Name 3 Approaches to Photography Used by Early Practitioners of the Conceptual Art Movement

"No matter what form [the artwork] may finally have it must begin with an idea. Information technology is the process of conception and realization with which the artist is concerned."

"People, buying my stuff, tin take it wherever they go and tin can rebuild it if they cull. If they proceed it in their heads, that's fine as well. They don't accept to buy it to have it - they tin just have information technology past knowing it."

"In order to proceeds some insight into the forces that elevate sure products to the level of 'works of art' it is helpful - amidst other investigations - to look into the economic and political underpinnings of the institutions, individuals and groups who share in the command of power."

"When objects are presented inside the context of fine art (and until recently objects always accept been used) they are equally eligible for aesthetic consideration equally are whatever objects in the earth, and an artful consideration of an object existing in the realm of art means that the object'southward existence or functioning in an fine art context is irrelevant to the aesthetic judgment."

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"All of the pregnant fine art of today stems from Conceptual art. This includes the art of installation, political, feminist, and socially directed art."

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Summary of Conceptual Art

Conceptual art is a motility that prizes ideas over the formal or visual components of art works. An amalgam of various tendencies rather than a tightly cohesive movement, Conceptualism took myriad forms, such as performances, happenings, and ephemera. From the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s Conceptual artists produced works and writings that completely rejected standard ideas of fine art. Their chief merits - that the articulation of an artistic thought suffices as a piece of work of fine art - implied that concerns such as aesthetics, expression, skill and marketability were all irrelevant standards by which fine art was usually judged. So drastically simplified, it might seem to many people that what passes for Conceptual art is not in fact "art" at all, much equally Jackson Pollock'southward "drip" paintings, or Andy Warhol'southward Brillo Boxes (1964), seemed to contradict what previously had passed for art. But it is important to understand Conceptual art in a succession of advanced movements (Cubism, Dada, Abstruse Expressionism, Pop, etc.) that succeeded in self-consciously expanding the boundaries of art. Conceptualists put themselves at the farthermost end of this advanced tradition. In truth, it is irrelevant whether this extremely intellectual kind of art matches one's personal views of what art should be, considering the fact remains that Conceptual artists successfully redefine the concept of a work of art to the extent that their efforts are widely accepted as art by collectors, gallerists, and museum curators.

Key Ideas & Accomplishments

• Conceptual artists link their piece of work to a tradition of Marcel Duchamp, whose readymades had rattled the very definition of the work of art. Similar Duchamp earlier them, they abandoned dazzler, rarity, and skill as measures of art.
• Conceptual artists recognize that all fine art is substantially conceptual. In guild to emphasize this, many Conceptual artists reduced the material presence of the work to an absolute minimum - a tendency that some have referred to every bit the "dematerialization" of art.
• Conceptual artists were influenced by the brutal simplicity of Minimalism, but they rejected Minimalism's embrace of the conventions of sculpture and painting as mainstays of artistic product. For Conceptual artists, art need not expect like a traditional work of fine art, or fifty-fifty take any concrete form at all.
• The analysis of art that was pursued by many Conceptual artists encouraged them to believe that if the artist began the artwork, the museum or gallery and the audition in some way completed it. This category of Conceptual art is known as 'institutional critique,' which can be understood every bit office of an fifty-fifty greater shift abroad from emphasizing the object-based piece of work of fine art to pointedly expressing cultural values of order at large.
• Much Conceptual art is self-conscious or self-referential. Like Duchamp and other modernists, they created art that is well-nigh fine art, and pushed its limits past using minimal materials and even text.

Overview of Conceptual Art

Ane of the principal theorists of Conceptual art, Sol Lewitt said "Ideas lone tin can be works of fine art; they are in a chain of development that may eventually find some form. All ideas need non be made physical." He conceived many different pieces, some were never built, while others were ultimately given physical form.

Central Artists

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  Joseph Beuys was a German language multi- and mixed-media artist best known for incorporating ideas of humanism, social philosophy and politics into his art. Beuys expert everything from installation and operation fine art to traditional painting and "social sculpture." He was continually motivated past the belief of universal human inventiveness.

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  John Baldessari, born in 1931, is an American conceptual creative person. He often combines epitome and languages in his art. His early works were canvas paintings that were empty except for painted statements derived from contemporary art theory. His juxtaposition of paradigm and text is reminiscent of Rene Magritte'southward surrealist paintings.

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  Sol LeWitt was an American creative person normally associated with the Minimalist and Conceptual movements. He rose to prominence in the 1960s with the likes of Rauschenberg, Johns and Stella, and his work was included in the famous 1966 showroom Principal Structures at the Jewish Museum. LeWitt'southward art often employed simple geometric forms and archetypal symbols, and he worked in a variety of media but was about interested in the thought backside the artwork.

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  Robert Rauschenberg, a fundamental figure in early on Pop art, admired the textural quality of Abstruse Expressionism but scorned its emotional desolation. His famous "Combines" are office sculpture, role painting, and part installation.

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  Robert Smithson was an American artist best known for his innovations in State and Globe Art. Smithson's large-calibration projects employed world and other natural resources to construct works that both manipulated and preserved the natural mural. His nigh famous piece of work is Spiral Jetty in Utah, constructed entirely from basalt, earth and common salt.

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  Walter de Maria is an American sculptor, composer, and multi-media artist whose best known piece of work is The Lightning Field (1977), consisting of 400 lightning rods situated on a field in New Mexico.

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  Damien Hirst is a British installation and conceptual artist, and in the 1980s was a founding member of the Young British Artists (YBAs). His best known piece of work is Physical Impossibility of Death in the Listen of Someone Living (1991), comprised of a dead tiger shark suspended in a vitrine of formaldehyde.

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  Jenny Holzer is an American conceptual and mixed-media creative person. Her work is best known for using a variety of text, propaganda imagery, sound, video and calorie-free, all of which she attempts to incorporate into public spaces, thus bringing creative experience straight into the world.

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  Joseph Kosuth is an American conceptual artist, philosopher and essayist. His near celebrated piece of work is One and Three Chairs (1965), which doubles every bit a slice of commentary on Plato'southward Theory of Forms. He is likewise well-known for his 1969 essay "Art after Philosophy," considered a key text of postmodern fine art writing.

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  Lawrence Weiner was one of the pioneers of text-every bit-art. His utilise of linguistic communication is notable for its lyricism, its inquisitive date with the cloth world around it, and its playful visual forms.

Practice Not Miss

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  Institutional Critique is the practice of systematic inquiry into the workings of art institutions and their connections to the development of art. Institutional Critique focuses on the relationships between the viewer, language, procedure, the consumption of art.

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  Beginning in the 1960s, artists of colour, LGBTQ+ artists, and women have used their fine art to stage and display experiences of identity and community.

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  Installation art is a genre of contemporary art-making in which 2- and three-dimensional materials are used to transform a particular site into an immersive space for the visitor. Installations may include sculptural, constitute, sound-based, and performance elements, and can be permanent or ephemeral.

Important Fine art and Artists of Conceptual Art

Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953)

Artist: Robert Rauschenberg

In 1953 Robert Rauschenberg visited Willem de Kooning's loft, requesting one of de Kooning's drawings to completely erase it. Rauschenberg believed that in order for this idea to go a piece of work of art, the work had to exist someone else's and not his own; if he erased one of his ain drawings then the result would be nothing more than a negated cartoon. Although disapproving at first, de Kooning understood the concept and reluctantly consented to manus over something that he (de Kooning) would miss and that would be a claiming to erase entirely, thus making the erasure that much more than profound in the terminate. It took Rauschenberg a footling over a month and an estimated fifteen erasers to "end" the work. "It's non a negation," Rauschenberg once said, "information technology's a celebration, it'due south simply the idea!" Of form, it likewise signaled a cheerio to Abstruse Expressionist art, and the expectation that a piece of work of art should exist expressive. The absent cartoon is a Conceptual piece of work avant la lettre, and a precursor to works like Sol Lewitt's Buried Cube Containing an Object of Importance but Little Value (1968), a gag piece, where LeWitt supposedly interred a simple cube in a collector'south k, and with it he buried Minimalism's object-centered approach.

One and Three Chairs (1965)

Artist: Joseph Kosuth

A physical chair sits between a calibration photograph of a chair and a printed definition of the word "chair." Emblematic of Conceptual fine art, I and 3 Chairs makes people question what constitutes the "chair" - the physical object, the idea, the photograph, or a combination of all three. Joseph Kosuth once wrote, "The fine art I telephone call conceptual is such because it is based on an enquiry into the nature of art. Thus, it is...a thinking out of all the implications, of all aspects of the concept 'art.'" 1 and 3 Chairs denies the hierarchical stardom betwixt an object and a representation, but as information technology implies a conceptual work of art tin can be object or representation in its various forms. This piece of work harks dorsum to and also extends the kind of inquiry into the presumed priority of object over representation that had been earlier proposed by the Surrealist René Magritte in his Treachery of Images (1928-9), with its image of a pipe over the inscription "Ceci northward'est pas united nations piping" (This is not a pipe).

Vertical Globe Kilometer (1977)

Artist: Walter de Maria

The idea underlying this piece was the cosmos of an actual yet invisible work of fine art. With the assistance of an industrial drill, de Maria dug a narrow pigsty in the basis exactly i kilometer deep, inserted a two-inch bore brass rod of the same length, then concealed information technology with a sandstone plate. A small hole was cut in the plate's center to reveal a small portion of the rod, which is perfectly level with the ground. The result is a permanent work of fine art that people are forced to imagine but may never really see. Equally a complementary piece to Vertical Earth Kilometer, de Maria created the far more visible Cleaved Kilometer (1979), which consisted of five hundred two-meter-long contumely rods, neatly arranged on an exhibition floor infinite in five parallel rows of one hundred rods each. In keeping with Conceptual artists' dispensation of traditional materials and formal concerns, this work defies the market: it can't be sold or entirely exhibited. Farther, its simplicity and largely curtained quality makes it anti-expressive and consistent with the menses'due south many paradoxical negations of the visual in "visual art."

Useful Resource on Conceptual Art

Content compiled and written past Justin Wolf

Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors

"Conceptual Art Move Overview and Assay". [Internet]. . TheArtStory.org
Content compiled and written past Justin Wolf
Edited and published past The Art Story Contributors
Available from:
Start published on 01 Oct 2012. Updated and modified regularly
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Source: https://www.theartstory.org/movement/conceptual-art/

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