Lecture 4 min.
Concept art ( in English, Conceptual art ) is a term coined by American artist Henry Flynt in the 1960s to describe a movement in contemporary art.
Conceptual art, or conceptualism (from Latin conceptus — thought, notion) — is a literary and artistic movement within postmodernism that took shape in the late 1960s and early 1970s in America and Europe.
In conceptualism, the concept behind a work matters more than its physical expression, and the goal of art is to convey an idea. Conceptual objects can exist in the form of phrases, texts, diagrams, charts, drawings, photographs, and audio or video materials. Any object, phenomenon, or process can become an object of art, since conceptual art is essentially a pure artistic gesture.
According to BBC art editor Will Gompertz, a defining feature of works in the field of conceptual art is their focus
"...not so much on creating a physical object as on ideas: that is why it is called conceptual" .
Conceptualists often used ready-made objects, but despite the utilitarian functions built into them, gave them a completely different meaning. In a 1967 article for Artforum magazine, Sol LeWitt proposed the following definition of conceptual art:
"...the aim of an artist working in conceptual art is to make his work intellectually interesting to the viewer, without touching his soul ".
Conceptualism was never a single unified movement. Conceptualism is an umbrella term covering several kinds of art . Rejecting the idea that art must necessarily provide aesthetic pleasure, conceptual artists work across many fields, including performance, video art, land art, and arte povera. Followers of conceptualist ideas often create unusual temporary installations that are intended to expand the boundaries of perception and make art accessible to everyone.
Originally emerging from minimalism, concept art ultimately became a collective term for the further development of trends in abstract painting and for various artistic movements, such as object art or happening, which treat the idea behind a work of art as taking priority over its execution.
Mel Bochner's 1966 exhibition "Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed as Art" at the School of Visual Arts gallery in New York is considered the first exhibition of the conceptual art movement. In 1969, the first museum exhibition of conceptual art in Germany was held at the Morsbroich Museum in Leverkusen.
The execution of a work of art is of secondary importance and need not be carried out by the artist personally. The main focus is on the concept and the idea, which are considered equivalent to the artistic work itself. In this sense, instead of finished paintings and sculptures, there are sketches, documents, instructions, or, in certain cases, artists' books that develop their own aesthetic qualities. One of the goals is the "dematerialization" of the work of art and the involvement of the viewer. Familiar viewpoints, terms, and contexts of the world are called into question, and new rules are invented. Artists work with contexts, meanings, and associations.
The theorists of conceptual art include Mel Bochner, Sol LeWitt, Art & Language, Joseph Kosuth, and Victor Burgin. Marcel Duchamp served as a role model for this movement. He distinguished his art from "retinal art," which acts primarily on the eye (and is thus, for example, useless) rather than functioning as an idea or a network of meaning in the mind. This approach often makes conceptual art elitist, fragile, and difficult for the ordinary viewer to access. Some works of conceptual art become accessible only after studying the artist and his thinking.
A wide variety of avant-garde movements of the 1960s, such as the paintings of Robert Ryman, the photo albums of Ed Ruscha, the sculptures of Carl Andre, Robert Morris, or Robert Smithson, as well as Happening, Fluxus, and Viennese Actionism, were immediate and often confusing similar precursors of conceptualism.
Among other things, thanks to the influence of art magazines such as Artforum, Avalanche, Parachute, Flash Art, and Art Press, groups of conceptualists quickly emerged in America and Europe. These were oriented toward New York but at the same time formed independent regional centers such as San Francisco in North America, as well as Los Angeles, San Diego, Vancouver, and Toronto.
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