Conceptual Art

by Paul Wood

As befits an art of the mind, 'Conceptual art' poses problems right from the start. What was it? When was it? (Is it still around or is it 'history'?) Where was it? Who made it? (Are we to consider 'X' a Conceptual artist or not?) And of course, the umbrella-question: why? Why produce a form of visual art premised on undercutting the two principal characteristics of art as it has come down to us in Western culture, namely the production of objects to look at, and the act of contemplative looking itself?...These are real questions ... Looked at in one way, Conceptual art gets to be like Lewis Carroll's Cheshire cat, dissolving away until nothing is left but a grin: a handful of works made over a few short years by a small number of artists, the most important of whom soon went on to do other things. Then again, regarded under a different aspect, Conceptual art can seem like nothing less than the hinge around which the past turned into the present: the modernist past of painting as the fine art, the canon from Cezanne to Rothko, versus the postmodernist present where contemporary exhibition spaces are full of anything and everything, from sharks to photographs, piles of rubbish to multi-screen videos -- full, it seems, of everything except modernist painting.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction, Art History

80 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Paul Wood began working for the Open University in the 1980s as a part-time Tutor in Scotland, based in Edinburgh. Since the 1990s he has worked in the Dept of Art History at Milton Keynes. His main involvement has been in the history of the modern movement. Previously, he was a Tutor on A315, Modern Art & Modernism which ran between 1983 and 1992, a Course Team member on A316 Modern Art: Practices and Debates from 1992 to 2003. He is currently Course Team Chair of AA318 Art of the Twentieth Century which appeared in 2004. He also works on the second level course A216, Art and its Histories and has written on the relation between non-western art and the ‘modern movement’ for the level 1 course AA100 The Arts Past and Present. His work has been published in numerous books, catalogues and journals in the field. His principal research interests lie in the theory of modernism and the avant-garde, and in revolutionary art and realism. More recently, he has worked on contemporary questions of globalisation and the relation of the western canon to non-western art. He is currently working on issues around the ‘Benin bronzes’ and is involved in a joint project with the Open University and the British Museum on Ancient Egyptian art.

In collaboration with Charles Harrison, he began Art in Theory in the early 1990s: a project to document the changing ideas which have informed the practice of modern art. Art in Theory 1900-1990 was published in 1992. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood were then joined by Jason Gaiger, and subsequently two further volumes have appeared, tracing the process back to the mid-seventeenth century: Art in Theory 1815-1900 and Art in Theory 1648-1815. In 2002 a new edition of the twentieth century volume was published as Art in Theory 1900-2000, thus completing the project to document the theoretical formation of the art of the extended modern period from the founding of the Academy to post-modernism.

Reviews

[Jez · Rating 4 out of 5]

I used this book as a reference while working on an exhibition. It is very lucid for what some can feel is a complicated topic.