The synthetic proposition: conceptualism as political art

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.

Conceptual Art and identity politics: from the 1960s to the 1990s

This chapter asks how a precisely articulated set of practices, defined by artists in the 1960s as Conceptual Art, evolve into a broad notion of conceptualism, and how the latter had expanded into its present forms. It shows how, in the United States context, some of the most important strategies of conceptualism developed through the influence of contemporaneous politics, more specifically the transition from Civil Rights into Black Power, the New Left, the anti-war movement, feminism, and gay liberation, as well as what later came to be collectively named “identity politics” in the 1970s. A range of artists who have self-defined as conceptualists synthesised Conceptual analytic approaches with an outlook on identity formation as a means of political agency, and not as a representation of the self, a strategy that significantly expanded in the 1970s. Two major aspects of identity politics have impacted the field. The first, activist and administrative, consisted of protests against existing institutions, the developments of action groups and collectives, and the subsequent formulation of alternative spaces. The second was the bearing that it had on artistic strategy, form, and subject matter. This chapter focuses on practices that took a critical outlook on identity formation.

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.

A state of passionate detachment: Charles Gaines by way of conclusion

The career of Charles Gaines has been dedicated to resisting or attempting to circumvent subjectivity. The political referent emerged in his work not as a means to represent himself or his political persuasion, but as a way to examine the relation of the poetic syntax of visual language to subject matter. A staunch conceptualist, Gaines has been creating artworks from rule-based processes since the early 1970s in order to question the operation of representation and modes of reference. By the 1990s he began analysing the specificity of tropes, focusing on the distinction between metaphor and metonymy, and eventually moving to work with particular political referents in a decisively non-descriptive, non-narrative, manner. In his early works Gaines set up a conceptual system from which the appearance of the work would be derived. Often employing chance operation or other aleatoric means to generate form, the work’s aesthetic was determined by systems, highlighting not only the distinction between the meaning of the terms random and arbitrary but also the distinction of the algorithmic from them both.

Institutional gender: from Hans Haacke’s Systems Theory to Andrea Fraser’s feminist economies

This chapter looks at a development within institutional critique as bracketed by the work of Haacke and Andrea Fraser, highlighting their interest in art as a site of social interaction, and focusing on the connection made by Fraser between the personal and the financial transaction. This trajectory nests within two typologies of criticism levelled against institutional critique: one claiming that all criticism is eventually subsumed into the system, and the other arguing that the gesture of exposing contradictions relies on a vulgar notion of political reality. This second position defined aesthetics as the form that makes ineligible what is intelligible on the stage of politics, calling for the analysis of forms of visibility that define the appearance of politics. It is in some ways a formalist argument. In contrast, Fraser’s proposition brought a feminist perspective to institutional critique to show how politics appear in and through the human body. In her synthesis of an identity-based/feminist entry point to the work of institutional critique, Fraser offered a perspective on the making of a political stage and its subjects. Her work compared how gender, the (working) human body, or the artwork appear, exist or mediate transactions, and what form value takes in the process.

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.

Adrian Piper: the body after conceptualism

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.