Conceptual Art

10 Pages 2586 Words

The term Conceptual Art was first used in 1967 by the artist Sol LeWitt, in his ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’ essay in which he states “I will refer to the kind of art in which I am involved with as conceptual art. In conceptual art the idea of concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art”. The beginning of Conceptual Art in the late 1960’s was marked by a paradigmatic shift from the traditional notions of art as object to art as idea. It challenged the significance of art’s material objectivity and instead emphasized that the idea or concept, was “the most important aspect” 1 of the work. Some artists, such as Joseph Kosuth, would go so far as to say the idea itself is the art, and that each work is “a definition of art”.2 Hence, his most famous series of works: Art as Idea as Idea, are photographic representations of an enlarged dictionary definition such as the definition of art, which can be seen in {Figure 1.} Here he completely disregards the physical object and focuses exclusively on the use of language to supply the information. In this series, Kosuth pays homage to the abstract expressionist painter Ad Reinhardt in reference to a statement made by him that ”art is art-as-art and everything else is everything else”.3 In this statement, Reinhardt is making the argument that art is only art if it is intended to be art, and that everything is else is not art. This goes hand in hand with Marcel Duchamp’s unassisted readymades, a term he used to describe the mass-produced objects he chose to designate as art, such as his bicycle wheel mounted on a stool, or his infamous men’s urinal signed R. Mutt. With the readymade, Duchamp changed the focus from the form of the language to what was being sa...