Wood, Paul(2002), Conceputal Art, London: Tate

1. Approaching Conceptual Art

Conceptual art gets to be like Lewis Carroll's Cheshire cat, dissolving away until nothing is left but a grin: a handful of works made over a few short years by a small number of artists, the most important of whom soon went on to do other things.

Conceptual art can seem like nothing less than the hinge around which the past turned into the present

e.g. Art and Language

Joseph Kosuth accused the historian Benjamin Buchloh of partisanship and bias after Buchloh had accused him for falsifying his role in the movement's origins.

another example: Mel Bochner vs Lucy Lippard

The critic and historian Charles Harrison regards Conceptual art, particularly the work of the Art & Language group, not as break with modernist principles in the name of re-engagement with social modernity, but as a necessary re-formulation of the grounds of art's critical independence.

The present book has located the Archimedean point from which a fully finished accout of Conceptual art may be levered into the edifice of art history.




a) Name

'Conceptual art' refer to a historical form of avant-garde practice that flourished in the late 60s and 70s (the term 'conceptual art' had historical currency, being used at the time to refer to a variety of language-, photography- and process- based activities: from the collision of Minimal art and various 'anti-formal' practices-increasing cultural and political radicalism

Sol Le Witt 'Paragraphs on Conceptual Art' and subsequently his 'Sentences on Conceptual Art'

'Conceptual Art' employed by the writer and musician Henry Flynt with the Fluxus group in New York

'Conceptual Art' is first of all an art of which the material is "concepts", going on to make the point that, since "concepts" are closely bound up with language, concept art is a kind of art of which the material is language.

There is a use of this word favored by journalism. To take an example , in the run-up to the 2000 Turner Prize competition at Tate Britain in London, one of the English broadsheet (not tabloid) newspapers causally aimed a jibe at the 'the dead animal/unmade bed conceptualism' of contemporary art. 'Conceptualism', that is, has come to stand in some quarters for the array of contemporary practices that do not conform to conventional expectations of art exhibitions showing hand-crafted objects for aesthetic contemplation. In this sense, 'Conceptualism' becomes a negative catch-all for what conservatives of various stripes do not like about contemporary art.

A recent collection of essays, titled Rewriting Conceptual Art has it  that such art constitutes the ground 'on which nearly all contemporary art exists', and that in its recent efflorescence, 'Conceptualism has become all-pervasive if not dominant in the art world'.

;Analytical' Conceptual art-->downgraded as the art of white male rationalists
'Global conceptualism' the title of a major exhibition in NY in 1999

2. Preconditions and Perspectives

modernism in the dominant form it had come to take in the Anglo-American world at least(Clement Greenberg) and crisis in the late 1960s(spectacular fall)

Form

early modernism=transcultural and transhistorical
Clive Bell and Roger Fry isolated the essential feature of art as 'form': 'significant form' for Bell, 'expressive form' for Fry.