Conceptual Art

by Ursula Meyer

5 1/2 x 8" with 227 pgs. copyright 1972 "First Edition" - Ursula Meyer, sculptor and writer, Associate Professor of Art at Herber M. Lehman College of the City University of New York. Her work is in the premanent collections of the Finch College Museum, The Brooklyn Museum, The Neward Museum and the Larry Aldrich Museum. Book contains b/w photos and b/w illustrations.

Genres: Art

227 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1972

Reviews

[Nat]

In 2016 I saw a big retrospective of British conceptual art at Tate Britain (https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate...). I loved conceptual art in college—I think mainly because it was basically just philosophy of language—but seeing the works in person seriously diminished my interest in it! Looking at issues of Art Language exhibited in glass cases was especially deflating.

This survey of conceptual art is from the end of the heyday of the movement (published in 1972), and manages to spark my interest in this art again, mainly by capturing more of the goofiness and less of the highly serious, basically unreadable academic-essay type reflections on art (though those are there too). I'm always especially puzzled by Joseph Kosuth's claim that there are art "propositions" (communicated by artworks?) and that those propositions are tautological, like Wittgenstein's account of logical propositions in the Tractatus. (Clearly Kosuth had been reading Ayer's Language, Truth, and Logic, because he keeps citing it.)

A discovery for me in one of the drier academic manifestos is the claim made by Ian Burn and Mel Ramsden in a piece called "The Grammarian" (1970) that art should be understood as the totality of statements made about art (e.g., "...is an artwork"), and they propose approaching the study of art (and I guess making art as well?) by looking at all of the collocations in which "artwork" appears. So they're proposing a kind of vector-space understanding of what art is.

[Tentatively, Convenience · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was 22 when I read this. I'd already been a 'conceptual artist' for at least the preceding 6 yrs w/o, probably, being aware that such a mvmt even existed. This was the 1st bk I read on the subject & I was very excited. The stark cutting thru of normal ways of doing things was extremely refreshing. The simplicity of Daniel Buren's using only striped paintings - but trying to present them in as many different lights as possible - such as as sandwich boards - was a stunning departure from most painting I was aware of. Hans Haacke's "Proposal Poll of MOMA Visitors" where he makes transparent the unpopularity of American Indochina policy is potent. Jan Dibbets' "Perspective Correction" where he cuts out a piece of turf so that when looked at from the correct angle it appears to be a square sticking up out of the ground is simple but in a way that few people wd think of - & it harkens back to anamorphic tricks of older painting. All in all, getting away from object production & toward perceptual paradigm production is of great importance to me & this bk was a milestone in that direction (even though it's an object, eh?!).