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NARRATOR: You're in a museum.
In one room, you admire an exquisitely
rendered painting of a lush garden
by Spanish artist Santiago Rusinol.
In another you encounter one of the most famous paintings
in the world, a monumental work by Picasso that bowls you over
with its dynamic composition of abstracted
but still recognizable figures and forms,
telling you of the horrors of the 1937
bombing of the village of Guernica
during the Spanish Civil War.
And in another room you come across something completely
different-- a picture of a chair, a chair, and a blown up
dictionary definition of a chair by Toledo, Ohio born artist
Joseph Kosuth.
What the actual [NO AUDIO].
Can we really call this art?
This thing that is entirely unlike those other things
in the rooms before it?
That exhibits no technical skill and transports due to nowhere
but right where you are, in an empty feeling,
slightly chilly gallery?
How can this be art and what am I supposed to do with it?
This is the case for conceptual art.
Kosuth made this work in New York in 1965.
In the years leading up, the Equal Pay Act had been passed,
President John F Kennedy was assassinated,
the Civil Rights Act was freshly signed into law,
and the Vietnam War and protests against it were in full effect.
The decade's identity as one of counter-cultural revolution
was crystallizing.
And the art of the time likewise reflected
a widespread questioning of tradition.
There was pop art and minimalism and happenings and fluxus.
Paintings, when they did happen, were coming off of the wall
and invading your space.
And there was also this thing that Kosuth
was doing which came to be called conceptual art.
In 1967, artist Sol Lewitt explained it like this--
"In conceptual art the idea or concept
is the most important aspect of the work.
It means that all the planning and decisions
are made beforehand and the execution
is a perfunctory affair.
The idea becomes the machine that makes the art."
For Lewitt, this often meant creating specific instructions
and diagrams for large scale wall drawings that
could be carried out by others.
Even after Lewitt's death, a drafts person or many of them
can make the drawing happen as long
as the instructions and certificate of authenticity
are on hand.
The resulting works can be magnificent
but it's not the individual touch of the artist that
makes them so.
It's the idea supported by proper execution.
Sometimes people were the machines that made the art.
Like for a 1969 piece, Vito Acconci
challenged himself to follow randomly selected passers
by until they entered a private space.
He said of it, "I'm almost not an 'I' anymore;
I put myself in the service of this scheme."
And sometimes it was actually machines
that were the machines that made the art.
Ian Burn's "Xerox Book" came to be when he photocopied
a blank sheet of white paper and then copied that copy
and so on and so forth 100 times with more and more visual noise
appearing as he went.
Documentation is often how we come
to know about conceptual art.
And that's OK because the physical presence
is secondary to the idea that brought it into being.
You didn't have to be there to see Eleanor Antin parade 50
pairs of rubber boots on a trip around California and New York.
She took photos and made postcards of them
and mailed them to hundreds of artists and museums
and libraries and friends.
And when you see one of those postcards
or hear about them in a YouTube video,
your understanding isn't really distorted or diminished.
Art critic and curator Lucy Lippard
described what was happening at the time
as a dematerialization.
It wasn't often as literal as John Baldessari's cremation
piece of 1969.
In which he burned all of his paintings
and had the ashes interred in a wall of the Jewish Museum.
Because materials were almost always involved,
it's just that they were often ephemeral--
maps, diagrams, photos, books or at least not
the primary concern.
Even molten lead became fleeting, as much as it can be,
in the hands of Richard Serra who in the late '60s
focused on action and process over finished object.
None of his original splash or cast pieces still exist.
They were made for temporary shows and discarded after.
Uniqueness wasn't important.
He has since made new iterations following the same procedure.
More characteristic of conceptual art
is Douglas Huebler's "Duration Piece #6"
for which he made a rectangle of sawdust in a doorway
and documented it every half hour for six hours.
The sawdust was then cleared away and what you see here
is the final piece.
Huebler said at the time, "The world is full of objects,
more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.
I prefer simply to state the existence of things
in terms of time and/or place."
Which brings us back to those chairs
because what Kosuth is doing is pointing out
the existence of things in time and place.
Taking it a few steps further than when Magritte reminded us
that this painting of a pipe is not a pipe.
Like when we look at this painting of a chair,
we know it's not a real chair.
But we're probably not thinking about how it's a kind of sign
we recognize as indicating a chair.
Just as a dictionary definition is a verbal sign that
points to something in the world and a photograph
is a visual sign that points to something that
is or used to be in the world.
Which of these three chairs do we
perceive to be more chair than the other,
especially now that this real one is in a museum collection
and will likely never be sat in again?
If this putting regular stuff in a museum sounds familiar,
it's because Duchamp, who made conceptual art way before it
was cool or even had a name.
In 1913, Marcel Duchamp attached a bicycle wheel
to a wooden stool and called it a ready made work of art.
It was art because he said it was
and because he put it in a gallery.
Kosuth's operation here is similar.
He said, "The art consists of my action of placing this activity
in an art context."
But the art context didn't have to be a gallery.
Sure, there were exhibitions that
chronicled this kind of art but more often the art
was its own means of distribution.
Seth Siegelaub thought of his "Xerox Book"
as an exhibition venue in itself,
giving each artist included 25 pages
to make a work that responded in some way to the format.
On Kawara made art by documenting his everyday life
and mailing news of it on postcards
to friends, acquaintances, and art collectors.
Eleanor Antin photographed herself naked every morning
to document her weight loss of 10 pounds over the course of 37
days.
And Mary Kelly recorded the activity
of taking care of her young son, reflected on motherhood
and conversations with him.
And eventually allowed him to scribble over
her documentation.
As Lippard wrote in 1973, "Much art
now is transported by the artist,
or in the artist himself."
Conceptual art was a way of working around
the power structures of the art world, which as it happens,
was rife with himself's and around market concerns.
Lee Lozano began her general strike peace in 1969,
declaring her withdrawal from the art world
and documenting her final visits to gallery openings
and museums.
Conceptual art was out in the world,
often blending with activism.
The Art Workers Coalition organized in 1969
to agitate for artists rights and against Vietnam, racism,
and sexism.
But for the most part, conceptual art
was political not in its illustration of current events
but in its commitment to rethink the status quo.
There was a worker mentality and pragmatism
to much first generation conceptual art.
A deadpan recording and structuring of life,
almost aggressively unartful, that
replaced the careful consideration of composition
and form and flourish normally associated
with art and artists.
Ed Ruscha's book "Twenty-six Gasoline Stations"
recorded exactly that, 26 gasoline stations.
Bernd and Hilla Becher took straightforward pictures
of water towers.
That's what they did, across years and continents.
There was no trickery at play, no need for an interpreter.
What's needed for this kind of art, more than interpretation,
is a shift in perspective.
An opening of a door that allows an idea by Douglas Huebler
to be art.
A piece of paper that reads, the line above
is rotating on its axis at a speed
of one revolution each day.
Or a sign to be art, like this one by Luis Camnitzer.
You can sit with this for a few seconds.
In 1969, artist and writer Victor Burgin
contended "It may now be said that an object becomes or fails
to become a work of art in direct response
to the inclination of the perceiver
to assume an appreciative role.
As Morse Peckham has put it, 'Art is not a category
of perceptual fields but of role playing.'"
So it's up to you.
Do you want to play a role and call this art?
If you do, congratulations.
In some cases, you might now own it.
Laurence Weiner's "Two Minutes Of Spray Paint Directly
Upon The Floor From A Standard Aerosol Spray Can"
is exactly what it sounds like.
And according to the artist the year after it was made,
"They don't have to buy it to have it.
They can have it just by knowing it."
We're used to art galleries being
places where visual experience reigns supreme.
But conceptual art asks us to understand the gallery
experience as never having been purely visual--
always informed by our other senses, the arts context,
and the invisible perceptual operations happening
in our minds to process it.
Conceptual art has given us new words
to describe what we encounter and new levels of interaction.
We can still appreciate a masterful painting,
but in a world after conceptual art we do so with our blinders
off.
Understanding that art is composed of signs.
It illustrates, it lives in specific buildings,
it decorates rich people's homes.
Once conceptualized lessons have been internalized
we see that this is not a garden.
This is not what happened at Guernica.
Conceptual art still lives and blends
with many other ways of making.
But it's a slippery art, one that
avoids living in just one spot, one that resists ownership
and being turned into other luxury good.
Despite its utopian aims, conceptual art
was and is still gobbled up by institutions
and put on the auction block.
But when it's good, it lives far outside
of our art stores and places of art worship.
And in this way, these ephemeral works
are strangely more permanent for there never having
much physicality to begin with.
Marble crumbles, paintings fade, but ideas--
ideas can last forever.
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