Introduction

The introduction addresses two intersecting trajectories in American art between the late 1960s and the early twenty-first-century century. On the one hand, it traces the ways in which disciplinary Conceptual Art, with a capital “C”, expanded into the diverse set of practices that have been characterised generally as conceptualism. On the other hand, it shows how the expansion of a critical conceptualism has been strongly informed by the turbulent rights-based politics of the 1960s. Initially, first generation Conceptual artists responded to preceding art movements within disciplinary boundaries, examining the definition of art itself and engaging abstract concerns. Artists then applied the basic principles of Conceptual Art to address a range of social and political issues. This development reflects the influence of Civil Rights, Black Power, the student movement, the anti-war movement, second wave feminism, and the gay liberation movement. Central in the American context, the multiple identity-based mobilisations that came to be known as “identity politics” were further articulated in the 1970s. The artists addressed in this book: Adrian Piper, Joseph Kosuth, David Hammons, Renée Green, Mary Kelly, Martha Rosler, Silvia Kolbowski, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Lorna Simpson, Andrea Fraser, Hans Haacke, and Charles Gaines expanded the propositions of Conceptual Art.

The political referent in debate: identity, difference, representation

This chapter offers a specific set of distinctions made in the debates about political art in the 1980s and 1990s by observing a constellation of anthologies, symposia, and exhibitions as a backdrop to understanding the curatorial agenda and reception of the 1993 Whitney Biennial for American Art, as well as a comprehensive examination of the exhibition contributions of Daniel Joseph Martinez, Andrea Fraser, and Lorna Simpson. The 1993 Biennial provides an ideal case study to examine the representation of socio-political issues in art, as it consolidated perspectives on two key terms for the later part of the twentieth century: identity politics and multiculturalism. A for-or-against debate gives way to understanding identity politics and multiculturalism as modes of describing a historical stage and/or a political strategy. Many artists concerned with these frameworks sought ways of showing how identities worked, not what they looked like. Significant in this respect was the landmark exhibition Difference: On Representation and Sexuality (1985), which highlighted a set of constructivist approaches to the formation of subjectivity and the subject, underscoring the social, ideological, psychological, economic, and linguistic structures of identity over essentialist definitions reliant upon notions of inherent communality. Silvia Kolbowski’s Model Pleasure I-VIII 1982-1984 (1982-84), included in Difference, is discussed.

The Synthetic Proposition

The synthetic proposition: Conceptualism and the political referent in contemporary art examines the impact of Civil Rights, Black Power, the student, feminist and the sexual-liberty movements on conceptualism and its legacies in the United States between the late 1960s and the present. It focuses on the turn to political reference in practices originally concerned with philosophically abstract ideas, and traces key strategies in contemporary art today to the reciprocal influences of conceptualism and identity politics, movements that have so far been historicized as mutually exclusive. It demonstrates that while identity-based strategies were particular, their impact spread far beyond the individuals or communities that originated them. Commencing with the early oeuvre of Adrian Piper, a first generation Conceptual artist, this book offers a study of interlocutors that expanded the practice into a broad notion of conceptualism, including Joseph Kosuth, 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 analyzed the cultural conventions embedded in modes of reference and representation such as language, writing, photography, moving image, or installation and exhibition display.