Extraterritoriality of conceptual art

By Kate Lim

One steps into a quiet gallery to see an exhibition as a willing suspension of everydayness. There, the white, clean space is punctuated with the presence of what is called a work of art.

It could be a collection of working drawings or sketches (lines, shapes and numbers), an invoice from the supplier, a mathematician’s calculations, a page ripped out of a magazine, a music score. It could be a black-and-white photograph titled “Artist’s Shit.” Or it could be a photographic enlargement of a dictionary definition, or a telephone placed on the floor with a piece of paper beside it saying, “If this telephone rings, you may answer it. The artist is on the line and would like to talk to you.” It could be a urinal turned upside down.

These are all famous pieces of conceptual art. Those who pay heed to forms or materials in art are anathema to conceptual artists. Many conceptualists loathed painting, considering it a privileged form of art that was strongly affiliated with museums. They were disgusted with the way the painter was presented as a mysterious being writhing in artistic pain. They wanted to show that the artist was biologically the same as the viewer. These artists asserted that with all these conventional orders stripped off, ideas, meanings and pure mental processes untainted by materials were all that were essential to art.

Although the heyday of conceptual art was loosely linked to the late 1960s with New York as its central base, conceptualism in art has given an impetus to global art communities since its inception, leaving an indelible legacy in the visual arts.

For one, any living contemporary artist is in theory emancipated from the constriction of conventional parameters of art-making. This can be seen as a positive byproduct. The obverse side of this phenomenal liberation is that no one in the professional art circle who has knowledge of conceptual art will ever dare to utter “no, it’s not art,” as long as the artist eloquently speaks about his or her own concept. Anything and anyone can be art or an artist according to this democratic art theory. Someone who questions if it is really art could be, on the contrary, criticized as being the art police.

We can naturally ask a critical question: what was the purpose of those conceptual artists? Much of the literature on conceptual art maintains that the purpose is to raise a bold proposition: “Imagine this (the urinal, for example) is an artwork in its own right.” Critics commented that based on this revolutionary conceptualization, they tried to make the viewers question the definition of art itself in a more positive way, challenging their passive acceptance of what was presented as art within the institutional environment. So, the logic went that what the artists presented as evidence of notes or photographs or even just words documenting the artist’s actions, investigations or conceptualizing process, was legitimately art, independent of any criteria or norm, especially the aesthetic criterion. The conceptualists, in my opinion, contended that their art had extraterritorial rights. They did not want to tolerate a fraction of the given rules of art that underpins the artistic experience shared at large among the majority of the interested art audience. It was akin to a very small vocal phalanx of artists occupying their own district and declaring, “This is art and it is subject to my own rules.”

Many pro-conceptual art critics regarded that conceptual art had a highly intellectual component, and conceptualists like Joseph Kosuth, Bruce Nauman and the group Art & Language acted like philosophers, telling the audience to think about thinking. In short, the conceptual artist wanted to put on the mantle of a philosopher or a social scientist. The conceptualists were not interested in material construction but in a great deal of words. In order to understand conceptual art, viewers have to find the meaning either through ‘reading’ the available text that is presented with the artwork, or ‘listening’ to the words spewed from the museum docent or curator. In their art, words matter so much so that the importance of ‘seeing’ as the human’s perceptual capability is rendered miniscule.

But ‘pointing at’ the dictionary definition of ‘meaning’ as executed in Joseph Kosuth’s work, ‘Titled (Art as Idea as Idea),” does not make him a truly serious philosopher. It takes a lifetime commitment to think and write of such a philosophical exploration, and so does making a valuable social critique that can contribute to the community. The ordinary person has occasional moments of being artistic, but that does not make them a real artist. The enigmatic fabric of words constructed intricately in the complete novel is totally different from the vocal brainstorming of an excited writer. To be able to accomplish material reification struggling with the finiteness of rules and limitations, and finally snatching a creative victory on the verge of being overruled by them, that is what should matter to art.

Kate Lim is director of Art Platform Asia, an

independent curator and art writer. Contact

her at kate.yk.lim@gmail.com.