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January 31, 2011
My understanding of the conceptual art movement in the mid-1960s to the early 1970s is that it critiqued the art institution assumption that art's principal aim is to produce something beautiful or aesthetically pleasing. Most artistic institutions are not conducive to reflection and continue to promote a consumerist conception of art and artists based on beauty and technical skill. So we have the basic opposition of concept and aesthetic.
The works of conceptual art encourage us to think about the kind of things that may be considered to be art, and about exactly what the role of the artist should be. It does so, on the one hand, by postulating ever more complex objects as candidates for the status of ‘artwork’, and, on the other hand, by distancing the task of the artist from the actual making and manipulating of the artistic material.
In American art criticism Rosalind Krauss argued that conceptual art in fact could be understood to have irrevocably severed the connection between art and its medium. She interpreted the arguments produced by Conceptual Art at the end of the 1960s as refuting once and for all the 'High Modernist' theory (as articulated by Clement Greenberg) that true art must be conceived and executed in medium-specific terms. The doctrine proposed by Clement Greenberg is that art, by necessity, concentrates on a thorough exploration of the laws of the given medium, in particular painting.
Conceptual art dismisses the relevance of medium-specific art practice in favour of a general and fundamental inquiry into the nature of art - in whatever medium. The inference is that those who continue to work in media-immanent terms, for example in painting, not only condemn their practice to historical insignificance, but also risk direct appropriation by the institutions and the market.
The conclusion is then that only a form of art that through conceptual gestures articulates a critical position with regard to the institution of art is capable of resisting the historical devaluation of artistic media and the subjugation of production to the laws of the art-system.
From the perspective of photography conceptual art meant a reduction to language and a sidelining of pictorial form and the picture making by the depictive arts; or at least to a counterpoint to neo-realism and documentary photography. So how can photography link up with or a linguistic work of art in conceptual art? What would photography after conceptual art look like, as distinct from artist's use of photography?
Is one pathway provided by the California painter Ed Ruscha's use of this principle to create the book Twentysix Gasoline Stations, in which he first came up with the title, then proceeded to photograph the subject on one of his road trips from Oklahoma City (his hometown) to Los Angeles, his adopted city. The work of art was to be the book itself, simply but carefully designed, whereas the photographs inside showed no traces of aesthetic decision making at all, as if the artist had merely pointed the camera out the car window in order to fulfill the requirements of the textual phrase.
Could this be a starting point? Is another the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher?
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The last few pics in rizomes are good. You must be on a wave.