[Bups-dis] Conceptual Art

[Bernie Doeser]

Amanda, this is an enormous can of worms, and is the subject of many books,
so brevity is both to be admired and also unrealistic, so I will try to put
down a few thoughts.

I think one of the reasons Wittgenstein was so admired was because he showed
us that the root of many of our philosophical problems are about the
inadequacy of language. Art is one of those terms which everyone thinks they
know what it means, but for which there is no common understanding.

Until the early 20th century the widespread view was that when people
considered art, what they were primarily considering was an art object. It
had to be created by an artist, using "artistic" manual skills, gain
authority from art critics and be displayed in an art gallery. Duchamp broke
this idea when he offered the urinal (Fountain) for display in New York in
1916 (I think). He did this on purpose as he wanted to redefine the idea of
art and shift it from the one of the object, to the idea of art as something
chosen, selected or thought of by the artist. Conceptual art was born.

This little snippet of history shows what a moveable feast culture and
society is. Also we are all moving through it at different speeds. Duchamp's
ideas were broadly accepted by the art world in the 1960's, but go around
Tate Modern any day now and listen to some of the comments (is it art?). I
recall the furore over Carl Andre's installation of bricks back in the 80's,
which still, today, rile most Daily Mail readers (sorry for that cheap
jibe).

The use of art has changed continuously throughout history (and hence its
purpose). Originally used to tell stories to the illiterate, then glorify
god, then denote wealth and power, then to decorate houses, then to
criticize society, then to experiment solipsistically and now what ? I'm not
sure - perhaps in our post-post-modern society any of these are valid.

A good subject none the less.... well done Amanda.

Bernie Doeser

-----Original Message-----
From: bups-dis-bounces at list.bups.org [mailto:bups-dis-bounces at list.bups.org]
On Behalf Of Amanda Montgomery
Sent: 29 January 2007 09:54
To: BUPS-DIS at bups.org
Subject: [Bups-dis] Conceptual Art

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I'll mention in reply to Carl's previous post that writings on the horror
film can be an interesting place to explore with negative emotions in art. I
thought I'd keep up the aesthetic theme though by posting a few thoughts on
intentions and misinterpretation of conceptual art as it's something that
comes up a lot in art-practice but probably not something I've explored
fully philosophically. 
 	Conceptual art seems to me to be a good illustration of the
long-standing philosophical problems regarding the nature of the artwork and
how we are to evaluate it, as conceptual pieces can differ very little, if
at all, from everyday objects and yet still qualify as art-objects.
Aestheticians like Danto have tackled problems like this by placing artworks
within their historical context of the 'artworld' and showing that the ideas
and developments within such pieces have relevance to the contextual ideas
of the time and are therefore validated and judged from their position and
importance to current art movement. 
 	This is an interesting stance as it removes some of the problems of
trying to find eternal art-qualities, such as beauty, expression and so on
(since artists in their charming way tend to respond to this by creating
ugly works or trying to void them of expression). However there are
difficulties with this theory, such the question of whether it merely
replaces old-fashioned 'art-qualities' with the quality of avant-gardism (an
idea that groups like the Stuckists seem to fight against). It also seems to
require specifically knowledgeable evaluators of art to determine
authenticity and value within current art-historical trends. But to pick up
on the issue of evaluation, how well can this authentification to be applied
to, for example, conceptual art? In conceptual art the idea of the artwork
is seen to be of more importance than the art object itself, yet if this is
the case then does it matter if the conceptual outcomes are those that the
artist intends? If so then the artwork has to be valued more by how the
artist places it in an artworld context through their explanation of their
conceptual intentions, and if not an artist would be able to unintentionally
create a fine art-historical piece merely through the misinterpretation of
it's intentions. 
 	So, if an artist intends both the creation of an artwork and the
communication of, say, idea X, and yet makes the artwork ambiguous enough
for the object to inspire idea Y through the act of interpretation on the
part of a viewer, then if idea Y is of more relative value than idea X, why
should the artwork not be judged on the merits of this concept it has
created? When it comes to the importance of authentic intentionality then is
it not enough to say that an artwork was intended as the inspirer of a
conceptual outcome and that if either the public or the art evaluating elite
interpret or misinterpret it in it's current context, then this is where the
value judgement lies? After all, artists may create works of ambiguity
rather than direct communication in order to facilitate and encourage such
multiple (mis-) interpretations. But if this is not the case and
intentionality truly is an over-riding factor, then can two artists place
the same object in a gallery, and be judged solely on who creates the better
explanation of it afterwards? Surely then the objects are not only of less
importance than the concept, but are of no importance at all.
 	A lot of idea-based pieces I've first experienced and then discussed
with artists later show the massive disparity between intention and
outcomes, sometimes with no connection between a very interesting
interpretation and it's very different origin (which feels horrible if
you've just been having life-changing thoughts over a piece that someone
just made because they liked the colours) and sometimes with virtually no
conscious intention on the part of the artist at all. It seems hard to say
that even superior critics could spot this difference at its most subtle, if
the object itself has so little bearing on outcomes. I used to think of this
through the idea of an artist who is heralded as brilliant by critics,
develops an ongoing style that is seen as innovative but relevant to the
current artworld, only to turn around after twenty years of silence and say
that he didn't understand any of this attention his pieces had been giving,
he had just, say, been splashing paint on a canvas for the hell of it and
was doing so with very little knowledge of the art-scene of his time.
 	Perhaps this is actually a problem with the nature of conceptual
art, where an object is given art-status based on the quality of the ideas
it contains, while these actually lie with artist and viewer and their
communication through the object is both ambiguous and multi-interpretable
(leading into the labyrinth of New Criticism.). Or perhaps Danto's theory is
simply not quite the solution it seems to be. Intentionality and
misinterpretation draw in a lot of issues about the nature of art-experience
(of both artist and viewer) and what qualifies the art-object but it'd be
interesting to hear what people think on the matter,

Amanda 

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