Conceptual art is art in which the concept(s) or idea(s) involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. Many of the works, sometimes called installations, of the artist Sol LeWitt may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions. This method was fundamental to LeWitt's definition of Conceptual art, one of the first to appear in print:

Tony Godfrey, author of ''Conceptual Art (Art & Ideas)'' (1998), asserts that conceptual art questions the nature of art, a notion that Joseph Kosuth elevated to a definition of art itself in his seminal, early manifesto of conceptual art, "Art after Philosophy" (1969). The notion that art should examine its own nature was already a potent aspect of (the influential art critic) Clement Greenberg's vision of Modern art during the 1950s. With the emergence of an exclusively language-based art in the 1960s, however, conceptual artists such as Joseph Kosuth, Lawrence Weiner and the English Art & Language group began a far more radical interrogation of art than was previously possible (see below). One of the first and most important things they questioned was the common assumption that the role of the artist was to create special kinds of material objects.

Through its association with the Young British Artists and the Turner Prize during the 1990s, in popular usage, particularly in the UK, "conceptual art" came to denote all contemporary art that does not practise the traditional skills of painting and sculpture. It could be said that one of the reasons why the term "conceptual art" has come to be associated with various contemporary practices far removed from its original aims and forms lies in the problem of defining the term itself. As the artist Mel Bochner suggested as early as 1970, in explaining why he does not like the epithet "conceptual", it is not always entirely clear what "concept" refers to, and it runs the risk of being confused with "intention." Thus, in describing or defining a work of art as conceptual it is important not to confuse what is referred to as "conceptual" with an artist's "intention."

History

The French artist Marcel Duchamp paved the way for the conceptualists, providing them with examples of prototypically conceptual works — the readymades, for instance. The most famous of Duchamp's readymades was ''Fountain'' (1917), a standard urinal basin signed by the artist with the pseudonym "R.Mutt", and submitted for inclusion in the annual, un-juried exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York (it was rejected). In traditional terms, a commonplace object such as a urinal cannot be said to be art because it is not made by an artist or with any intention of being art, nor is it unique or hand-crafted. Duchamp's relevance and theoretical importance for future "conceptualists" was later acknowledged by US artist Joseph Kosuth in his 1969 essay, "Art after Philosophy," when he wrote: ''"All art (after Duchamp) is conceptual (in nature) because art only exists conceptually."''

In 1956, recalling the infinitesimals of G.W. Leibniz, quantities which could not actually exist except conceptually, the founder of Lettrism, Isidore Isou, developed the notion of a work of art which, by its very nature, could never be created in reality, but which could nevertheless provide aesthetic rewards by being contemplated intellectually. Also called ''Art esthapériste'' ('infinite-aesthetics'). Related to this, and arising out of it, is excoördism, the current incarnation of the Isouian movement, defined as the art of the infinitely large and the infinitely small.

In 1961 the term "concept art," coined by the artist Henry Flynt in his article bearing the term as its title, appeared in a Fluxus publication. However it assumed a different meaning when employed by Joseph Kosuth and the English Art and Language group, who discarded the conventional art object in favour of a documented critical inquiry into the artist's social, philosophical and psychological status. By the mid-1970s they had produced publications, indexes, performances, texts and paintings to this end. In 1970 ''Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects'', the first dedicated conceptual art exhibition, was mounted at the New York Cultural Center.

The Critique of Formalism and the Commodification of Art

Conceptual art emerged as a movement during the 1960s. In part, it was a reaction against formalism as it was then articulated by the influential New York art critic Clement Greenberg. According to Greenberg Modern art followed a process of progressive reduction and refinement toward the goal of defining the essential, formal nature of each medium. Those elements that ran counter to this nature were to be reduced. The task of painting, for example, was to define precisely what kind of object a painting truly is: what makes it a painting and nothing else? As it is of the nature of paintings to be flat objects with canvas surfaces onto which colored pigment is applied, such things as figuration, 3-D perspective illusion and references to external subject matter were all found to be extraneous to the essence of painting, and ought to be removed.

Some have argued that conceptual art continued this "dematerialization" of art by removing the need for objects altogether, while others, including many of the artists themselves, saw conceptual art as a radical break with Greenberg's kind of formalist Modernism. Later artists continued to share a preference for art to be self-critical, as well as a distaste for illusion. However, by the end of the 1960s it was certainly clear that Greenberg's stipulations for art to continue within the confines of each medium and to exclude external subject matter no longer held traction.

Conceptual art also reacted against the commodification of art; it attempted a subversion of the gallery or museum as the location and determiner of art, and the art market as the owner and distributor of art. Lawrence Weiner said: "Once you know about a work of mine you own it. There's no way I can climb inside somebody's head and remove it." Many conceptual artists' work can therefore only be known about through documentation which is manifested by it, e.g. photographs, written texts or displayed objects, which some might argue are not in themselves the art. It is sometimes (as in the work of Robert Barry, Yoko Ono, and Weiner himself) reduced to a set of written instructions describing a work, but stopping short of actually making it—emphasising that the idea is more important than the artifact.

Language and/as art

Language was a central concern for the first wave of conceptual artists of the 1960s and early 1970s. Although the appearance of text in art was by no means novel, it was not until the 1960s that the artists Lawrence Weiner, Edward Ruscha, Joseph Kosuth, Robert Barry, and the English Art & Language group began to produce art by exclusively linguistic means. Where previously language was presented as one kind of visual element alongside others, and subordinate to an overarching composition (see for example Synthetic Cubism), the conceptual artists used language in place of brush and canvas, and allowed it to signify in its own right. Of Lawrence Weiner's works Anne Rorimer writes, "The thematic content of individual works derives solely from the import of the language employed, while presentational means and contextual placement play crucial, yet separate, roles."

The British philosopher and theorist of conceptual art Peter Osborne suggests that among the many factors that influenced the gravitation toward language-based art, of vital importance for conceptualism was the turn to linguistic theories of meaning in both Anglo-American analytic philosophy, and structuralist and post structuralist Continental philosophy during the middle of the twentieth century. This linguistic turn "reinforced and legitimized" the direction the conceptual artists took. Osborne also notes that the early conceptualists were the first generation of artists to complete degree-based university training in art.

Conceptual Art and Artistic Skill

"By adopting language as their exclusive medium, Weiner, Barry, Wilson, Kosuth and Art & Language were able to sweep aside the vestiges of authorial presence manifested by formal invention and the handling of materials." They staged yearly demonstrations outside the Turner Prize.

In 2002, Ivan Massow, the Chairman of the Institute of Contemporary Arts branded conceptual art "pretentious, self-indulgent, craftless tat" and in "danger of disappearing up its own arse ... led by cultural tsars such as the Tate's Sir Nicholas Serota." Massow was consequently forced to resign. At the end of the year, the Culture Minister, Kim Howells (an art school graduate) denounced the Turner Prize as "cold, mechanical, conceptual bullshit".

In October 2004 the Saatchi Gallery told the media that "painting continues to be the most relevant and vital way that artists choose to communicate."

Notable examples of conceptual art

1953 : Robert Rauschenberg exhibits ''Erased De Kooning Drawing'', a drawing by Willem De Kooning which Rauschenberg erased. It raised many questions about the fundamental nature of art, challenging the viewer to consider whether erasing another artist's work could be a creative act, as well as whether the work was only "art" because the famous Rauschenberg had done it.

1956 : Isidore Isou introduces the concept of infinitesimal art in ''Introduction à une esthétique imaginaire'' (''Introduction to Imaginary Aesthetics'').

1957: Yves Klein, ''Aerostatic Sculpture (Paris)''. This was composed of 1001 blue balloons released into the sky from Galerie Iris Clert to promote his ''Proposition Monochrome; Blue Epoch'' exhibition. Klein also exhibited 'One Minute Fire Painting' which was a blue panel into which 16 firecrackers were set. For his next major exhibition, ''The Void'' in 1958, Klein declared that his paintings were now invisible and to prove it he exhibited an empty room.

1960: Yves Klein's action called ''A Leap Into The Void'', in which he attempts to fly by leaping out of a window. He stated: "The painter has only to create one masterpiece, himself, constantly."

1960: The artist Stanley Brouwn declares that all the shoe shops in Amsterdam constitute an exhibition of his work.

1961: Robert Rauschenberg sent a telegram to the Galerie Iris Clert which said: 'This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so.' as his contribution to an exhibition of portraits.

1961: Piero Manzoni exhibited Artist's shit, tins purportedly containing his own feces (although since the work would be destroyed if opened, no-one has been able to say for sure). He put the tins on sale for their own weight in gold. He also sold his own breath (enclosed in balloons) as ''Bodies of Air'', and signed people's bodies, thus declaring them to be living works of art either for all time or for specified periods. (This depended on how much they are prepared to pay). Marcel Broodthaers and Primo Levi are amongst the designated 'artworks'.

1962: Christo's ''Iron Curtain'' work. This consists of a barricade of oil barrels in a narrow Paris street which caused a large traffic jam. The artwork was not the barricade itself but the resulting traffic jam.

1962: Yves Klein presents ''Immaterial Pictorial Sensitivity'' in various ceremonies on the banks of the Seine. He offers to sell his own 'pictorial sensitivity' (whatever that was, he did not define it) in exchange for gold leaf. In these ceremonies the purchaser gave Klein the gold leaf in return for a certificate. Since Klein's sensitivity was immaterial, the purchaser was then required to burn the certificate whilst Klein threw half the gold leaf into the Seine. (There were seven purchasers.)

1962: Piero Manzoni created ''The Base of the World'', thereby exhibiting the entire planet as his artwork.

1963: George Brecht's collection of Event-Scores, ''Water Yam'', is published as the first ''Fluxkit'' by George Maciunas.

1963: Henry Flynts article ''Concept Art'' is published in "An Anthology of Chance Operations"; a collection of artworks and concepts by artists and musicians that was published by Jackson Mac Low and La Monte Young (ed.). "An Anthology of Chance Operations" documented the development of Dick Higgins vision of intermedia art in the context of the ideas of John Cage and became an early Fluxus masterpiece. Flynt's "concept art" devolved from his idea of "cognitive nihilism" and from his insights about the vulnerabilities of logic and mathematics.

1964: Yoko Ono publishes ''Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions and Drawings''. An example of Heuristic art, or a series of instructions for how to obtain an aesthetic experience.

1965: A complex conceptual art piece by John Latham called ''Still and Chew''. He invites art students to protest against the values of Clement Greenberg's ''Art and Culture'' (much praised and taught in London's St. Martin's School of Art where Latham taught). Pages of Greenberg's book (borrowed from the college library) are chewed by the students, dissolved in acid and the resulting solution returned to the library bottled and labelled. Latham was then fired from his part-time position.

Joseph Kosuth dates the concept of One and Three Chairs in the year 1965. The presentation of the work consists of a chair, its photo and a blow up of a definition of the word "chair". Kosuth has chosen the definition from a dictionary. Four versions with different definitions are known.

1966: N.E. Thing Co. Ltd. (Iain and Ingrid Baxter of Vancouver) exhibited ''Bagged Place'' the contents of a four room apartment wrapped in plastic bags. The same year they registered as a corporation and subsequently organized their practice along corporate models, one of the first international examples of the "aesthetic of administration."

1967: Sol LeWitt´s ''Paragraphs on Conceptual Art'' were published by the American art journal ''Artforum''. The ''Paragraphs'' mark the progression from Minimal to Conceptual Art.

1968: Lawrence Weiner relenquishes the physical making of his work and formulates his "Declaration of Intent," one of the most important conceptual art statements following LeWitt's "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art." The declaration, which underscores his subsequent practice reads: "1. The artist may construct the piece. 2. The piece may be fabricated. 3. The piece need not be built. Each being equal and consistent with the intent of the artist the decision as to condition rests with the receiver upon the occasion of receivership."

Friedrich Heubach launches the magazine ''Interfunktionen'' in Cologne, Germany, a publication that excelled in artists' projects. It originally showed a Fluxus influence, but later moved toward Conceptual art.

1969: Robert Barry's ''Telepathic Piece'' at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, of which he said 'During the exhibition I will try to communicate telepathically a work of art, the nature of which is a series of thoughts that are not applicable to language or image'.

The first issue of "Art-Language" is published in May. It is subtitled as "The Journal of conceptual art" and edited by Terry Atkinson, David Bainbridge, Michael Baldwin and Harold Hurrell. The editors are English members of the artists group Art & Language.

1969: Vito Acconci creates "Following Piece," in which he follows randomly selected members of the public until they disappear into a private space. The piece is presented as photographs.

The English journal "Studio International" published Joseph Kosuth´s article "Art after Philosophy" in three parts (October–December). It became the most discussed article on "Conceptual Art".

1970: Painter John Baldessari exhibits a film in which he sets a series of erudite statements by Sol LeWitt on the subject of conceptual art to popular tunes like 'Camptown Races' and 'Some Enchanted Evening'.

1970: Douglas Huebler exhibits a series of photographs which were taken every two minutes whilst driving along a road for 24 minutes.

1970: Douglas Huebler asks museum visitors to write down 'one authentic secret'. The resulting 1800 documents are compiled into a book which, by some accounts, makes for very repetitive reading as most secrets are similar.

1971: Hans Haacke's 'Real Time Social System'. This piece of systems art detailed the real estate holdings of the third largest landowners in New York City. The properties were mostly in Harlem and the Lower East Side, were decrepit and poorly maintained, and represented the largest concentration of real estate in those areas under the control of a single group. The captions gave various financial details about the buildings, including recent sales between companies owned or controlled by the same family. The Guggenheim museum cancelled the exhibition, stating that the overt political implications of the work constituted "an alien substance that had entered the art museum organism". There is no evidence to suggest that the trustees of the Guggenheim were linked financially to the family which was the subject of the work.

1972: Fred Forest buys an area of blank space in the newspaper Le Monde and invites readers to fill it with their own works of art.

General Idea launch ''File'' magazine in Toronto. The magazine functioned as something of an extended, collaborative artwork.

1974: Cadillac Ranch near Amarillo, Texas.

1975-76: Three issues of the journal "The Fox" were published in New York. The editor was Joseph Kosuth. "The Fox" became an important platform for the American members of Art & Language. Karl Beveridge, Ian Burn, Sarah Charlesworth, Michael Corris, Joseph Kosuth, Andrew Menard, Mel Ramsden and Terry Smith wrote articles which thematized the context of contemporary art. These articles exemplify the development of an institutional critique within the inner circle of Conceptual Art. The criticism of the art world integrates social, political and economic reasons.

1977: Walter De Maria's 'Vertical Earth Kilometer' in Kassel, Germany. This was a one kilometer brass rod which was sunk into the earth so that nothing remained visible except a few centimeters. Despite its size, therefore, this work exists mostly in the viewer's mind.

1977: John Fekner creates hundreds of environmental and conceptual outdoor works consisting of stenciled words, symbols, dates and icons spray painted in New York, Sweden, Canada, England and Germany.

1989: Christopher Williams' ''Angola to Vietnam'' is first exhibited. The work consists of a series of black-and-white photographs of glass botanical specimens from the Botanical Museum at Harvard University, chosen according to a list of the thirty-six countries in which political disappearances were known to have taken place during the year 1985.

1990: Ashley Bickerton and Ronald Jones included in "Mind Over Matter: Concept and Object" exhibition of ”third generation Conceptual artists” at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

1991: Ronald Jones exhibits objects and text, art, history and science rooted in grim political reality at Metro Pictures Gallery.

1991: Charles Saatchi funds Damien Hirst and the next year in the Saatchi Gallery exhibits his ''The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living'', a shark in formaldehyde in a vitrine.

1992: Maurizio Bolognini starts to "seal" his Programmed Machines: hundreds of computers are programmed and left to run ad infinitum to generate inexhaustible flows of random images which nobody would see.

1993: Matthieu Laurette established his artistic birth certificate by taking part in a French TV game called 'Tournez manège' (The Dating Game) where the female presenter asked him who he was, to which he replied: 'A multimedia artist'. Laurette had sent out invitations to an art audience to view the show on TV from their home, turning his staging of the artist into a performed reality.

1993: Vanessa Beecroft holds her first performance in Milan, Italy, using models to act as a second audience to the display of her diary of food.

1999: Tracey Emin is nominated for the Turner Prize. Part of her exhibit is ''My Bed'', her dishevelled bed, surrounded by detritus such as condoms, blood-stained knickers, bottles and her bedroom slippers.

2001: Martin Creed wins the Turner Prize for ''The Lights Going On and Off'', an empty room in which the lights go on and off.

2004: Andrea Fraser's video ''Untitled'', a document of her sexual encounter in a hotel room with a collector (the collector having agreed to help finance the technical costs for enacting and filming the encounter) is exhibited at the Friedrich Petzel Gallery. It is accompanied by her 1993 work ''Don't Postpone Joy, or Collecting Can Be Fun'', a 27-page transcript of an interview with a collector in which the majority of the text has been deleted.

2005: Simon Starling wins the Turner Prize for ''Shedboatshed'', a wooden shed which he had turned into a boat, floated down the Rhine and turned back into a shed again.

Notable conceptual artists

Vito Acconci

Vikky Alexander

Art & Language

Marina Abramović

Billy Apple

Shusaku Arakawa

Michael Asher

Mireille Astore

John Baldessari

Artur Barrio

Robert Barry

Lothar Baumgarten

Joseph Beuys

Mel Bochner

Allan Bridge

Marcel Broodthaers

Victor Burgin

Chris Burden

Daniel Buren

Sophie Calle

Roberto Chabet

John Milton Cage

Martin Creed

Jan Dibbets

Mark Divo

Marcel Duchamp

Olafur Eliasson

John Fekner

Henry Flynt

Andrea Fraser

Kendell Geers

General Idea

Thierry Geoffroy

Gilbert and George

Felix Gonzalez-Torres

Allan Graham

Dan Graham

Hans Haacke

Iris Häussler

Oliver Herring

Jenny Holzer

Greer Honeywill

Zhang Huan

Douglas Huebler

David Ireland

Ray Johnson

Ronald Jones

Ilya Kabakov

On Kawara

Jonathon Keats

Mary Kelly

Yves Klein

Joseph Kosuth

Barbara Kruger

Yayoi Kusama

John Latham

Matthieu Laurette

Sol LeWitt

Richard Long

Mark Lombardi

Piero Manzoni

Danny Matthys

Allan McCollum

Cildo Meireles

Marta Minujín

Linda Montano

N.E. Thing Co. Ltd. (Iain & Ingrid Baxter)

Bruce Nauman

Yoko Ono

Roman Opalka

Dennis Oppenheim

Adrian Piper

William Pope.L

Dmitri Prigov

Martha Rosler

Allen Ruppersberg

Bodo Sperling

Hiroshi Sugimoto

Stelarc

Tyler Turkle

Mierle Laderman Ukeles

Wolf Vostell

Peter Weibel

Lawrence Weiner

Roger Welch

Gillian Wearing

Christopher Williams

Further reading

Books:

Peter Osborne, ''Conceptual Art (Themes and Movements)'', Phaidon, 2002 (See also the external links for Robert Smithson)

Klaus Honnef, ''Concept Art'', Cologne: Phaidon, 1972

Ermanno Migliorini, ''Conceptual Art'', Florence: 1971

Ursula Meyer, ed., ''Conceptual Art'', New York: Dutton, 1972

Lucy R. Lippard, ''Six Years: the Dematerialization of the Art Object From 1966 to 1972''. 1973. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

Gregory Battcock, ed., ''Idea Art: A Critical Anthology'', New York: E. P. Dutton, 1973

Juan Vicente Aliaga & José Miguel G. Cortés, ed., ''Arte Conceptual Revisado/Conceptual Art Revisited'', Valencia: Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, 1990

Thomas Dreher, ''Konzeptuelle Kunst in Amerika und England zwischen 1963 und 1976'' (Thesis Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, München), Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1992

Robert C. Morgan, ''Conceptual Art: An American Perspective'', Jefferson, NC/London: McFarland, 1994

Robert C. Morgan, ''Art into Ideas: Essays on Conceptual Art'', Cambridge ''et al.'': Cambridge University Press, 1996

Tony Godfrey, ''Conceptual Art'', London: 1998

Alexander Alberro & Blake Stimson, ed., ''Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology'', Cambridge, Mass., London: MIT Press, 1999

John Roberts, ''The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art After the Readymade'', London and New York: Verso Books, 2007

Michael Newman & Jon Bird, ed., ''Rewriting Conceptual Art'', London: Reaktion, 1999

Anne Rorimer, ''New Art in the 60s and 70s: Redefining Reality'', London: Thames & Hudson, 2001

Daniel Marzona, ''Conceptual Art'', Cologne: Taschen, 2005

Michael Corris, ed., ''Conceptual Art: Theory, Practice, Myth'', Cambridge, Mass.,: Cambridge University Press, 2004

Peter Goldie and Elisabeth Schellekens, ''Who's afraid of conceptual art?'', Abingdon [etc.] : Routledge, 2010. - VIII, 152 p. : ill. ; 20 cm ISBN 0-415-42281-7 hbk : ISBN 978-0-415-42281-9 hbk : ISBN 0-415-42282-5 pbk : ISBN 978-0-415-42282-6 pbk

Exhibit catalogues:

''January 5–31, 1969'', exh.cat., New York: Seth Siegelaub, 1969

''When Attitudes Become Form'', exh.cat., Bern: Kunsthalle Bern, 1969

''557,087'', exh.cat., Seattle: Seattle Art Museum, 1969

''Konzeption/Conception'', exh.cat., Leverkusen: Städt. Museum Leverkusen ''et al.'', 1969

''Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects'', exh.cat., New York: New York Cultural Center, 1970

''Art in the Mind'', exh.cat., Oberlin, Ohio: Allen Memorial Art Museum, 1970

''Information'', exh.cat., New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1970

''Software'', exh.cat., New York: Jewish Museum, 1970

''Situation Concepts'', exh.cat., Innsbruck: Forum für aktuelle Kunst, 1971

''Art conceptuel I'', exh.cat., Bordeaux: capcMusée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, 1988

''L'art conceptuel'', exh.cat., Paris: ARC–Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1989

Christian Schlatter, ed., ''Art Conceptuel Formes Conceptuelles/Conceptual Art Conceptual Forms'', exh.cat., Paris: Galerie 1900–2000 and Galerie de Poche, 1990

''Reconsidering the Object of Art: 1965-1975'', exh.cat., Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1995

''Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s-1980s'', exh.cat., New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1999

See also

Anti-anti-art

Classificatory disputes about art

Conceptual architecture

Contemporary art

Danger music

Experiments in Art and Technology

Found art

Gutai group

Information art

Installation art

Intermedia

Land art

Modern art

Moscow Conceptualists

Neo-conceptual art

Net art

Postmodern art

Romantic conceptualism

Something Else Press

Systems art

Video art

Visual arts

Individual works

''Fountain''

''One and Three Chairs''

''The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even''

Notes and references

External links

Sol LeWitt, "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art"

Conceptualism

pdf file of An Anthology of Chance Operations (1963) containing Henry Flynt's "Concept Art" essay at UbuWeb

Minus Space.com, reductive and concept-based art

conceptual artists, books on conceptual art and links to further reading

* Category:Art movements *Art Category:Contemporary art Category:Art media Category:Aesthetics Category:Conceptualism

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Luis Camnitzer (born 1937) is a German-born Uruguayan artist and academic who resides in the United States. He is a conceptual artist who creates work in a variety of media—including installation, printmaking, drawing, and photography—that breaks down limitations and questions that define the center versus the periphery. Even though select works of Camnitzer deal with explicitly political content, he states that all his art is deeply political, "in the sense of wanting to change society." His approach to Conceptualism often utilizes language to underscore issues of power and commodification, exploring the relationship between images, objects, and texts.

Background

Luis Camnitzer was born in Lübeck, Germany in 1937, grew up in Montevideo, Uruguay, and has lived and worked in New York since 1964. He received Guggenheim Fellowships in 1961 and 1982 and has made his mark internationally not only as an artist but as a critic, educator, and art theorist.

Formally allied with the American Conceptualists of the 1960s and 1970s, over the past fifty years Camnitzer has developed an essentially autonomous oeuvre. Through his art, Camnitzer often plays with the role of audience as silent witness and accomplice, within the arts as well as politics, often drawing on his youth in Montevideo under a repressive government that the international community allowed to persist.

Exhibitions

Camnitzer’s work has appeared in numerous exhibitions, and is represented in the permanent collections of various international institutions including Tate Modern, MoMA, and El Museo del Barrio.

Retrospectives of his work have been presented at Lehman College Art Gallery in the Bronx (1991), Kunsthalle Kiel in Germany (2003), Daros Museum in Switzerland (2010) and El Museo del Barrio (2011). His work has appeared in biennials and group shows, including Information (1970), The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Biennial of Havana (1984, 1986, and 1991); Venice Biennale (1988); Whitney Biennial (2000); Documenta 11 (2002); Beyond Geometry (2005), Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The New York Graphics Workshop (2008), Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas; and El Museo Del Barrio (AMANAPLANACANALPANAMA (1995), Uruguayan Torture Series (1983), and The Disappeared (1997).

Connection to El Museo del Barrio

In many ways, Luis Camnitzer’s career reflects El Museo del Barrio’s own trajectory. Camnitzer arrived in New York just before the Museum’s founding, immediately joining the fomenting dialogue about representation and culture at that time, including pivotal roles in the city -based New York Graphic Workshop, Museo Latinoamericano, and Movimiento por la Independencia Cultural de América (MICLA). On one hand, The New York Graphic Workshop (founded by Camnitzer, José Guillermo Castillo, and Liliana Porter, 1964-1970) sought to redefine art objects in Conceptual terms through printmaking by creating disposable, serial objects whose ideas invoked accessibility and participation. On the other hand, artists in New York founded the Museo Latinoamericano and MICLA in 1971, to respond to the way they were being represented, share resources, and later, join forces internationally to object to dictatorships or repression in Latin America and the Caribbean.

For nearly five decades, Camnitzer has persevered as an influential creator, critic, writer, theorist, teacher, and curator—a true “artist’s artist.” His activism on many fronts mirrors the political, social, economic, and artistic challenges that have faced our broader communities over this time. His life has been lived in Spanish and English, crossing artistic and cultural boundaries and troubling any stereotypes of what a “Latin American” artist should be.

El Museo has featured Camnitzer’s work in many past exhibitions. Of particular note is his retrospective Luis Camnitzer (2011) organized by Daros Latinamerica, his solo exhibition, AMANAPLANACANALPANAMA in 1995, as well as the presentation of his Uruguayan Torture Series (1983) in The Disappeared (1997), an exhibition organized by the North Dakota Museum of Art. Camnitzer also co-curated an exhibition for El Museo with Lowery Stokes Sims, The Latino Papers: Posters, Prints and Works on Paper from El Museo del Barrio's Permanent Collection (1994), presented at the Equitable Gallery, NY. In addition, El Museo holds in public trust several of his works in its own Permanent Collection.

Publications

Camnitzer is a frequent contributor to the magazine ArtNexus. He is the author of New Art of Cuba (1994, 2003) and Conceptualism in Latin American Art: Didactics of Liberation (2007).

Academic Career and Residence

Camnitzer studied at the Escuela de Bellas Artes, Universidad de Uruguay, and the Academy of Munich. Camnitzer is Professor Emeritus at State University of New York at Old Westbury, New York, where he started teaching in 1964. He currently lives in Great Neck, New York.

References

el museo.org

Category:People from Lübeck Category:University of the State of New York faculty Category:Uruguayan academics Category:Uruguayan artists Category:Uruguayan expatriates in the United States Category:Uruguayan writers Category:Uruguayan people of German descent Category:1937 births Category:Living people Category:Place of birth missing (living people)

ca:Luis Camnitzer de:Luis Camnitzer nl:Luis Camnitzer

bgcolour	#6495ED
name	Chris Burden
birth place	Boston, Massachusetts
nationality	American
field	Performance artist
training	Pomona CollegeUniversity of California, Irvine
awards	}}

Christopher "Chris" Burden (born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1946) is an American artist working in performance, sculpture, and installation art.

Life and career

Education

Burden studied for his B.A. in visual arts, physics and architecture at Pomona College and received his MFA at the University of California, Irvine from 1969 to 1971.

Early performance art

Burden began to work in performance art in the early 1970s, he made a series of controversial performances in which the idea of personal danger as artistic expression was central. His most well-known act from that time is perhaps the 1971 performance piece ''Shoot'', in which he was shot in his left arm by an assistant from a distance of about five meters. Other performances from the 1970s were ''Five Day Locker Piece'' (1971), ''Deadman'' (1972), ''B.C. Mexico'' (1973), ''Fire Roll'' (1973), ''TV Hijack'' (1972), ''Doomed'' (1975) and ''Honest Labor'' (1979).

One of Burden’s most reproduced and cited pieces, ''Trans-Fixed'' took place in 1974 at Speedway Avenue in Venice, California. For this performance, Burden lay face up on a Volkswagen Beetle and had nails hammered into both of his hands, as if he were being crucified on the car.The car was pushed out of the garage and the engine revved for two minutes before being pushed back into the garage.

Later that year, Burden performed his piece ''White Light/White Heat'' at the Ronald Feldman gallery in New York. For this work of experiment performance and self-inflicting danger, Burden spent twenty-two days lying on a triangular platform in the corner of the gallery. He was out of sight from all viewers and he could not see them either. According to Burden, he did not eat, talk, or come down the entire time.

Several of Burden's other performance pieces were considered somewhat controversial at the time: another "danger piece" was ''Doomed'', in which Burden lay motionless in a museum gallery under a slanted sheet of glass, with a clock running nearby. Unbeknownst to the museum owners, Chris had planned to remain in that position until someone interfered in some way with the piece. Forty-five hours later, a museum guard placed a pitcher of water in reaching distance to Burden. Burden then smashed the glass, and took a hammer to the clock, thus ending the piece.

In 1975, he created the fully operational ''B-Car'', a lightweight four-wheeled vehicle that he described as being "able to travel 100 miles per hour and achieve 100 miles per gallon". Some of his other works from that period are ''DIECIMILA'' (1977), a facsimile of an Italian 10,000 Lira note, possibly the first fine art print that (like paper money) is printed on both sides of the paper; ''The Speed of Light Machine'' (1983), in which he reconstructed a scientific experiment with which to "see" the speed of light; and the installation ''C.B.T.V.'' (1977), a reconstruction of the first ever made Mechanical television.

In 1978, he became a professor at University of California, Los Angeles, a position from which he resigned in 2005 due to a controversy over the university's alleged mishandling of a student's classroom performance piece that echoed one of Burden's own performance pieces. Burden cited the performance in his letter of resignation, saying that the student should have been suspended during the investigation into whether school safety rules had been violated. The performance allegedly involved a loaded gun, but authorities were unable to substantiate this.

Later life

In 1992, Burden exhibited his ''Fist of Light'' during the Whitney Biennial exhibition in New York. It consisted of a sealed kitchen-sized metal box with hundreds of metal halide lamps burning inside. It required an industrial air conditioner to cool the room.

In 1999, Burden's sculpture ''When Robots Rule: The Two Minute Airplane Factory'' was shown at the Tate Gallery in London. It was a "factory-like assembly line which manufactures rubber-band-powered model aeroplanes from tissue paper, plastic and balsa wood". Each plane had a propellor powered by a rubber band, and when each was completed, at a rate of one every 2 minutes, the machine launched it to fly up and circle around the gallery. Unfortunately, the machine was non-functional for at least two months of the installation, leading ''World Sculpture News'' to question the intent of the piece and remark that "the work illustrated that robots, in fact, don’t rule everything, and for the time being, are still subjected to individual and groups shortcomings."

In 2005, Burden released ''Ghost Ship'', his crewless, self-navigating yacht which docked at Newcastle-upon-Tyne on 28 July after a 330-mile 5-day trip from Fair Isle, near Shetland. The project was commissioned by Locus+ at a cost of £150,000, and was funded with a significant grant from Arts Council England, being designed and constructed with the help of the Marine Engineering Department of the University of Southampton. It is said to be controlled via onboard computers and a GPS system; however, in case of emergency the ship is 'shadowed' by an accompanying support boat.

In the Summer of 2011, Burden finished his kinetic sculpture, ''Metropolis II'', which took four years to build. It is scheduled to be installed at LACMA in Fall 2011.

Personal life

Chris Burden is married to multi-media artist Nancy Rubins. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California. His studio is located in Topanga Canyon.

Burden was referenced in David Bowie's 1977 song "Joe the Lion", Laurie Anderson's 1977 song "It's Not the Bullet that Kills You - It's the Hole (for Chris Burden)" on the double LP "Airwaves", and in the diary of Nathan Adler from the David Bowie album "1. OUTSIDE". He was also mentioned in the Jeff Lindsay book "Dexter by Design", and in Norman Mailer's book "The Faith of Graffiti".

References

External links

''Chris Burden'' by Robert Horvitz - detailed overview and analysis of Burden's early work, published in the May 1976 issue of Artforum magazine

1996 review of Burden's MAK retrospective

Ghost Ship

Chris Burden at Tate Gallery, London: Review of installation ''When robots rule: The two minute airplane factory'', ''World Sculpture News/artdesigncafe'', Spring 1999

UbuWeb Film & Video: Chris Burden

A feature article on Burden in June 2008 issue of ''Men's Vogue''

"Poetic, Model: A New Criticism Of Chris Burden via Evil Monito Magazine"

Chris Burden in the Mediateca Media Art Space

Photos of Chris Burden's Urban Light near the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA

Category:1946 births Category:Living people Category:American artists Category:Guggenheim Fellows Category:American installation artists Category:Video artists Category:Body art Category:BioArtists Category:Postmodern artists Category:Artists from Massachusetts Category:Artists from California Category:Pomona College alumni Category:Art in the Greater Los Angeles Area Category:American performance artists

ca:Chris Burden de:Chris Burden es:Chris Burden fr:Chris Burden hu:Chris Burden nl:Chris Burden pl:Chris Burden ru:Бурден, Крис sv:Chris Burden

born	Samantha Taylor
birth date	March 04, 1967
birth place	Croydon, United Kingdom
occupation	Film director, artist
yearsactive	1993-present
spouse	Jay Jopling(m.1997—d.2008; 2 children)
partner	Aaron Johnson(2009—present; 1 child)
children	3 daughters }}

Samantha "Sam" Taylor-Wood OBE (born 4 March 1967), born Samantha Taylor, is an English filmmaker, photographer, and visual artist. Her directorial feature film debut was the 2009 Nowhere Boy, a film based on the childhood experiences of The Beatles songwriter and singer John Lennon. She is one of a group of artists known as the Young British Artists.

Early life and career

Taylor-Wood was born in Croydon, England. Writing in ''The Telegraph'', journalist Anna van Praag said Taylor-Wood was born "to a yoga-teacher and astrologist mother, Taylor-Wood's biker father left when she was nine. It prompted her mother to enroll the family in a commune in Sussex, where they wore orange robes and took Sanskrit names, all of which Taylor-Wood hated."

Fine art career

Taylor-Wood began exhibiting fine art photography in the early-1990s. One collaboration with Henry Bond, titled ''26 October 1993'', featured Bond and Taylor-Wood pastiching the roles of Yoko Ono and John Lennon in the manner of the photo-portrait made—by photographer Annie Leibovitz—a few hours before Lennon was assassinated, in 1980. In 1994, she exhibited a multi-screen video work titled ''Killing Time'', in which four people mimed to an opera score. From that point multi-screen video works became the main focus of Taylor-Wood's work. Beginning with the video works ''Travesty of a Mockery'' and ''Pent-Up'' in 1996. Taylor-Wood was nominated for the annual Turner Prize in 1998, but lost out to the painter Chris Ofili. She won the Illy Café Prize for Most Promising Young Artist at the 1997 Venice Biennale. In 2002, Taylor-Wood was commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery to make a video portrait of David Beckham—whom she depicted sleeping. She is perhaps best known for her work entitled 'Crying Men' which features many of Hollywood's ''glitterati'' crying, including Robin Williams, Sean Penn, Laurence Fishburne, and Paul Newman.

''Nowhere Boy''

In August 2008, Taylor-Wood was chosen to direct ''Nowhere Boy'', a biopic about the childhood of The Beatles singer, John Lennon.

Speaking about her experience directing the movie, in September 2010, Taylor-Wood said,

"I thought, 'I'm in too deep and if I mess this up I'm just never gonna make a film again,' and I went into a panic. I got into the car and said, 'I just have to call these producers and pull out. I got into the car and I put the key into the ignition and Lennon's voice came straight out of the radio and it was [the Lennon song] ''Starting Over''. It was one of those moments where I thought it was a sign: 'OK I'm gonna do it.'"

The 53rd annual London Film Festival screened the film as its closing presentation on 29 October 2009. The film was released in the UK on Boxing Day, 2009. Charles Gant, writing in The Guardian—three weeks after the film's national release—said that the film had "extremely disappointing receipts." Taylor-Wood was nominated for a BAFTA award on 21 January 2010, but lost out to Duncan Jones.

After five weeks on release in the USA, as of November 7, 2010, the film had taken $1,196,019.

Other film and television work

In 2008, Taylor-Wood directed a short film ''Love You More'', written by Patrick Marber and produced by Anthony Minghella. The film includes two songs by Buzzcocks and features a cameo appearance by the band's lead singer Pete Shelley. In February 2009, Sam Taylor-Wood, collaborating with Sky Arts chose to interpret Vesti la Giubba from Pagliacci. She commented: "I’m really happy to be involved in such a great project. I think by capturing one of opera's most moving moments in a film short, we have put a modern spin on the aria." In 2011, she directed the music video of "Überlin" by R.E.M.. The clip stars her fiance Aaron Johnson, who, "throws some kung-fu kicks, attempts some pirouettes, prances, punches the air, chicken walks, tries out some bunny impressions, and, at one point, fondles his bottom."

Personal life

In the early 1990s, Taylor-Wood was in a relationship with artist Henry Bond.

On 19 September 2008, Taylor-Wood and her art dealer husband, Jay Jopling—with whom she has two daughters, aged five and thirteen—announced their eleven-year marriage was over, and they were separating amicably.

Taylor-Wood overcame two spells of cancer. When she was 30, she suffered from late-diagnosed colon cancer. Three years later, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She claims that chemotherapy saved her life, together with her own will to live.

Taylor-Wood is in a relationship with her ''Nowhere Boy'' star, Aaron Johnson, who is 23 years younger than she is. As of 31 October 2009, the couple are engaged to be married. On July 7, 2010, Taylor-Wood gave birth to their first child, daughter Wylda Rae Johnson. On July 29, 2011 it became known that the couple are expecting their second child.

In 2009, Taylor-Wood made a cash payment of £11 million for a detached townhouse in Primrose Hill, London.

Taylor-Wood was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2011 Birthday Honours for services to the arts.

References

External links

White Cube bio page

BBC Collective Sam Taylor-Wood video interview about her show Still Lives at Baltic, plus a gallery of images

Sam Taylor-Wood on artnet

David Video David Beckham Sleeping Video at Liverpool Walker Gallery

Love You More short film official website

Category:1967 births Category:Alumni of Goldsmiths, University of London Category:English artists Category:English film directors Category:English photographers Category:Female film directors Category:Living people Category:Video artists Category:Cancer survivors Category:Officers of the Order of the British Empire Category:People from Croydon

ca:Sam Taylor-Wood es:Sam Taylor-Wood fr:Sam Taylor-Wood it:Sam Taylor-Wood ru:Тейлор-Вуд, Сэм sv:Sam Taylor-Wood

bgcolour	#6495ED
name	Joseph Kosuth
birth date	January 31, 1945
birth place	Toledo, Ohio
nationality	American
field	Conceptual art
training	School of Visual Arts, New York City
awards	}}

Joseph Kosuth (born January 31, 1945), is an American conceptual artist.

Life and work

Kosuth was born in Toledo, Ohio, and studied fine arts at the School of Visual Arts in New York City from 1965 to 1967.

His art generally strives to explore the nature of art, focusing on ideas at the fringe of art rather than on producing art ''per se''. Thus his art is very self-referential, and a typical tautological statement is this: :"The 'value' of particular artists after Duchamp can be weighed according to how much they questioned the nature of art."

One of his most famous works is ''One and Three Chairs'', a visual expression of Plato's concept of The Forms. The piece features a physical chair, a photograph of that chair, and the text of a dictionary definition of the word "chair". The photograph is a representation of the actual chair situated on the floor, in the foreground of the work of art. The definition, posted on the same wall as the photograph, delineates in words the concept of what a chair is, in its various incarnations. In this and other, similar works, ''Five Words in Blue Neon'' and ''Glass One and Three'', Kosuth forwards tautological statements, where the works literally are what they say they are.

In an addition to his artwork, he has written several books on the nature of art and artists, including ''Artist as Anthropologist''. In his essay "Art after Philosophy" (1969), he argued that art is the continuation of philosophy, which he saw at an end. He was unable to define art in so far as such a definition would destroy his private self referential definition of art. Like the Situationists, he rejected formalism as an exercise in aesthetics, with its function to be aesthetic. Formalism, he said, limits the possibilities for art with minimal creative effort put forth by the formalist. Further, since concept is overlooked by the formalist, "Formalist criticism is no more than an analysis of the physical attributes of particular objects which happen to exist in a morphological context". He further argues that the "change from 'appearance' to 'conception' (which begins with Duchamp's first unassisted readymade) was the beginning of 'modern art' and the beginning of 'conceptual art'." Kosuth explains that works of conceptual art are analytic propositions. They are linguistic in character because they express definitions of art. This makes them tautological. In this vein is another of his well-known pieces: In Figeac, Lot, France, on the ''"Place des écritures"'' (writings place) is a giant copy of the Rosetta stone.

Footnotes

References and notes

Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson, ''Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology'', MIT Press, 1999, pxl. ISBN 0262511177

Joseph Kosuth, ''Art After Philosophy and After'', Collected Writings, 1966-1990. Ed. by G. Guercio, foreword by Jean-François Lyotard, MIT Press, 1991 (ISBN 0-262-11157-8 /ISBN 978-0-262-11157-7)

Dreher, Thomas: ''Konzeptuelle Kunst in Amerika und England zwischen 1963 und 1976'', Thesis Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich 1991/Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1992, p. 70ff. (One and Three Chairs, 1965), 167 (Xerox Book, 1968), 169ff. (The Second Investigation, since 1968), 281-294 (The Tenth Investigation, Proposition One, 1974); ISBN 3-631-43215-1 (in German)

See also

''One and Three Chairs'' - one of Kosuth's most well known pieces

External links

Thomas Dreher: Joseph Kosuth - "Zero & Not" 1985-86

Category:1945 births Category:Living people Category:American conceptual artists Category:People from Toledo, Ohio Category:Postmodern artists Category:Contemporary artists Category:Artists from New York Category:Installation artists Category:Neon artists Category:Postmodernists Category:Media theorists

de:Joseph Kosuth et:Joseph Kosuth es:Joseph Kosuth fr:Joseph Kosuth it:Joseph Kosuth hu:Joseph Kosuth nl:Joseph Kosuth ja:ジョセフ・コスース no:Joseph Kosuth pl:Joseph Kosuth pt:Joseph Kosuth ro:Joseph Kosuth ru:Кошут, Джозеф sv:Joseph Kosuth