Conceptual Systems: The Dances, Music, and Drawings of Laura Dean

Laura Dean's creative output in minimalist art spans interconnected work in dance, music, and drawing. Throughout the early 1970s, Dean represented her compositional structures as works on paper, which present an expanded visualization of her artistic experimentation with color, symmetry, repetition, and form. Dean rejects the reconstruction of her performance works, instead she advances a notion of dances as impermanent. Situating Dean in the context of serial and conceptual art in which the material art object is deemphasized in favor of communicating compositional logic, I argue that Dean presents a choreographic legacy premised on the intentional disappearance of her work in favor of perpetuating ideation and concept.

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International Indeterminacy: George Maciunas and the Mail

ARTMargins ◽

10.1162/artm_a_00218 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 7 (3) ◽

pp. 57-85 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Colby Chamberlain

Keyword(s):

New York ◽

Attorney General ◽

Conceptual Art ◽

New York State ◽

John Cage ◽

Power Structures ◽

Mail Art ◽

Art Object ◽

Curatorial Practice ◽

History Of

The term “network” has often been used to characterize Fluxus's internationalism and to identify its membership. This has led a number of scholars to argue that Fluxus anticipated forms of artistic exchange now associated with Internet-based art. More recently, it has cast Fluxus as a precedent for applying a network model to other transcontinental avant-gardes, particularly in curatorial practice. Yet in the rush to relate Fluxus to contemporary discourses on global connectivity, insufficient attention has been paid to the specific apparatuses that facilitated its cohesion. This article stages an intervention into Fluxus studies (and by extension Conceptual art, mail art, and other transnational movements associated with communication and the “dematerialization” of the art object) by drawing on the field of German media theory to analyze the “paperwork” that makes up much of the movement's material production. Specifically, it focuses on how the artist George Maciunas's engaged the postal system in order to facilitate Fluxus's collectivity, as well to insinuate Fluxus's methods of experimental composition into larger power structures. After an opening discussion of Maciunas's important diagrammatic history of Fluxus's development (a.k.a. the John Cage chart), the article tracks Maciunas's deployment of newsletters to organize Fluxus activities, his infamous mail-based sabotage proposals, his collaborations with Mieko Shiomi and Ben Vautier, and his “Flux Combat” with the New York State Attorney General.

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The synthetic proposition: conceptualism as political art

The Synthetic Proposition ◽

10.7228/manchester/9781784992750.003.0004 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Nizan Shaked

Keyword(s):

Conceptual Art ◽

Complex Method ◽

Political Art ◽

Art And Politics ◽

Art Object ◽

The Social ◽

Martha Rosler ◽

And Gender ◽

Definition Of

This chapter takes a comparative look at several models of interdisciplinary conceptualist practices that responded critically to Conceptual Art’s original claims. Artists responded to a limitation they identified in the narrow focus of early Conceptual Art, and turned to the social, the political, and the “life-world,” external to the hermeneutic definition of art. When this second wind of conceptualism integrated external subject matter, it was no longer in the modernist sense of art and politics. Synthetic conceptualism incorporated the basic investigations of Conceptual Art to form a complex method of artmaking that was deconstructive just as it was referential. Artists integrated a meta-critique to reveal frameworks that endowed artistic language and strategies with pre-conceived meaning. Three artists exemplify this shift. Adrian Piper transitioned from an analysis of the art object as a factor of time and space to the role of cultural forms in formulating gendered and racialised social meaning; Mary Kelly from labour and gender issues to the discourse of the subject; and Martha Rosler from the documentary mode to the critique of representation in mass media.

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Arte conceptual (neoliberal) en El Otro Sendero

Illapa Mana Tukukuq ◽

10.31381/illapa.v0i13.1895 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 27-37

Author(s):

Mijail Mitrovic Pease

Keyword(s):

Visual Culture ◽

Contemporary Art ◽

Conceptual Art ◽

Institutional Critique ◽

Art Object ◽

Palabras Clave ◽

Hernando De Soto ◽

Arte Contemporáneo

El presente artículo analiza el dossier fotográfico del libro El Otro Sendero (Lima, 1986) del economista peruano Hernando De Soto, a través de ciertos debates sobre el arte conceptual y la crítica institucional en el arte contemporáneo global. El autor busca realizar una crítica de la ideología neoliberal en el Perú, tomando como caso de análisis su autor y libro más representativo. Palabras clave: crítica institucional, neoliberalismo, ideología, cultura visual, desborde popular AbstractBy means of certain debates on conceptual art and institutional critique in global contemporary art, this article analyses the photographic dossier in Hernando De Soto’s El Otro Sendero (Lima, 1986). The dossier operates as an art object that stands for a new neoliberal vision ofcontemporary Peru. Keywords: Institutional critique, neoliberalism, ideology, visual culture

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The Contemporary Art of the Nature Morte in the Age of Artificial Life Forms: The Metafictional Illusion of Life in Installation Art and Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein

FORUM: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture & the Arts ◽

10.2218/forum.32.6469 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Audrey Chan

Keyword(s):

Artificial Life ◽

Installation Art ◽

Contemporary Literature ◽

Conceptual Art ◽

Life Forms ◽

Jeanette Winterson ◽

Art Installation ◽

Art Object ◽

Art Objects ◽

Definition Of

Observing the artistic response to the illusional nature of artificial life forms in the field of installation art, contemporary writers often allude to conceptual artworks through ekphrastic means to “grasp the texture of the contemporary real” (Virilio 4) in a technologically “transformative moment” (Boxall 4). A “reality hunger” for the contemporary brings together a “burgeoning group of interrelated […] artists in a multitude of forms of media” (Shields 3) to experiment new forms across disciplines through ekphrasis, which “strikes to explode” the “stuffed package” of a culture “containable with its shaped word” (Krieger 233). In her essay “Art Objects” (1995), Jeanette Winterson shows her interest in contemporary conceptual art as she writes that “the true artist is interested in the art object as an art process” and establishing a connection to the future instead of being interested in the final product (12). Her definition of art coincides with that of conceptual art as it seeks to analyse “the ideas underlying the creation and reception of art” (Shanken 433), and thus takes on the framework of the meta-critical process from conceptual art with “the use of scientific concepts and technological media both to question their prescribed applications and to create new aesthetic models” (Shanken 434). Deriving from the artistic landscape of conceptual installation art and its interactions with science, Winterson borrows the subject of the nature morte and the metafictional framework to address the clashes between artificial life forms and the human civilisation by alluding to artworks such as those of Damien Hirst in her novel Frankissstein (2019) when writing about cryonic bodies: “It’s a little like an art installation in here isn’t it? Have you seen Damien Hirst’s pickled shark in a tank?” (106). Based on the interdisciplinary interrelations between installation art and contemporary literature, this paper will read the dialogue between Winterson’s ekphrastic subject of the nature morte in Frankissstein and contemporary installation art, including works of Hirst, Cai Guo-Qiang, and Guillaume Paris, as a response to the rise of artificial life forms with respect to their metafictional and illusional nature as AI will become “fully self-designing” (Winterson 73).

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Understanding Material vs. Immaterial in Conceptual and Digital Art

Tahiti ◽

10.23995/tht.103179 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 10 (4) ◽

Author(s):

Rahma Khazam

Keyword(s):

Conceptual Art ◽

Physical World ◽

Digital Art ◽

Art And Politics ◽

Art Object ◽

History Of ◽

Technological Means ◽

The 1960S ◽

Shed Light ◽

Courtauld Institute

In the history of twentieth-century art, we can identify two key moments when the notion of the immaterial became a focus of attention. The first, spanning the period from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, was the dematerialization of the art object in the context of conceptual art, famously described in Lucy Lippard's Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. The second was digital art, which likewise emerged in the 1960s, foregrounding the use of technological means to produce immaterial artworks. Yet in both cases, the claim of immateriality was unfounded. Building on accumulating evidence, the conference “Conceptualism and Materiality. Matters of Art and Politics” held at The Courtauld Institute of Art in London in 2019 drew attention to the importance of materials and materiality in conceptual art, countering its reputation as idea-centred. As for digital art, it has become increasingly obvious that the infrastructure and tools required to produce and maintain it are firmly grounded in the physical world, thereby challenging its alleged immateriality. The first part of this essay explores dematerialization and its aftermath in the context of conceptual art, while the second highlights the analogous developments taking place in digital art. My aim will be to shed light on these shifts from material to immaterial and back again in both conceptual and digital art, and map their similarities and differences. As I will show, both tried – and failed – to satisfy art's recurring but unrealizable yearning to rid itself of the material.

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Creative Process and Pedagogy with Interactive Dance, Music, and Image

Congress on Research in Dance Conference Proceedings ◽

10.1017/s2049125500001266 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 41 (S1) ◽

pp. 307-311 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Kerry Francksen ◽

Bret Battey ◽

Jo Breslin

Keyword(s):

New Technologies ◽

Music Technology ◽

Teaching Staff ◽

Dance Music ◽

Feedback Systems ◽

Interactive Technologies ◽

Dance Pedagogy ◽

Emergent Behaviour ◽

Lecture Demonstration ◽

Compositional Structures

This lecture-demonstration reflects on a research-informed teaching project in which teaching staff in dance and music technology collaborated on technical and pedagogic research and artistic creation in interactive dance. Our primary aim was to throw light on how interactive technologies might challenge and develop the ways in which students in dance and music technology engage in creative practice. Through the exploration of a set of technologies and conceptual approaches, the research has revealed very particular compositional structures and methods. Experimental sketches were developed with a particular focus on emergent behaviour and richly behavioured audio-visual feedback systems that were both controlled by and influenced the dancers. The demonstration presents our approaches and offers methodologies and strategies for the use of new technologies in dance pedagogy.

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The Re-Materialisation of the Art Object

Digital Media and Technologies for Virtual Artistic Spaces ◽

10.4018/978-1-4666-2961-5.ch001 ◽

2013 ◽

pp. 1-13

Author(s):

Dew Harrison

Keyword(s):

Conceptual Framework ◽

Second Life ◽

New Technologies ◽

Conceptual Art ◽

Current Situation ◽

Cutting Edge ◽

Art Practice ◽

Virtual Objects ◽

Art Object ◽

The Impact

The phenomena of the re-materialisation of the art object is presented through the shift in art-thinking since mid-last century, derived from the impact of earlier art. This shift is marked by Lippard’s seminal book on the disappearance of the art object, as reflected in the title above, with reference to the Duchampian Readymade and Greenbergian Modernism. The chapter then reviews the current situation via contemporary understandings and the writings of Beech who challenges Lippard’s view of immateriality within Conceptual art. This is followed by examples of recent practice where new technologies have allowed for a re-materialisation of the art object to include artists such as Intersculpt, Michael Eden, and those in the Second Life Kriti Island exhibition, where virtual objects solidified into physical forms. This re-positioning of the art object allows a return to the initial formative conceptual framework, and offers a way through to a cutting-edge form of postconceptual art practice.

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Adrian Piper: the body after conceptualism

The Synthetic Proposition ◽

10.7228/manchester/9781784992750.003.0003 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Nizan Shaked

Keyword(s):

Conceptual Art ◽

Extended Period ◽

The Body ◽

Subject Position ◽

Audience Reception ◽

Apparent Difference ◽

Analytic Thinking ◽

Dynamic Relationship ◽

Art Object ◽

Body Self

This chapter takes a close look at Adrian Piper’s transition from Conceptual Art to conceptualism, in the context of Conceptual Art’s canonical interpretations. I observe that her contribution was focused specifically on questions of mediation—the mediation of content by materials, forms, and language—later considering the mediating power of race, gender and other forms of apparent difference. From the application of analytic thinking to the work of art, she extended her enquiries to the dynamic relationship between the various elements of the artwork, such as object, author, body, self, circulation, and audience reception. Piper’s use of the autobiographical tone and the body arrived chronologically after an extended period of preoccupation with the context of the art object, its circulation and reception, and general inquiries into the nature of time and space through a focus on media and mediation. In accordance with this sequence of development, I propose to read her later work in the same way, always first as Conceptual, onto which we can then apply the political question. To enter the work through its analytic base is to read it on the terms of its making, not the subject position of its maker.

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