The synthetic proposition: Conceptualism and the political referent in contemporary art

Rethinking Art's Histories

by Nizan Shaked, Amelia Jones (Series Editor), Marsha Meskimmon (Series Editor)

The synthetic proposition examines the impact of Civil Rights, Black Power, the student, feminist and sexual-liberty movements on conceptualism and its legacies in the United States between the late 1960s and the 1990s. It focuses on the turn to political reference in practices originally concerned with abstract ideas, as articulated by Joseph Kosuth, and traces key strategies in contemporary art to the reciprocal influences of conceptualism and identity movements that have so far been historicised as mutually exclusive.

The book demonstrates that while identity-based strategies were particular, their impact spread far beyond the individuals or communities that originated them. It offers a study of Adrian Piper, David Hammons, Renée Green, Mary Kelly, Martha Rosler, Silvia Kolbowski, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Lorna Simpson, Hans Haacke, Andrea Fraser and Charles Gaines. By turning to social issues, these artists analysed the conventions of language, photography, moving image, installation and display.

280 pages, Paperback

Published June 13, 2017

Reviews

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really interesting reappraisal of conceptual art. It builds on points already made by writers like Mark Godfrey (2005) about how photography opened up the rather formal concerns of conceptual art, but gives this shift a distinctive name: synthetic versus analytic conceptual art. The main achievement, though, is a careful unpacking of the distinction between self and identity that shifts how we might understand women's contribution to conceptual art (Adrian Piper, Andrea Fraser, Mary Kelly). Often women's conceptual art is interpreted as the return of subjective concerns (certainly true in the case of Antin who isn't discussed). What the book does is reorient identity politics as more in keeping with the anti-aesthetic anti-expressive tenets of conceptual art. There's an admission right at the end about the impossibility of eliminating subjectivity all together that I appreciated. A very thought provoking and carefully argued book.