By the mid-1960s, modernism had reached its canonical status in the form of post-painterly abstraction. Post-paniterly abstraction, a term coined by the critic Clement Greenberg, had evolved from Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s whose most revered representative was Jackson Pollock.
In the 1960s, however, a wide range of art forms began to assert themselves, that would pose a challenge to the established modernist aesthetics. Conceptual Art was one of the many movements that attacked the haughty supremacy of intellectual aestheticism in a massive shock wave in the course of the revolutionary decade.
Criticism of Abstract Art as Corporate Enterprise
Conceptual art signalled a radical departure from hitherto revered Abstract Art in that it opposed its aesthetic principles on fundamental level. While representatives of modernist criticism, such as Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried regarded post-painterly abstraction as the aesthetic height of modernism, a different point of view was becoming increasingly prominent.
The opposition's main argument was pointed at the modernist art’s loss of critical ability. Instead of continuing the avant-gardist tradition of engaging in wider cultural and social comment, for some critics abstract art, such as that of Kenneth Noland and Frank Stella, had come to represent a corporate enterprise compliant with official institutions.
Modernist Art and Mainstream Culture
Modernist painting and sculpture were considered to be a continuation of the official canon rather than agents of cultural empowerment. They were seen as perpetuating the established standards of quality and as such occupying the highest position in hierarchy within arts. Their status as self-contained and self-sufficient art forms independent of their wider context had become to be associated with social hierarchy as these forms were commercialized and incorporated into mainstream culture.
Expansion of Diverse Art Forms
The domination of painting and sculpture was contested by the expansion of artistic activity into a diversity of artistic forms comprising of performance, installation, happenings, environments and textual works of conceptual art.
Idea and Text Are the Main Principles of Conceptual Art
The separation of artwork from life was opposed by transplanting art from the confines of a gallery into other contexts.The guiding principle of conceptual art was idea rather than opticality achieved by the manipulation of physical properties of an artwork. The main operative component of conceptual art was text, and ideas were conveyed through linguistic analysis of newly emergent concerns that conceptual artists wanted to formulate.
Conceptual art introduced a new way of creating art that required intellectual engagement on part of the artist and whose meaning was to be recovered by active participation of the viewer. Ideas referring to objects, theories or situations were presented as words, plans, diagrams, frequently accompanied by photographs.
This meant that the notion of a work of art as a physical entity was negated. Where Michael Fried identified the artist’s presence in works such as those by Kenneth Noland, a typed text could bear no traces of the artist’s personality in the modernist sense.
Negation of Artist's Personality in Joseph Kosuth's Titled
So where for modernist critics a painting’s or sculpture’s physicality communicated the artist’s unique individuality, Titled (Art as Idea as Idea) by Joseph Kosuth reveals nothing of the artist’s emotions or his state of mind for the lack of expressive technique and materials. As a mechanically reproduced text, Kosuth’s black and white photographic enlargement of a dictionary definition is totally impersonal compared with agitated brushwork and expressive colours of abstract painting.
Such individualistic traces were highly esteemed qualities by modernist criticism and works possessing of them commanded high prices in the art market. Subsequently, abstract works of art became increasingly assimilated into the official culture based on their monetary value rather than their critical dimension.
As a part of the status quo, Abstract Art was seen as having lost its social significance and became a target of criticism. In this light, Kosuth’s Titled might be explained as drawing attention away from the artist as an individual and focusing instead on the wider issue of the meaning of art since the dictionary quotation is a definition of the word ‘meaning’.
The viewer is left with the sheet of white print on a black background. The text is positioned at the centre of the perfect square containing no other distractive elements. It is as though the austerity and simplicity of the presentation of this neutral statement was designed to prompt the viewer to contemplate the idea of meaning and its relevance, and by extension to engage intellectually in considering its significance, or lack of it, in art.
Index 01 and Initiation of New Critical Discourse
In wider context, such approach indicates the questioning of the state of affairs within arts. If a work such as Kosuth’s, a photostat on paper made by photographic reproduction of a common object, was presented as art, then the definition of art object was a new issue to be considered.
Kosuth’s mode of art production was linked to the Art & Language group whose members adopted the use of ordinary objects in conjunction with texts. Their collaborative installation Index 01 encouraged analytical debate of contemporary issues within arts. Opening up the possibility of a critical discourse that questioned the contemporary art practices, Index 01 signified an attempt to democratize art, thereby opposing the dominant status of abstract art supported by modernist criticism.
Redefining the Meaning of Art
Testing the boundaries and limits of what could qualify as art was one of the issues explored by conceptual art. Modernist paintings or sculptures were conceived as physically defined objects, detached and independent from their surroundings and intended to produce aesthetic effects through the combination of their material properties. In conceptual art, on the other hand, aesthetic was of no concern.
Bibliography:
Book 4: Themes in Contemporary Art, edited by Gill Perry and Paul Wood, Yale University Press, 2004
Zuzana Minarikova - I live in London and work in publishing in Bloomsbury which is an exciting part of London, full of museums, galleries, bookshops and ...
