What Was Conceptualism & Why Won't It Go Away?

Catalog description

This course examines the conceptual art movement, the hopes that shaped its political and aesthetic stratagems, and its legacy. We will begin by revisiting some of the major assumptions and conditions that catalyzed conceptualism, including the cultural climate of the 1960s, the critique of the object-status of art, concerns about the broader social function of the artist, as well as commodity culture. We will then take up our topic from various thematic vantages: the historical and philosophical question of language; the notions of “dematerialization” and documentation, particularly as aesthetic strategies aimed at “suppressing the beholder”; the practice of institutional critique and the broader idea of the world as system; the relationship between art, “information,” and the technological imaginary of the times. A few seminar meetings will be dedicated to focusing on a single artist or artwork. As we proceed we will also keep an eye on the question of why and in what ways conceptualism has persisted beyond its founding moment in the late 1960s, and what its more recent iterations in artistic production—as ‘global-’, ‘neo-’, and ‘post-conceptualisms’—have to offer.