This Is Not a Thread: (Conceptual Art)

http://www.sin-stuff.com/affordable/files/gimgs/1_joseph-kosuth-chair.jpg

funny cuz it actually does resemble a thread in many respects

is this not a picture thread or not a thread just about conceptual art in gen.?

there are quite a few ilx threads that are like conceptual art

"This is Not a Thread" - reference to the Magritte painting which is kinda a forerunner to the Kosuth chair piece

http://www.ilxor.com/ILX/NewAnswersControllerServlet?boardid=62

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3344/3621045869_b7462905c2_o.jpg

50 cc of Hot Air

Does the title indicate that this non-thread thread is conceptual art? Or do the parenthesis around "conceptual art" signify a different sense?

http://www.portlandmonthlymag.com/assets/0001/5883/shelley.jpg?1255896144

i have a weird relationship w/ conceptual art. because i tend to think of the ideas as objects that exist in space.

this is not a thank you note for clarifying magritte ref

Is David Blaine the equivalent of Kincaid in the conceptual/performance art space?

I haven't heard of David Blaine

as part of a large scale time piece, i have thought about sex at least once every five minutes constantly, without significant interruption, for the last 30-some years

have you documented your work? Documentation is key!

re david blaine, he used to do modest but excellent card tricks for people on the street, but somewhere along the line he turned into an endurance spectacle walking publicity stunt. i remember hearing him compared unfavorably to this other famous endurance artist who had a piece where he punched in a time clock every hour of every day for five years.

no it fucking isnt
xp

documentation was what commodified conceptual art

Oh yeah, the time clock guy - yeah, there was definitely an endurance art "trend" in the late 60s/early 70s.

it was partly a joke, T - like the difference between conceptual art and something that is not art is documentation - about 11 years ago, I was at a performance where this guy (art school MFA student) made a bed in the gallery, and there were six people documenting this. I was disappointed to learn that they were not part of the performance as he conceived it.

i thought it might be, but thats not a way of thinking i want to spread further

idk is this a joke thread or if i had some thought and theories that i've been thinking abt wrt to this whole business would this be an good place to put them.

this other famous endurance artist who had a piece where he punched in a time clock every hour of every day for five years.

Including nights?

Go for it plax

my main thing is about formalism.

-conceptual art kindof arises out of marxist art histories. that it circumvents formal boundaries. but each medium accumulates/generates its own boundaries (and since pure conceptualism puts in place this narrative of circumvention, how can it transcend itself?)

-another pet theory i have really makes it obvious how painting is what i really care about. Because painting, more than any other medium, seems to be obsessed with its own histories. And one thing that i think becomes apparent, is that its obsessed w/ its own origin myths. like in superhero movies. for eg. oil painting, which was really invented to show light in a more convincing way and the way oil paintings seem to be lit from within. which is about a divine light (this seems to be why monochromes in partic have an inherent spirituality, because the medium itself is about a kind of spirituality). But how does that work wrt conceptual art? what are its origin myths, or are we too close historically to figure that out?

you know, and i think sol lewitt especially had a real feel for this flow between idea and form, and thought about ideas as having a definite shape or movement (you know like the machine that makes the art)

"Including nights?"

I think so! This guy basically did this self-punishment for little fanfare over a long period of time while there was crass media hoopla stirred by Blaine for standing in a clear plastic box in public for a few weeks.

i think the Marxist/anti-commodification issue is a big part of the origin story of conceptual art, though it is something, like "rock," where histories tend to draw in precursors and influences - like Magritte and Duchamp

yeah i always think of words like "corrollary" and "displacement" when i think of early conceptualism. you know w/ documentation etc or w/ what I'm saying about circumvention and transcendence. that its weirdly greenbergian the whole thing. it becomes about a formal purity, but the form itself is obscured or displaced, you can never see the thing itself, but the aftermath, the traces of it. like we can divine this pure abstract platonism from the imperfect remnants. there's a weird ambivalence about all that.

philip, the guy you are thinking of is tehching hsieh

http://www.blogyourmind.info/media/Tehching%20Hsieh.jpg

that's it! boy he looks tired.

also that conceptualism in all its purity arrives at a time when painting seemed to have ground to a halt by becoming too rigidly entrenched in some purified notion of what it could be, so while baldessari was removing everything but the art from his pieces, painting was trying to find ways to re-engage narrative/content/decoration etc and subvert its way out of its modernist deadlock.

(not to strawman myself, like i dont really believe these potted histories btw, but they do become useful for artists to understand themselves contextually and they do have their place)

also that baldessari bit should be in really sarcastic scare quotes

according to the conventional history, painting had pretty much reduced itself as far is it could go without ceasing to be painting anymore, didn't it?

yeah exactly, so you've got somebody like Blinky Palermo kindof rethinking painting on these marxist terms. and he's a student of beuys so he's interested in the latent narratives and mythologies of materials, so you have this re-thinking and reinvigoration of, say, hard edged abstraction, but on completely different terms to the post painterly abstractionists.

and i just think its interesting that similar marxist critiques w/n art at the same time would take such oppositional structures formally (that is purging v. introduction)

interesting case limit w/r/t documentation begetting commodification: the little-known conceptual artist christopher d'arcangelo, whose primary artistic strategy was the process of removal. to wit: he had a piece in a group show at i think white columns? and insisted that his name and any information about his work be removed from any invites/literature/press releases associated with the exhibition. a lot of his very small body of work (he died at 24) definitely derives from the suspicion/distrust of museums that was characteristic of lots of the conceptual/fluxus ppl. but was conceptualism the origin point of this distrust? or at least the first movement where that sentiment was shared widely among its practitioners? (curious about this cuz i don't really know)

i think its the first point where that distrust becomes a formal boundary to be negotiated maybe

this is the tehching hseih piece i have just read and found unexpectedly moving

there's distrust of museums - in terms of canon-formation, power structure, etc. - and then there's distrust of the "art world" - in terms of commodification

well i think that for eg. modernist fears about "decoration" have at their core an anxiety about commodification.

really apologize abt the way i'm throwing around modernism, but i mean i could be talking about matisse or noland there so.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtRpUB7J1tU

this famous nauman piece seems to be about a lot of the things im trying to say

lol at this being one of the parting shots in that nytimes things:

"I think — I’ll be really extreme here — that he killed art so he could transcend it."

anyway sorry for hijacking this

don't be, i always like reading yr posts on the topic since i'm not nearly as well-versed in these matters as you

ty thread for alerting me to the presence of tehching hseih

basically the only big famous art person i've ever met irl was simon starling. and when he talks about his practice (and he's really lucid about what considerations go into his decision-making) were really interesting. Because he seems like somebody who is really an old school lewitt type but when he talks about how just personal taste and fairly straightforward choices about how things should look, become crucial in how he conceives and configures his work. it made me think of Felix Gonzalez Torres (haha a lot of stuff does though) and how a lot of the strategies of conceptual art become redeployed as a kind of backstory for objects (i'm thinking specifically of his go-go dancer platform). They almost reinforce their status as commodities (i mean, if we're really stuck on this marxist mythology) by fetishizing the backstory, using the "idea" as the foundation for a kind of Benjaminian aura. Idk its just a feeling I get from a lot of people that i have casual conversations about contemporary art w/ that this has become an easy dogma (that its all about the "idea") in a way that might be fiercely ironic if you connect the dots right.

okay here's another one: There's one theory that kindof goes that the history of western art has been of different spaces. I think the one everyone learns in school is the renaissance and the discovery of perspective. But there have been other more subtle ones like b/w the 16th and 17th century you have this shift in the treatment of the picture plane b/w a kind of expansive space that opens out onto the viewer and a kind of enclosed, contained window view. And you might think about cubism as a kind of fractured, composite space.

And some art historians would say that these different characterizations of space have something to do w/ a kind of phenomenological morality, that they reflect the social landscape and narrate the relationship b/w the viewer and the artist, or reflect the psychic geography and how the individual experiences space historically.

And so one way of understanding the origins of conceptual art could be to think of the type of space it constitutes. And I guess for me that would have to do with this displacement idea that you get most explicitly w/ art that is experiences as documentary of something that happened elsewhere, or where the object is only a manifestation of the "idea" where the idea is the art. And I get the feeling that there's a certain alienation that results in that: like even art is something that is permanently removed, that is incredibly mediated. That transcendence is endlessly deferred and possibly essentially chimeric, which is a huge shift away from the immersive confrontational posturing of Minimalism for eg.

and like brice marden for instance where he leaves this band at the bottom that reveals the making of the painting because for him the site of painting is itself holy. And its interesting for me that LeWitt or Weiner try to get away completely from that kind of theology but end up just reformulating it.

And so one way of understanding the origins of conceptual art could be to think of the type of space it constitutes. And I guess for me that would have to do with this displacement idea that you get most explicitly w/ art that is experiences as documentary of something that happened elsewhere, or where the object is only a manifestation of the "idea" where the idea is the art. And I get the feeling that there's a certain alienation that results in that: like even art is something that is permanently removed, that is incredibly mediated.

otm, and fascinating besides. suppose that such art is not only something that results in alienation (alienation of the art from our experience of its manifestation), but that perhaps results from and reflects alienation, mediation. in that sense, as you say, very much of its time. on one level, you could see this as reflective of the separation of art, something we came to enshrine as almost mythic/metaphysical in the 20th century, from our commodified experience of art objects. on a larger level, you could perhaps describe it as instance of the human self defining itself as separate from a mediated and commodified material universe. i.e., the retreat of the self-as-viewer from this world to a remove from which it observes the world as if in a frame. art, being an act of self, is likewise extracted from the material to this protected remove. something magical in this then, as human selves that are not quite in the world still act on it in such a way as to leave traces of the distanced viewing space in which they operate.

anyway, yeah. great post.

but the more that distinction is stressed, the more tension there is between the physical and conceptual aspects of any work. and this apparent bifurcation is itself really interesting. i mean for me it seems to have precedents in eg. con-(or even tran)-substantiation (and that kind of calvinism is reflected maybe in the strict puritanism of eg. Weiner), or like marxist dialectics of the commodity itself (in a simplistic way i mean). But it ends up pointing at itself, at real or illusory values in art and how we can even deal w/ that, or make provisions for that. Especially when what art itself is might be completely outside our purview, shadowy and elusive.

one thing i find interesting about it is the way the artist is privileged in this idea. Like if you separate the object from the idea, and view the object as merely a trace or part of the art, then that reduces the value of the object.

hmm

Recognizing copyright in Wildflower Works presses too hard on these basic principles. We fully accept that the artistic community might classify Kelley’s garden as a work of postmodern conceptual art. We acknowledge as well that copyright’s prerequisites of authorship and fixation are broadly defined. But the law must have some limits; not all conceptual art may be copyrighted. In the ordinary copyright case, authorship and fixation are not contested; most works presented for copyright are unambiguously authored and unambiguously fixed. But this is not an ordinary case. A living garden like Wildflower Works is neither “authored” nor “fixed” in the senses required for copyright.

http://clancco.com/wp/2011/02/16/vara_moral-rights_sculpture_originality/

I'm going to buy a condominium and fill it with George Condo works and call it "Magna What, Magna Who"

http://albumsbyconceptualartists.tumblr.com/