Concept art

A feature of the conceptual art, according to BBC art editor Will Gompertz, is their focus

“... not so much on creating a physical object as on ideas: that’s why it is called conceptual” ^[1] .

Conceptualists often used ready-made objects, however, despite the utilitarian functions embedded in them, they gave them a completely different meaning. Sol Levitt, in a 1967 article for ArtForum magazine, proposed this definition of conceptual art:

“... the goal of an artist engaged in conceptual art is to make his work intellectually interesting for the viewer, while not affecting his soul ^[2] .”

It is worth noting that conceptualism has never been a single direction. Conceptualism is a general concept for several types of art ^[3] . Rejecting the idea that art must necessarily bring aesthetic pleasure, conceptual artists work in a variety of fields, including performance art , video art , land art, and arte faith . Often, followers of the ideas of conceptualism create unusual temporary installations, which, according to the idea, should expand the boundaries of perception and make art accessible to everyone.

The invention of the term “conceptual art” is attributed to the American philosopher and musician Henry Flint . That was the title of his 1961 essay ( Conceptual Art ), published in An Anthology of Chance Operations , edited by Jackson MacLow and La Monte Young in 1963 .

French artist Marcel Duchamp set the stage for conceptualists with his readymades . The most famous of Dushanov’s read-meids was “The Fountain” (1917), a urinal signed by the artist with the pseudonym “R. Mutt” (a pun reminiscent of the popular cartoon characters Matt and Jeff ^[4] ) and proposed as an exhibit for the exhibition of the Society of Independent New York artists. ^[5]

It was M. Duchamp who first raised the question of reassessing what can be considered art. Up to this point, it was believed that art should have aesthetic, technical and intellectual value. Duchamp 's ideas and their theoretical importance for future conceptualism was later appreciated by the American artist Joseph Kossuth . In his essay “Art after Philosophy” (Art after Philosophy, 1969) Kossuth wrote: “All art (after Duchamp ) is conceptual in nature, because art exists only as an idea” (“All art (after Duchamp) is conceptual (in nature) because art only exists conceptually "). Having completed a provocative and demonstrative break with tradition in 1917, the artist gives rise to a new concept, based on which, the author’s idea and idea in evaluating the work surpasses its visible beauty.

“For the artist himself to decide what is a work of art and what is not. Duchamp's position was as follows: if the artist, conscious of the contexts and meanings, declared his work a work of art, then so it is ” ^[6] .

Defending the primacy of the concept over the object itself, he insisted that artists should not be limited in expressing their thoughts and emotions. Now the artist has the right to convey his idea by the means that he considers necessary. Alternatively, an idea can be conveyed even through its own body, in a subgenre of conceptual art, which was called " performance " ^[1] . In the narrow sense of the word, the term "conceptualism" is associated with artists of the second half of the 1960s, who asked what art is (art in general). One of the main tools in the conceptual art of the 1960s is photography. With the help of the camera, some analysis is possible. For example, the French artist Sophie Cull using photographs reveals the fictitiousness of any document ^[7] . We also note the Soviet photographer Boris Mikhailov , the only photographer from the USSR who had his own retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York .

“Mikhailov takes strange photos, ugly. For example, he has a series of “Unfinished Thesis”: these are such black and white photographs about nothing, as if from a family album. Nevertheless, he holds this fine line: reporting on the formless, he shows a minimum of formalism. " ^[7]

Conceptual art took shape as a movement throughout the entire period of the 1960s. In 1970, the first exhibition of conceptual art took place. Conceptual art and conceptual artists were held at the New York Cultural Center. ^[8]

A special place in the history of this trend is occupied by Moscow conceptualism. It is important to note that Moscow conceptualism developed in isolation from the countries of Western and Eastern Europe, Asia and America, which was caused by such phenomena as the Iron Curtain and the Cold War. So, unlike Western conceptualism, Russian representatives of this movement did not constitute a single art group ^[2] . In the second half of the 1970s and early 1980s, Soviet reality became the main theme for Moscow conceptualists. Thus, the works of Kabakov , Bulatov , Monastyrsky, Pivovarov , Prigov and Nakhova refer to romantic conceptualism - the term first mentioned in the article by philosopher Boris Groys in the journal “A — Z”. Groys wrote:

“And yet I do not know a better way to designate what is happening in Moscow now and looks quite fashionable and original ^[2] .”

Separately, we highlight such artists as Komar and Melamid , Chuykov - they are also representatives of the domestic version of conceptualism , namely social art .

Conceptualism exists not only in the field of art. It is also presented in the literature. One of the striking examples of Russian literary conceptualism is Vladimir Sorokin. Sorokin works with different types of speech and with different types of speech practices. This can be illustrated by the example of his novel “Blue Fat, 1999:

“... there are clones of writers, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, someone else, and these clones are written as originals. But in order to insure himself, so as not to pretend to accurately reproduce the manner of Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, Sorokin writes: this clone turned out to be 75%, this one - 60%. There is no and cannot be an ideal repetition, but there is a hint of a certain type of literary practice with the code name “Leo Tolstoy” or “Fedor Dostoevsky”. Sorokin works with these types of speech as material, in other words, works like a real conceptual artist ” ^[7] .

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  Art & Language , Art-Language Vol.3 Nr. 1 , 1974
  1953 - Robert Rauschenberg exhibited "Erased De Kooning Drawing" - a drawing by Willem De Kooning , which Rauschenberg erased. He raised many questions about the nature of art, allowing the viewer to decide whether the erased work of another artist could be a creative act, whether this work could be art only because the famous Rauschenberg erased it.
• 1957 - Yves Klein , “Aerostatic Sculpture (Paris)” (“Aerostatic Sculpture (Paris)”). A composition of 1001 blue balloons in the sky above the Galerie Iris Clert for advertising the exhibition Le Vid . Klein also exhibited One Minute Fire Painting, which was a blue panel that contained 16 crackers. Later in 1957, Klein announced that his painting was now invisible and showed it in an empty room. This exhibition was entitled “The Surfaces and Volumes of Invisible Pictorial Sensibility”.
• 1960 - The action of Yves Klein, called "Jump into the Void" ("A Leap Into The Void"), during which he jumped out of the window.
• 1960 - Artist Stanley Brouwn states that all shoe stores in Amsterdam make up an exhibition of his works. In Vancouver, Ian and Ingrid Baxter exposed the contents of a four-room apartment, packed in plastic bags.
• 1961 - Robert Rauschenberg sent a telegram to Galerie Iris Clert, which said: "This is a portrait of Iris Clert, if I say so," as his contribution to the exhibition of portraits.
• 1961 - Pierrot Manzoni put his own breath (in balloons) as “Bodies of Air”, and also signed the bodies of other people, declaring them living works of art.
• 1961-1962 - The work of Hristo Yavashev and Jeanne-Claude de Guyebon "Iron Curtain" ("Iron Curtain"): a barricade of oil barrels on a narrow street in Paris, which prevented traffic. This work was a protest against the construction of the Berlin Wall . ^[9]
• 1962 - Yves Klein introduced Immaterial Pictorial Sensitivity in a ceremony on the banks of the Seine. He offered to sell his "pictorial sensitivity" (whatever it was) in exchange for a gold leaf. During this ceremony, the buyer gave Klein a gold leaf in exchange for a certificate. Since Klein’s “sensitivity” was intangible, the buyer was asked to burn the certificate, while Klein threw a leaf to the Seine (there were seven purchases in total).
• 1962 - Piero Manzoni created The Base of the World, exposing the planet as his own work of art.
• 1963 - Henry Flint 's Essay: Concept Art article was published in An Anthology ...
• 1964 - Yoko Ono published Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions and Drawings. An example of heuristic art or a series of instructions on how to gain an aesthetic experience.
• 1965 - Conceptual action by John Latham, called "Still and Chew". He invited students of an art university to protest against the values ​​of Clement Greenberg “Art and Culture”. The pages of the book from the student library were chewed by students and returned to the library in bottles with labels. Latham was then fired.
• 1965 - Joseph Kossuth dated the concept of One and Three Chairs. The presentation of the work included a chair, its photo and the definition of the word “chair”. Kossuth took the definition from the dictionary. Four versions are known with different definitions.
• 1967 - Paragraphs on Conceptual Art by Sol Le Witt was published in the journal Artforum. The Paragraphs marked the transgression of Minimalism and Conceptual Art.
• 1969 - Robert Barry and his Telepathic Piece (Telepathic Piece), about which the artist declared: “Throughout the exhibition I will try to telepathically communicate a work of art whose nature is a series of thoughts that are not suitable for words and images” (During the exhibition I will try to communicate telepathically a work of art, the nature of which is a series of thoughts that are not applicable to language or image).
• 1969 - The first issue of Art-Language was released in May. He had the subtitle “The Journal of conceptual art”, the editors were Terry Atkinson, David Bainbridge, Michael Baldwin and Harold Hurrell: “Art & Language ”. The English journal Studio International published an article by Kossuth, “Art after Philosophy”, in three parts (October-December).
• 1970 - Douglas Huebler set a series of photographs that the artist took every two minutes while traveling on the road for 24 minutes.
• 1970 - Douglas Huebler asked museum visitors to write "one authentic secret." As a result, 1800 documents were combined into a book, which was a very boring reading, since most of the secrets were similar.
• 1971 - Hans Haacke "Real Time Social System". Documentary description of the property of the third largest landowner in New York. The Guggenheim Museum refused to exhibit this exhibition.
• 1972 - Fred Forrest bought a piece of empty space in the newspaper Le Monde and invited readers to fill it with their own drawings.
• 1974 - Marina Abramovich created a performance called "Rhythm 0". The concept of this performance included the presence of 72 objects, some of which could give pleasure, while others hurt. The idea of ​​the performance was to provide complete freedom of action, in relation to Abramovich, with the help of these items, for 6 hours.
• 1975-76 - Three issues of The Fox magazine were published in New York. The editor was Joseph Kossuth . The Fox has become an important platform for American Art and Language members. Karl Beveridge, Ian Burn, Sarah Charlesworth, Michael Corris, Joseph Kossuth , Andrew Menard, Mel Ramsden and Terry Smith wrote articles on contemporary art.
• 1977 - Walter de Maria "Vertical Earth Kilometer" in Kassel, Germany. It was a kilometer of wire immersed in the ground, so nothing was visible except a few centimeters. Despite the size, the work was present mainly in the imagination of the viewer.
• 1989 - Christopher Williams first exhibited Angola to Vietnam. The work consisted of a series of black and white photographs of glass botanical specimens from the University of Harvard Botanical Museum, selected according to a list of thirty-six countries in which there were political disappearances during 1985. .
• 1991 - Charles Saatchi "discovered" Damien Hirst and the next year put him on "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living", a shark in a formaldehyde aquarium.
• 1993 - Matthieu Laurette took part in the French television game Tournez manège, where the presenter asked him who he was, to which he replied: "multimedia artist." Laurette sent invitations to the artistic public to watch the show on television, turning his performance as an artist into a directed reality.
• 1993 - Vanessa Beecroft staged her first performance in Milan, Italy, using models.
• 1992-1993 - Gillian Waring. The chrome print on an aluminum plate that says “I am in despair” from the “Signs” cycle that says what you want them to say, not signs that say what other people want you to say. Storage: Maureen Paley Gallery, London, UK.
• 1999 - Tracy Emin is nominated for the Turner Prize. Part of her My Bed exposition, her unmade bed, is surrounded by items such as condoms, stained underpants, bottles, and slippers.
• 2001 - Martin Creed received the Turner Prize for "The Lights Going On and Off," an empty room in which the lights turned on and off.
• 2004 - An Untitled video by Andrea Fraser documenting her sexual encounter with a collector at the hotel (the collector agreed to pay $ 20,000 for the meeting) was exhibited at the Friedrich Petzel Gallery, along with her 1993 work Don’t Postpone Joy, or Collecting Can Be Fun ”, a 27-page recording interview with a collector.
• 2005 - Simon Starling received the Turner Prize for Shedboatshed, a wooden barn that he turned into a boat, sailed down the Rhine and converted again into a barn.
• 2009 - Paola Peavy and her work "1000", performed in the Tate Modern.
• 2009 - Ottmar Hörl created the scandalous installation “Dance with the Devil” from 1250 black plastic gnomes, each of which raised its right hand, symbolizing a Nazi salute. Thus, the artist protested against the growth of neo-Nazism in modern Germany ^{[10] [11]} .
• 2014 - Sebastian Bieniek, “Don’t forget that everything will be forgotten” ^[12] .

• Bobrinskaya E. A. Conceptualism. - M.: Galart, 1994 .-- 216 p.

• Moscow conceptualism
• Post concept art
• Neoconceptualism

• Chateau de Montsoreau-Museum of Contemporary Art
• Art & Language Uncompleted: The Philippe Méaille Collection, MACBA Barcelona
• Conceptual Art, artists and art ... the-artists.org
• Sol LeWitt, Paragraphs on Conceptual Art
• Conceptualism
• Website "Thomas Dreher: Intermedia Art" on Conceptual Art
• Arte Conceptual y Postconceptual