Conceptual art

‘All of the significant art of today stems from conceptual art. This includes the art of installation, political, feminist and socially directed art.’ Sol LeWitt interviewed by Saul Ostrow, BOMB, no 85, fall 2003

Conceptual art emerged as an art movement in the 1960s. For the first time since the early 1920s (the time of the Russian LEF and European De Stijl), art theory came to the fore. Crucial to conceptual art was the reassessment of the work of Marcel Duchamp (especially the unassisted ready-made) and the recognition of the importance of language and a growing understanding of the way meaning emerges from a position in a system (via philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose Philosophical investigations was published posthumously in 1953). As Wittgenstein argued, when investigating meaning in language, one must ‘look and see’ the variety of uses to which a word is put.

For conceptual artists, art wasn’t an end in itself but a way of making a statement about art. Artistic production became a way of ‘doing philosophy’, or at least for finding between art and philosophy a way to explore the epistemological basis of culture, ie the nature of knowledge, or how we know what we know.

When Duchamp put a urinal in an art gallery and called it Fountain 1914, he questioned the rules by which art was made and expanded its possibilities. If not the emotional and psychological source of the work, what is an artist? Traditionally something made by hand, a manual achievement, what do we mean by a work of art? What’s the nature of the creative act? What’s the situation of the artist in a world dominated by mass-produced goods?
 
The ‘already-mades’ caused an epistemological break with the past: the work was not about its meaning, it was about its function within a given context. Art history is still reeling from the pitiless matter-of-factness of non-art objects finding their way into the sanctified precincts of the museum.

A work by another conceptual artist, Joseph Kosuth, comprises a photographic enlargement of a dictionary definition of a chair, a photograph of a chair and a real chair. One and three chairs 1965 hints at Magritte’s famous The treachery of images (This is not a pipe) 1929, with its underlying implication that this is only a representation of a pipe. As a consequence it does what all paradoxes do, it leaves you having to reconcile what seem like antithetical propositions. So emerged an art of ideas and barbed queries using art as a way to address how we read and produce meanings. Conceptual art was like algebra and calculus after centuries of counting eggs and measuring cloth.