International Art of post 1970’s – Conceptual Art.
(Avoid discussing artworks before 1970 for this section if you can)
General facts about Conceptual Art:
- Conceptual art emerged as an international art form during a period of social and cultural upheaval
in the 1960s and 1970s, which coincided with the era of Pop-Art.
- Derived to a degree from Dada in terms of readymades, found objects, the idea of randomness and
the concern with the irrational & automatism.
- However, concepts and ideas involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and
material concerns.
- The first quintessential conceptual artwork was Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953) by Robert
Rauschenberg (1925-2008) which, as the name indicates, is a drawing by the Abstract Expressionist
Willem De Kooning (1904-97) which Rauschenberg erased. The work raises interesting questions
about the meaning of art. Is the erasure of another artist's work a creative act? Is the finished
product as important or more important than the idea behind it? And so on. The work itself now
resides in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
- Strong notion of "dematerialization" of art by removing the need for objects altogether.
- Ironically, the artist him-/herself may become the art vehicle in an attempt to bring across meaning.
In some cases, the object itself in Art is used ironically, such as in Jeff Koons’ and Damien Hirst’s
work.
- Conceptual art, while having no intrinsic financial value, can deliver a powerful message, and thus
has served as a vehicle for socio-political comment, as well as a broad challenge to the tradition of a
'work of art' being a crafted unique object.
- The process of creation also becomes integral if not dominant aspect of Conceptual Art.
- Craftsmanship not the main concern… the Idea can exist without the crafted object.
- However, in some cases, the medium does become the message (use example).
- Goes beyond the limits of traditional media and mode.
- Reaction against formalism.
- Discards conventional object in favour of a documented critical inquiry into the artist’s social,
philosophical and psychological status.
- Against the co-modification of Art; challenges Art as a saleable item, its location/space (vs traditional
display in galleries), art market (who owns the artwork? The viewer who internalises the idea
provided by the artwork? Or the buyer?)
- Demands a new kind of participation from the spectator.
- Some conceptual artists consider that art is created by the viewer, not by the artist or the artwork
itself.
- Signifier= “vehicle” = artwork/artist. Signified = message. Receiver = viewer. Therefore a message
(meaning) can go lost without something (the viewer) to receive it.
- Sol deWitt said: “It doesn’t really matter if the viewer understands the concepts of the artist by
seeing the art. Once it is out of his hand the artist has no control over the way a viewer will perceive
the work. Different people will understand the same thing in a different way.”
- Sought to prevent the rash labelling of their art by adopting one or both of two strategies: insist that
the term “conceptual” be applied so broadly (describing any art no longer governed by a traditional
medium) as to be meaningless, or so narrowly (indicating only language-based art that dealt with Art
per se) as to be offensive to almost everyone.
- Conceptual Art aims to reveal truths, to a large degree.
Does conceptual art need skill?...
An important difference between conceptual art and more "traditional" forms of art-making goes to the question
of artistic skill. Although it is often the case that skill in the handling of traditional media plays little role in
conceptual art, it is difficult to argue that no skill is required to make conceptual works, or that skill is always
absent from them. John Baldessari, for instance, has presented realist pictures that he commissioned professional
sign-writers to paint; and many conceptual performance artists (e.g. Marina Abramović) are technically
accomplished performers and skilled manipulators of their own bodies. It is thus not so much an absence of skill
or hostility toward tradition that defines conceptual art as an evident disregard for conventional, modern notions
of authorial presence and individual artistic expression.
Stylistic characteristics of modes, artists and artworks (only iconographical details – descriptions- are
provided):
❖ Language/ Word Art:
- Language was a central concern for the first wave of conceptual artists of the 1960s and early 1970s.
Conceptual artists used language in place of brush and canvas, and allowed it to signify in its own
right.
- Language and linguistics are seen as man-made conventions, so it is used ironically, and words are
“rewritten”, readdressed and challenged in terms of conventional suggestions of meaning.
Hans Haacke – Real Time Social System (1971).
This piece of systems art detailed the real estate holdings of the third largest landowners in New York City. The
properties were mostly in Harlem and the Lower East Side, were decrepit and poorly maintained, and
represented the largest concentration of real estate in those areas under the control of a single group. The
captions gave various financial details about the buildings, including recent sales between companies owned or
controlled by the same family. The Guggenheim museum cancelled the exhibition, stating that the overt political
implications of the work constituted "an alien substance that had entered the art museum organism". There is
no evidence to suggest that the trustees of the Guggenheim were linked financially to the family which was the
subject of the work.
Jenny Holzer (also Installation artist) – Abuse Of Power Comes As No Surprise (1984)
Her first public works, Truisms (1977–9), appeared in the form of anonymous broadsheets pasted on buildings,
walls and fences in and around Manhattan. Commercially printed in cool, bold italics, numerous one-line
statements such as ‘Abuse of power comes as no surprise' and ‘There is a fine line between information and
propaganda', were meant to be provocative and elicit public debate. Thereafter Holzer used language and the
mechanics of late 20th-century communications as an assault on established notions of where art should be
shown, with what intention and for whom. Her texts took the forms of posters, monumental and electronic
signs, billboards, television and her signature medium, the LED (light emitting diode) sign. Other works appeared
on T-shirts, tractor hats, stickers, metal plaques, park benches and sarcophagi. The LED signs have been placed in
high-impact public spaces such as Times Square, New York, as well as in art galleries and museums.
Barbara Kruger – Your Manias Become Science (1981)
Barbara Kruger started taking her own photographs and super imposing text onto them, but later (1980’s) “she
stopped making her own photographs and instead selected photographs from magazines and cropped and
enlarged them. All the photographs Barbara Kruger uses are somehow familiar. They are “appropirated”
images, taken from mass culture, commenting on the truths about society and the human race.
❖ Happenings:
- Happenings involved more than the detached observation of the viewer; the artist engaged with
Happenings required the viewer to actively participate in each piece.
- There was not a definite or consistent style for Happenings, as they greatly varied in size and
intricacy.
- However, all artists staging Happenings operated with the fundamental belief that art could be
brought into the realm of everyday life. This turn toward performance was a reaction against the
long-standing dominance of the technical aesthetics of Abstract Expressionism and was a new art
form that grew out of the social changes occurring in the 1950s and 1960s. It ended in the early
1970’s.
Allan Kaprow- FALLS UNDER PRE-1970’s. He is therefore not applicable, but relevant, as he was a forerunner of
the sub-movement.
However, this piece falls into the timeline:
- Trading Dirt (1983)
Kaprow produced the extended piece, Trading Dirt, when studying at the Zen Center of San Diego. He began by
trading the soil in his garden for the "Buddhist dirt" of the center. This was then traded with various types of dirt
collected by Kaprow. This sequence of events went on sporadically for three years, each exchange accompanied
by an anecdote, recorded on film. Kaprow presents dirt as a metaphor that only gains meaning as it is exchanged
or "traded." This occurred in 1983, long after Kaprow had replaced the Happening with the Activity. The work
integrates storytelling with playful humour and illustrates a shift toward a more private, intimate participatory
exchange. A film, Trading Dirt with Simon Rodia and Allan Kaprow by Rosie Lee Hooks and Paul S. Rogers, was
created for the Allan Kaprow: Art as Life exhibition at MOCA Geffen Contemporary in Spring 2008 in addition to
a reinvention of the piece.
Medium: Soil, dog dirt, anecdotes, video recording
❖ Land Art:
- Earth art, also referred to as Land art or Earthworks, is largely an American movement that uses the
natural landscape to create site-specific structures, art forms, and sculptures.
- Created works that were, to varying degrees, divorced from the art market.
- In addition to the monumentality and simplicity of Minimalist objects, the artists were drawn to the
humble everyday materials.
- The favored materials for Earthworks were those that could be extracted directly from nature, such
as stones, water, gravel, and soil. Influenced by prehistoric artworks such as Stonehenge, Earth
artists left their structures exposed to the elements.
- Earth artists often utilized materials that were available at the site on which their works were
constructed and placed, honoring the specificity of the site. Locales were commonly chosen for
particular reasons.
- The rejection of traditional gallery and museum spaces defined Earth art practice.
Walter De Maria – Vertical Earth Kilometer (1977).
De Maria's Vertical Earth Kilometer in Kassel, Germany was a one kilometer brass rod which was sunk into the
earth so that nothing remained visible except a few centimeters. Despite its size, therefore, this work exists
mostly in the viewer's mind.
Broken Kilometer (1979).
Located at 393 West Broadway in New York City, it is composed of 500 highly polished, round, solid brass rods,
each measuring two meters in length and five centimeters (two inches) in diameter. The 500 rods are placed in
five parallel rows of 100 rods each. The sculpture weighs 18 3/4 tons and would measure 3,280 feet if all the
elements were laid end-to-end. Each rod is placed such that the spaces between the rods increase by 5mm with
each consecutive space, from front to back; the first two rods of each row are placed 80mm apart, the last two
rods are placed 570 mm apart. Metal halide stadium lights illuminate the work which is 45 feet wide and 125
feet long.
Lightening Field (1977)
A work of Land Art situated in a remote area of the high desert of western New Mexico. It is comprised of 400
polished stainless steel poles installed in a grid array measuring one mile by one kilometer. The poles -- two
inches in diameter and averaging 20 feet and 7½ inches in height -- are spaced 220 feet apart and have solid
pointed tips that define a horizontal plane. A sculpture to be walked in as well as viewed, The Lightning Field is
intended to be experienced over an extended period of time.
Christo & Jeanne-Claude – Surrounded Islands (1981)
After more than two years of planning that began in 1981 they, along with hundreds of volunteers, unfurled pink
polypropylene fabric 200 feet out over the surface of the water off eleven islands in Biscayne Bay. The 6.5
million square feet of fabric was held out over the water by booms the same color of the fabric itself, a bright,
bold shade of pink. On May 7th 1983, a few days after the unfurling began on 'Pink Day' the installation of
Surrounded Islands was complete. They would be viewable by the public by boat, bridge, and plane, and make
Miami an international art sensation, for two weeks before the gigantic temporary installation came to an end.
According to Christo and Jeanne-Claude "The luminous pink color of the shiny fabric was in harmony with the
tropical vegetation of the uninhabited verdant islands, the light of the Miami sky and the colors of the shallow
waters of Biscayne Bay." Many observers, of course, just saw them as wonderfully big, pink lily pads seemingly
floating down Biscayne Bay.
Robert Smithson – Spiral Jetty (1970)
Spiral Jetty is an earthwork sculpture constructed in April 1970 on the northeastern shore of the Great Salt Lake
near Rozel Point in Utah. The sculpture is built of mud, precipitated salt crystals, basalt rocks, and water. The
sculpture forms of a 1,500-foot-long (460 m), 15-foot-wide (4.6 m) counterclockwise coil jutting from the shore
of the lake.The sculpture is sometimes visible and sometimes submerged, depending upon the water level of the
Great Salt Lake.
❖ Performance Art:
- Body’s role in artistic production.
- Challenge the conventions of traditional forms of visual art such as painting and sculpture. When
these modes no longer seem to answer artists' needs - when they seem too conservative- artists
turned to performance in order to find new audiences and test new ideas.
- Performance art borrows styles and ideas from other forms of art, or sometimes from other forms
of activity not associated with art, like ritual, or work-like tasks.
- Some varieties of performance from the post-war period are commonly described as "actions."
German artists like Joseph Beuys preferred this term because it distinguished art performance from
the more conventional kinds of entertainment found in theatre. But the term also reflects a strain of
American performance art that could be said to emerge out of a reinterpretation of "action
painting," in which the object of art is no longer paint on canvas, but something else - often the
artist's own body.
- Liberation of media (art materials).
- If Process art focused attention on the techniques and materials of art production, so did aspects of
performance.
- Process art was also often intrigued by the possibilities of mundane and repetitive activities;
similarly, many performance artists were attracted to task-based activities that were very foreign to
the highly choreographed and ritualized performances in traditional theatre or dance.
Yves Klein (but he belongs to the pre-1970’s group). So he’s a no-go!
Joseph Beuys – Coyote - I Like America and America Likes Me (1974)
In May 1974 Beuys flew to New York and was taken by ambulance to the site of the performance, a room in the
René Block Gallery at 409 West Broadway. Beuys lay on the ambulance stretcher swathed in felt. He shared this
room with a coyote, for eight hours over three days. At times he stood, wrapped in a thick, grey blanket of felt,
leaning on a large shepherd's staff. At times he lay on the straw, at times he watched the coyote as the coyote
watched him and cautiously circled the man, or shredded the blanket to pieces, and at times he engaged in
symbolic gestures, such as striking a large triangle or tossing his leather gloves to the animal; the performance
continuously shifted between elements that were required by the realities of the situation, and elements that
had a purely symbolic character. At the end of the three days, Beuys hugged the coyote that had grown quite
tolerant of him, and was taken to the airport. Again he rode in a veiled ambulance, leaving America without
having set foot on its ground. As Beuys later explained: ‘I wanted to isolate myself, insulate myself, see nothing
of America other than the coyote.’
Chris Burden - Shoot (1971)
In many of his early 1970s performance pieces, Burden put himself in danger, thus placing the viewer in a
difficult position, caught between a humanitarian instinct to intervene and the taboo against touching and
interacting with art pieces. To perform Shoot, Burden stood in front of a wall while one friend shot him in the
arm with a .22 long rifle, and another friend documented the event with a camera. It was performed in front of a
small, private audience. One of Burden's most notorious and violent performances, it touches on the idea of
martyrdom, and the notion that the artist may play a role in society as a kind of scapegoat. It might also speak to
issues of gun control and, in the context of the period, the Vietnam War.
- Performed at F Space, Santa Ana, California
Vito Acconci – Seedbed (1972)
In the piece, there is a low wooden ramp merging with the floor. The ramp extends across the width of the
room, beginning two feet up the side of one wall and slanting down to the middle of the floor. In his original
performance of the piece, Acconci lay hidden underneath the ramp installed at the Sonnabend Gallery,
masturbating. The artist's spoken fantasies about the visitors walking above him were heard through
loudspeakers in the gallery. "In this legendary sculpture/performance Acconci lay beneath a ramp built in the
Sonnabend Gallery. Over the course of three weeks, he masturbated eight hours a day while murmuring sexually
explicit things. In Seedbed, Acconci is the producer and the receiver of the work's pleasure. He is simultaneously
public and private, making marks yet leaving little behind, and demonstrating ultra-awareness of his viewer
while being in a semi-trance state.
Marina Abramovic - The Artist Is Present, (March 2010). Museum of Modern Art.
During the run of the exhibition, Abramović performed The Artist Is Present, a 736-hour and 30-minute static,
silent piece, in which she sat immobile in the museum's atrium while spectators were invited to take turns
sitting opposite her. Abramović said the show changed her life "completely – every possible element, every
physical emotion".
- Rhythm 10 (1973)
Abramovic uses a series of 20 knives to quickly stab at the spaces between her outstretched fingers. Every time
she pierces her skin, she selects another knife from those carefully laid out in front of her. Halfway through, she
begins playing a recording of the first half of the hour-long performance, using the rhythmic beat of the knives
striking the floor, and her hand, to repeat the same movements, cutting herself at the same time. This piece
exemplifies Abramovic's use of ritual in her work, and demonstrates what the artist describes as the
synchronicity between the mistakes of the past and those of the present.
- Performed at a festival in Edinburgh
❖ Body Art:
- Body’s role in artistic production or as the art product itself.
- Conceptual Art that involves the body of the artist or any other body that either acts as the vehicle
of the message or becomes the message itself.\
- Closely linked to Performance Art.
- Flesh as communication, more so than the act.
-
Chris Burden - Trans-Fixed (1974) (definitely also seen as Performance Art. Burden connects body Art and
Performance Art in most of his works.)
Took place on April 23, 1974 at Speedway Avenue in California. For this performance, Burden lay face up on a
Volkswagen Beetle and had nails hammered into both of his hands, as if he were being crucified on the car. The
car was pushed out of the garage and the engine revved for two minutes before being pushed back into the
garage.
Jeanne Dunning – The Blob (1994) (also Conceptual photography).
Oversized liquid-filled sack resembling an enormous implant, attached to the artist inside an oversized shirt.
Colour photograph.
Orlan
Also video-and performance artist.
Orlan is a performance artist who uses her own body and the procedures of plastic surgery to make "carnal art".
She is transforming her face, but her aim is not to attain a commonly held standard of beauty. Orlan is the only
artist working so radically with her own body, asking questions about the status of the body in society.
Orlan is not her name. Her face is not her face. Soon her body will not be her body. Paradox is her content;
subversion is her technique. Her features and limbs are endlessly photographed and reproduced; in France, she
appears in mass- media magazines and on television talk shows. Each time she is seen she looks different,
because her performances take place in the operating room and involve plastic surgery.
Let me know if you want to discuss her art. Or go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orlan for more info. Look at
especially the sections entitled Early Phases and the Reincarnation of Saint Orlan. Her work is controversial, so
this is only for those of you who are interested and into Feminist studies.
Marina Abramovic - Rhythm 0, (1974).
This was a six-hour work of performance art in Studio Morra, Naples. The work involved Abramović standing still
while the audience was invited to do to her whatever they wished, using one of 72 objects she had placed on a
table. These included a rose, feather, perfume, honey, bread, grapes, wine, scissors, a scalpel, nails, a metal bar,
and a gun loaded with one bullet. It could be viewed as body art in the sense that her body became the main
vehicle of the transmission of meaning.
Dennis Oppenheim - Reading Position for Second Degree Burn (1970). (also seen as a Performance
piece).
Oppenheim lay in the sun for five hours with an open book on his chest. In removing the book, one could see
where the book once lay, as the skin was significantly whiter than the area that was exposed to the sun. The
book was entitled “Tactics”.
❖ Installation Art:
- Installation art is a relatively new genre of contemporary art - practised by an increasing number of
postmodernist artists - which involves the configuration or "installation" of objects in a space, such
as a room or warehouse.
- The resulting arrangement of material and space comprises the "artwork".
- Because an installation usually allows the viewer to enter and move around the configured space
and/or interact with some of its elements, it offers the viewer a very different experience from (say)
a traditional painting or sculpture which is normally seen from a single reference point.
Furthermore, an installation may engage several of the viewer's senses including touch, sound and
smell, as well as vision.
- Temporary OR permanent.
- installation artists are more concerned with the presentation of their message than with the
material used to present it. However, unlike 'pure' conceptual art, which is supposedly experienced
in the minds of those introduced to it, installation art is more grounded and remains tied to a
physical space.
Ann Hamilton – Malediction (1992) – also known as Performance Art.
Spectator enters a room in a gallery strewn with stiff rags, wrung pieces of washing and occasionally wine-
stained cloths. Careful treading leads to a second room in which the artist is seated at a refectory table.
Hamilton repeatedly moulded lumps of bread dough in her mouth and then placed the forms into a basket. She
sits facing a wall of bed linens piled high and cascading down. Behind the wall, a recording of a woman quietly
reading Walt Whitman’s prose poems, “Song Of Myself” and “Body Electric”, can be heard vaguely.
Damien Hirst - This Little Piggy Went To The Market, This Little Piggy Stayed Home (1996)
Mediums used: Glass, pig, painted steel, silicone, acrylic, plastic cable ties, stainless steel, formaldehyde solution
and motorised painted steel base. ‘This Little Piggy Went to Market, This Little Piggy Stayed at Home’ (1996) is
an early work from the ‘Natural History’ series, consisting of a bisected pig. The animal is contained within two
glass and steel tanks which slide mechanically “like a bacon slicer; slowly, tragically” to unite then separate the
halves.
- The Golden Calf (2008)
Encased in a gold vitrine and mounted on a plinth of Carrara marble, the formaldehyde-preserved British
Charolais bull has horns and hooves cast in solid 18 carat gold. The work’s title refers to the Exodus account of
the Israelites’ idolatrous worship of a Golden Calf during Moses’s absence. As in traditional artistic depictions of
the idol, Hirst’s calf is crowned with a sun disc of solid gold, a symbol of pagan deification. Through its opulent
materials, the work elevates the cow recurrent in earlier ‘Natural History’ works. Whilst noting that increased
wealth naturally extends an artist’s reach, he also references the double-edged conceptual appeal of the metal.
“Gold’s the thing [that], when you open the briefcase in the movies, shines on you and sucks you in. It brings out
the worst in you as well as the best.”
- For The Love Of God (2007)
This is a platinum skull set with diamonds, is one of Hirst’s most important and widely recognised works. The 32
platinum plates making up ‘For the Love of God’ are set with 8,601 VVS to flawless pavé-set diamonds, weighing
a massive 1,106.18 carats. The teeth inserted into the jaw are real and belong to the original skull. The skull from
which ‘For the Love of God’ was cast, was purchased from a London taxidermist and subsequently subjected to
intensive bioarchaeological analysis and radiocarbon dating. This research revealed it dated from around 1720 -
1810, and was likely to be that of a 35-year-old man of European/Mediterranean ancestry. The title originates
from exclamations Hirst’s mother would make on hearing plans for new works when he was starting out as an
artist. As he explains: “She used to say, ‘For the love of God, what are you going to do next!’”
Hirst’s work also falls under the theme of Art as Controversy.
Tracey Emin - My Bed (1999).
Emin’s dishevelled bed, surrounded by detritus such as condoms, blood-stained knickers, bottles and her
bedroom slippers.
❖ Photographic Art (Conceptual photography):
- Conceptual photography is a type of photography that illustrates an idea.
- The 'concept' is both preconceived and, if successful, understandable in the completed image.
- Conceptual photography is NOT photojournalism.
Cindy Sherman – Untitled Film Stills (1977-1980)
The series Untitled Film Stills consists of 69 black-and-white photographs. The artist poses in different roles and
settings (streets, yards, pools, beaches, and interiors), producing a result reminiscent of stills typical of Italian
neorealism or American film noir of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. She avoided putting titles on the images to
preserve their ambiguity.[16] Modest in scale compared to Sherman’s later photographs, they are all 8 1/2 by 11
inches, each displayed in identical, simple black frames. Sherman used her own possessions as props, or
sometimes borrowed, as in Untitled Film Still #11 in which the doggy pillow belongs to a friend. The shots were
also largely taken in her own apartment.
❖ Video Art:
- Video art is a type of art which relies on moving pictures and comprises video and/or audio data.
- Video art came into existence during the late 1960s and early 1970s as new consumer video
technology became available outside corporate broadcasting.
Bruce Naumann (We haven’t delved into Video Art, so it’s not necessary to study this. But if they talk about
technology, you may want to visit the following site:
http://www.art21.org/artists/bruce-nauman/videos
Any post-1970’s videos would work. You can choose any 1 of the 7 videos to discuss, if you want to talk about
Video Art.
❖ Aesthetic Consumerism:
(try to avoid Jeff Koons. The examiners don’t particularly like his work, as it is too similar to Dada and Pop Art.
But if the question is really applicable to Koons’ work….):
Jeff Koons – New Shelton Wet/Dry Triple Decker (1981)
Two immaculate, unused wet/dry vacuum cleaners are stacked one atop the other and hermetically sealed in
Plexiglas boxes lit from below with fluorescent lights. Separated from their domestic role as cleaning machines,
the objects are elevated to sculpture.
Don’t write about Balloon Dog (series) if you don’t know it well.
Please note that these notes are summarized
from information that had been collected
over a long period of time. These are simply
summaries and suggestions of artworks.
These summaries are to be used in
conjunction with your notes in your Visual
Arts Gr.11 handbook;
Pages 258 – 262 (introduction to the context
of the time)
Pages 263 – 280, 282 – 291 – all Conceptual
Art
