Radical Art          

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Concept Art

Concept art is first of all an art of which the material is concepts, as the material of e.g. music is sound.
Since concepts are closely bound up with language, concept art is a kind of art of which the material is language.

[Henry Flynt: "Essay: Concept Art." (1961) In: La Monte Young (ed.): An Anthology, 1963.]

The aesthetics of ideas According to Kant's famous analysis, the aesthetic is experienced when our perceptual/interpretive processes do not manage to decode their input in terms of pre-existing concepts, but nonetheless display a meaningful kind of coherence. This suggests that worthwhile art provides the spectator with perceptually ambiguous and indefinite input, and avoids the straightforward expression of unequivocal ideas. Almost all artistic genres indeed work that way. Nevertheless, there is another possibility. Ideas themselves may be treated as artworks. Independently of their literal interpretation in terms of the real world, they may be the object of a "second-order perception", which considers them in their associative and metaphorical relations to other ideas in the same and other domains. It has often been observed that the contemplation of mathematical and philosophical notions is aesthetically rewarding in just this way. For several centuries, the "art of ideas" has been practiced incidentally in the margins of philosophy and literature. In the early 1960's it became an acknowledged artistic genre, first in avant-garde music and subsequently in the visual arts. This page provides links to material about this tradition, and to material about its antecedents and parallels in other domains and periods. Note that we employ the phrase "concept art" in a strict and well-defined sense: the presentation of verbally articulated ideas as artworks. By going back to Henry Flynt's original terminology, we hope to improve somewhat on the language of current art criticism, which tends to lump all analytically oriented art together under one completely vague notion of "conceptual art".

Fluxus, Concept Art and Conceptual Art

	Fluxus: Generalized Music          George Brecht: Events          Henry Flynt: Undefined Mathematics              Tautology           Paradox           Art against art            Speech Acts            Words           Word Constellations            Found Text            Arithmetic           Algorithms	Lawrence Weiner: Material and Topological Concepts           Sol LeWitt: Visual Concepts            Robert Barry: Meta-Concepts            Joseph Kosuth: Philosophy as Art            Art & Language: Invisible Pieces              Enumeration           Signifying Nothing           Signifying Anything           Signifying Everything
	To add: Scientific discourse as art (Bernar Venet) To add: Collections of quotes (Walter Benjamin, Alfred Ayer, Joseph Kosuth, this website)

Theoretical Perspectives

Platonism Thus, for example, when I imagine a triangle, even though there may perhaps be no such figure anywhere in the world outside of my thought, nor ever have been, nevertheless the figure cannot help having a certain determinate nature... or essence, which is immutable and eternal, which I have not invented and which does not in any way depend on my mind. René Descartes: Meditation on First Philosophy, 1641.		Kant Erhaben ist, was auch nur denken zu können ein Vermögen des Gemüts beweist, das jeden Maßstab der Sinne übertrifft. Immanuel Kant: Kritik der Urteilskraft, Buch II, § 25, p. 85.
The Romantic Agony Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter . . . Keats	Philosophy as art Es ist aber wahrscheinlich, dass es Menschen giebt und geben wird – die weit besser Fichtisiren werden, als Fichte. Es können wunderbare Kunstwercke hier entstehen – wenn man das Fichtisiren erst artistisch zu treiben beginnt. Novalis: Fichte Studien. Ca. 1800.
Mathematics Die größere "Reinheit" der nicht auf die Sinne wirkenden Gegenstände, z. B., der Zahlen. Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1937.	Music It seems to me that the most radical redefinition of music would be one that defines 'music' without reference to sound. Robert Ashley, 1961.	Generative Esthetics Die Ästhetik entwirft Prinzipien möglicher Kunstwerke . . ., aber nicht durch die Mittel der Kunst, sondern in der Form der reinen Theorie. Max Bense: Aesthetica. Einführung in die neue Aesthetik. 1965.

Antecedents and Parallels

Marcel Duchamp: Readymades           Fritz Perls: Gestalt Therapy

To add: Zen, Georg Lichtenberg, Oscar Wilde, Jorge Luis Borges

Quotes

All I make are models. The actual works of art are ideas. Rather than 'ideals' the models are a visual approximation of a particular art object I have in mind. Joseph Kosuth: Statement, 1967. Every competent human brain strives for emancipation from its organic duties. Every competent human brain strives for freedom to shape a purely mental life of its own. Susanne Langer: Mind. An Essay on Human Feeling. 3 Vols. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967/1972/1982. It may be preferable, for obvious reasons, to limit artworks to the mind, to allow them to exist in thought only. Dematerialized, planted in consciousness, they would exist solely in the imagination and might survive untarnished. Lothar Baumgarten: "Status quo", 1987. Artforum 7 (1988), p. 108. In a sense, conceptual art returns to Judaism as it eliminates the image and focuses on the word. Osvaldo Romberg : "Art to Art. Life to Life." Catalogue, Faith, Ridgefield: Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, 1999.

Criticism

Rosinen mögen das Beste an einen Kuchen sein; aber ein Sack Rosinen ist nicht besser als ein Kuchen; und wer im Stande ist, uns einen Sack voll Rosinen zu geben, kann damit noch keinen Kuchen backen, geschweige, daß er etwas besseres kann. Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1948. (Vermischte Bemerkungen, p. 127.)

 

References

Alexander Alberro and Patricia Norvell, editors: Recording Conceptual Art. Early Interviews with Barry, Huebler, Kaltenbach, LeWitt, Morris, Oppenheim, Siegelaub, Smithson, and Weiner by Patricia Norvell. University of California Press, 2001. Bruce Altshuler: Art by Instruction and the Pre-History of do it. In: Catalogue do it, Independent Curators International, 1998. Terry Atkinson, David Bainbridge, Michael Baldwin & Harold Hurrell (eds.): ART-LANGUAGE. The Journal of Conceptual Art. Vol. 1 nos. 1-3 (May 1969-June 1970); vol. 2 no. 1 (February 1972). Art and Language Press. Gregory Battcock (ed.): Idea Art. A Critical Anthology (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1973). Thomas Dreher: Konzeptuelle Kunst in Amerika und England zwischen 1963 und 1976. Frankfurt a. M., 1992. Thomas Dreher: "Konzeptuelle Kunst in Amerika und England 1963-76." Vortrag Karl-Franzens-Universität, Kunsthistorisches Institut, Graz, 10.1.1996. Thomas Dreher: "Art & Language UK (1966-72): Maps and Models." In: Oliver Jahraus, Nina Ort and Benjamin Marius Schmidt (eds.): Beobachtungen des Unbeobachtbaren. Konzepte radikaler Theoriebildung in den Geisteswissenschaften. Weilerswist: Velbrück Verlag, 2000, pp. 169-198. Henry Flynt: "Essay: Concept Art." (1961) In: La Monte Young (ed.): An Anthology, 1963. Patrick Hughes and George Brecht: Vicious Circles and Infinity. A Panoply of Paradoxes. London: Jonathan Cape, 1975. Joseph Kosuth: "Art After Philosophy I & II." Studio International, October/November 1969. Lucy C. Lippard: Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. New York: Praeger, 1973. Robert C. Morgan: Conceptual Art: An American Perspective. (Foreword by Michael Kirby.) Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, 1994. Robert C. Morgan: Art Into Ideas. Essays On Conceptual Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Edward A. Shanken: "Art in the Information Age: Technology and Conceptual Art." Leonardo 35, nr. 4 (2002), 433-38.

© Remko Scha (May 14, 2002 – April 2, 2007)