1960 - Conceptual Art Flashcards

Artist: Joseph Kosuth
Artwork description & Analysis: A physical chair sits between a scale photograph of a chair and a printed definition of the word “chair.” Emblematic of Conceptual art, One and Three Chairs makes people question what constitutes the “chair” - the physical object, the idea, the photograph, or a combination of all three. Joseph Kosuth once wrote, “The art I call conceptual is such because it is based on an inquiry into the nature of art. Thus, it is…a thinking out of all the implications, of all aspects of the concept ‘art.’” One and Three Chairsdenies the hierarchical distinction between an object and a representation, just as it implies a conceptual work of art can be object or representation in its various forms. This work harks back to and also extends the kind of inquiry into the presumed priority of object over representation that had been earlier proposed by the Surrealist Rene Magritte in his Treachery of Images (1928-9), with its image of a pipe over the inscription “Ceci n’est pas un pipe” (This is not a pipe).
Wood folding chair, mounted photograph of a chair, and photographic enlargement of a dictionary definition of “chair” - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Ewa Partum<br></br>Active Poetry 1971
Performance: Ewa Partum used performance as a means of creating her poetry. Her poetic works were made by taking individual letters of the alphabet cut from paper, and scattering them in city and countryside locations. By deconstructing language, the artist aimed to explore its structures.

Sol LeWitt<br></br>A Wall Divided Vertically into Fifteen Equal Parts, Each with a Different Line Direction and Colour, and All Combinations 1970
Instructions: Rather than actually making wall-drawings himself, Sol LeWitt produced instructions, consisting of text and diagrams, outlining how his wall drawings could be made.

Joseph Beuys
I like America and America likes me
Action: Beuys referred to his performance works as actions. His most famous action, I Like America and America Likes Me took place in May 1974. Beuys wrapped himself in felt and spent three days in a room with a coyote. The work was an expression of his anti-Vietnam War stance, and also reflected his beliefs about the damage done to the American continent and its native cultures by European settlers.

Richard Long<br></br>A Line Made by Walking 1967
Land art: To make this work Richard Long walked backwards and forwards in a field until the flattened turf caught the sunlight and became visible as a line. He photographed the work, as a means of recording this physical intervention within the landscape.

Bruce McLean<br></br>Pose Work for Plinths I 1971
Body art: Originally conceived as a performance, McLean’s poses are an ironic and humorous commentary on what he considered to be the pompous monumentality of traditional large plinth-based sculptures. The artist later had himself photographed, repeating the poses.

Jannis Kounellis<br></br>Untitled 1969
Found objects: Some conceptual artists use found objects to express their ideas. For example artists in the Italian arte povera group used all kinds of found objects and low-value materials such as twigs, cloth and fat, with the aim of challenging and disrupting the values of the commercialised contemporary gallery system. (Arte povera means ‘poor art’).

Mary Kelly<br></br>Post-Partum Document. Analysed Markings And Diary Perspective Schema (Experimentum Mentis III: Weaning from the Dyad) 1975
Documentation: In Post-Partum Document 1975, Mary Kelly documented the relationship between herself and her son over a period of six years. Drawing on contemporary feminist thought, and in particular on psychoanalysis, it explores the contradictions for a woman artist between her creative and procreative roles.

Gilbert & George<br></br>A Portrait of the Artists as Young Men 1970
Film and video: Film and video is often used by conceptual artists to record their actions or performances. Gilbert & George’s art is a form of self-portraiture, since they almost always feature in their own work. They see no separation between their activities as artists and their everyday existence, and since 1969 have presented themselves as living sculptures.

Sophie Calle
The Hotel, Room 47 1981
This is a two-part framed work comprising photographs and text. In the upper part, the title Room 47 is printed below a colour photograph of elegantly carved wooden twin head-boards behind a bed covered in rich brown satin. Below it, three columns of italic text are diary entries describing findings in the hotel room between Sunday 22 February 1981 and Tuesday 24. In the lower frame a grid of nine black and white photographs show things listed in the text above.

La Monte Young, Draw a Straight Line and Follow It, 1961
Thought of as a score, an instruction, and a sort of poem.

Artist: Robert Morris
Box with the Sound of Its Own Making, 1961
Wood, internal speaker, 7” cassette of ¼” tape.
As its title indicates, Morris’s “Box with the Sound of Its Own Making” consists of an unadorned wooden cube, accompanied by a recording of the sounds produced during its construction. Lasting for three-and-a-half hours, the audio component of the piece denies the air of romantic mystery surrounding the creation of the art object, presenting it as a time-consuming and perhaps even tedious endeavor. In so doing, the piece also combines the resulting artwork with the process of artmaking, transferring the focus from one to the other. Fittingly, the first person in New York Morris invited to see the piece was John Cage-whose silent 1952 composition 4’33” is famously composed of the sounds heard in the background while it is being performed. Cage was reportedly transfixed by Box with the Sound of Its Own Making, as Morris later recalled: “When Cage came, I turned it on… and he wouldn’t listen to me. He sat and listened to it for three hours and that was really impressive to me. He just sat there.”

John Baldessari, Terms Most Useful for Describing Works of Art, 1966-68. Acrylic on canvas
This piece is so straightforward in fact that we can use the terms in the painting to describe the painting itself. It’s tough to say whether John Baldessari was serious when he made this work or just messing with art critics - what with the lifelong battle between artists and critics and everything. In all likelihood it’s the latter, but we think it’s OK for critics to get a taste of their own medicine every once in a while. Baldessari certainly thought so and didn’t hold back.
Baldessari’s Terms Most Useful In Describing Creative Works Of Art “gives vision” and “flavor” to art criticism criticism. Does he do this by ridiculing critics? Maybe. Is it still “enlighten[ing]”? Yes. This painting is “out of the ordinary” and “challenges” the entire profession and livelihood of people like Jerry Saltz, Peter Schjeldahl and Holland Cotter (all critics, obviously). Baldessari implies that it is hard to “take seriously” anything that certain writers say about him, especially Jerry Saltz who said, “Baldessari’s art was never as unnerving or revealing of secret psychic structures as Nauman’s. Nor was he as intelligent or as visually original as Ruscha, as darkly poetic as Acconci, or as relentless as Serra.” If anything these comments give Baldessari a “motivation” to “communicate” how stupid he thinks critics are in hopes that his ideas will “transfer” to art lovers everywhere. All in all, this work is just a tongue-in-cheek way of flipping art criticism on its head in an attempt to make people lol.

Artist: Agnes Denes
Dialectic Triangulation: A Visual Philosophy, 1967-69
Mapping the loss that occurs in communication, i.e. between viewer and artist, between giver and receiver, between specific meaning and symbol, between nations, epochs, systems and universes. • Mapping human parameters within the changing aspects of reality, within the transformations and interactions of phenomena. • Working with the paradox, the contradictions of human existence such as our illusions of freedom and the inescapability of the system; our alienation in togetherness; the individual human dilemma, struggle and pride versus the whole human predicament; our importance or insignificance in the universe. • Trying to give form to invisible processes such as evolution, changing human values, thought processes and time aspects (pinpointing the moment growth becomes decay in an organism; penetrating the “folds of time” to record its “instants”). • Finding contradictions and balances, pitting art against existence, illusions versus reality, imagination versus fact, chaos versus order, the moment versus eternity, universals versus the self.

Dan Graham, Opposing Mirrors and Video Monitors on Time Delay, 1973<br></br>Two mirrors, two cameras, two monitors, time delay
Live video cameras film and transmits footage to the opposite TV, with a few seconds delay. The mirror then reflects the present moment and multiple times of the past.

Anthony McCall, Line Describing a Cone, 1973
Line Describing a Cone is composed by a beam of white light emitted from a film projector positioned at one end of a darkened room. Passing through the projector is an animated film of a thin, arcing line that, frame by frame, gradually joins up to become a complete circle. Over the course of thirty minutes this line of light traces the circumference of the circle as a projection on the far wall while the beam takes the form of a three-dimensional hollow cone. Mist from smoke machines gives the beam of light a greater density, making it appear almost tangible.


Roman Ondák<br></br>Measuring the Universe 2007<br></br>Presented at Tate St Ives, 2011
In the summer of 2011, Roman Ondák’s Measuring the Universe was installed at Tate St Ives. Upon entering an initially empty, white gallery, visitors were invited to mark their height on the walls, along with their name and the date. Over the duration of the installation, the room was gradually filled with individual markings and names, overlapping and obscuring one another, to create a constellation of measurements. After the installation closed, the walls were repainted white, obscuring the moments of engagement with the performance, emphasising the ephemerality of the artwork as a whole, and of those brief moments of participation.
Ondák’s work functions on the level of the personal and of the public. The act of measuring the body – in the way, as Ondák points out, one measures a child as they grow1 – allowed participants to create an empirical measurement of themselves which was entirely unique. On the other hand, when viewed as the repeated act of measurement, and displayed as the physical, visual embodiment of that – both in the marks on the wall, and on the visitors’ ability to observe one another participating – the work took on an acutely public aspect. Anyone visiting Tate St Ives during the three-month span of the installation, could impact on the work, depending on their height and where they chose to place their signature. Those visiting the installation could also choose to focus on individual measurements, picked out and studied, or to observe the gradual creation of a collective pattern around the room. The private and the public became intertwined as the creators, the material and the observers of the evolving work.

Artist: Chris Burden
Samson, 1985
“a museum installation consisting of a 100-ton jack connected to a gear box and a turnstile. The 100-ton jack pushes two large timbers against the bearing walls of the museum. Each visitor to the museum must pass through the turnstile in order to see the exhibition. Each input on the turnstile ever so slightly expands the jack, and ultimately if enough people visit the exhibition, SAMSON could theoretically destroy the building. Like a glacier its powerful movement is imperceptible to the naked eye. This sculptural installation subverts the notion of the sanctity of the museum (the shed that houses art).”

Felix Gonzalez-Torres
Untitled (Perfect Lovers) (1987-1990)
Artwork description & Analysis: “Untitled” (Perfect Lovers) is an installation of two identical, battery-operated clocks, synchronized and hanging side-by-side. As ordinary objects elevated to the level of fine art, the clocks undoubtedly reference the Duchampian readymade, and, with their austere forms and serial repetition, Minimalist sculpture. Like all of Gonzalez-Torres’s works, however, mundane materials are springboards for subtle personal and political meanings that vary with their context. The viewer’s response to the clocks shifts dramatically knowing that the artist created the installation while his partner Ross Laycock was dying from AIDS. Gonzalez-Torres acknowledged that clocks would fall out of synch, one eventually stopping first. “Time is something that scares me . . . or used to. This piece I made with the two clocks was the scariest thing I have ever done. I wanted to face it. I wanted those two clocks right in front of me, ticking.”<br></br><br></br>On the other hand, the clocks exemplify his desire to create works with multiple possible meanings. Although it obviously reflects his own homosexual relationship, the abstract nature of the clocks’ substitution for bodies allows it to be read generally, as a metaphor for love. Gonzalez-Torres explained how he resisted the label of “gay art” during a period of increased censorship and furor over the NEA funding for Robert Mapplethorpe: “Two clocks side by side are much more threatening to the powers that be than an image of two guys sucking each other’s dicks, because they cannot use me as a rallying point in their battle to erase meaning. It is going to be very difficult for members of Congress to tell their constituents that money is being expended for the promotion of homosexual art when all they have to show are two plugs side by side, or two mirrors side by side…“<br></br><br></br>Gonzalez-Torres often produced multiple versions of his installations, and his detailed instructions for their display became an important element of the piece itself. For Perfect Lovers, the instructions require the commercial clocks to be of exact dimensions and design and that they touch; before the exhibition opens the hands are set to the same time; if one or both of the clocks stop before the end of the exhibition, batteries may be replaced and reset. With such directions, Gonzalez-Torres created the basic boundaries of the work, while still allowing for certain flexibility in any given exhibition or installation.
- Dallas Museum of Art

Yoko Ono, Cut Piece (1964)<br></br><br></br>If you ever had any doubt that Yoko Ono was a groundbreaking artist in her own right before she had even met John Lennon, this piece should allay all doubts. The piece originally began as a textual “event score” similar to La Monte Young’s Composition #2.<br></br>The work is quite minimalist as a text-only piece, but the work took on much more provocative protofeminist overtones when Ono performed it in 1964. At first, Cut Piece might seem naughty or erotically charged as members of the audience engage in the taboo thrill of cutting off tiny pieces of the female artist’s clothes. Then, the work gradually becomes more disturbing, as more and more of the woman’s clothing is cut away, leaving her even more naked and vulnerable. The effect was amplified even more when Ono performed the piece, because she would stay silent during the piece, embodying an almost stereotypical Asian stoicism. At one performance of the piece in Japan, a man even made a motion to stab Ono with the scissors. It is one of the first major feminist artworks about the objectification of women, at a time when the word “objectification” was barely in anybody’s conceptual toolkit.

Elaine Sturtevant, Relâche (1967)
Pop Art was built on appropriations from mass culture, such as Andy Warhol’s Campbell Soup cans and Roy Lichtenstein’s comic book panels. Sturtevant stood Pop Art on its head by appropriating the appropriators, creating slightly altered reproductions of works by the major Pop Artists. When Andy Warhol made multicolored silkscreens of flowers, Sturtevant made her own versions of Warhol’s flowers, at one point exhibiting a show that consisted of nothing but slightly altered remakes of Warhol’s flowers. When Jasper Johns appropriated the American flag for his paintings, Sturtevant appropriated the original appropriation of the American flag. The titans of Pop Art, Warhol, Johns, Lichtenstein, and Rauschenburg, all got wealthy mining the rich vein of mass culture, but when Sturtevant started use the Pop Artists as the raw material for her own work (much like the Pop Artists did to mass commercial culture), the tenor of the reaction was often, “Who does she think she is?”<br></br><br></br>Perhaps the most brilliant of Elaine Sturtevant’s appropriations is her 1967 restaging of the ballet Relâche, a 1924 work choreographed by Francis Picabia with a score by Erik Satie. The title Relâche is a bit of a joke, because the word “relâche” is used in French to indicate that a performance has been cancelled. Ironically, the first performance of Relâche in 1924 actually was cancelled, because the principal dancer Jean Börlin wasn’t feeling well. When it came time for Sturtevant to stage Relâche, she cancelled the performance, not because any of the performers were sick, but because the cancellation was the performance. Sturtevant had gone “meta” even one level beyond old Dadaists like Picabia and Satie. Sturtevant was evidently convincing enough in her restaging/cancellation of Relâche that the pioneering Dadaist Marcel Duchamp went out of his way to attend the performance.
Duchamp, who of course knew of the original Relâche, decided to attend Sturtevant’s performance but arrived to discover that the show had been called off. He returned to his taxi, which was idling outside (his wife Teeny had been waiting for him).<br></br><br></br>Shortly after, Duchamp invited Sturtevant to dinner, and asked her how the performance had gone. “Fine, thank you,” she responded. He wondered, had everything gone as planned? “Yes.”<br></br><br></br>“That’s quite beautiful,” he said.

Hans Haacke, MoMA Poll (1970)<br></br><br></br>Martin Fox has already pointed out the amazing work Hans Haacke, but I wanted to point out MoMA Poll, the first of what are called Haacke’s “system works.” In 1970, Haacke proposed to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) that he would make an installation that asked visitors of the gallery to vote on a sociopolitical issue, but Haacke would not reveal the issue until it was time to unveil the exhibit. When the exhibit was finally put on display, it proved to be extremely controversial, because the poll incorporated into the installation specifically singled out Governor of New York Nelson Rockefeller for failing to denounce Nixon’s Vietnam War policies. The fact that Rockefeller was on the Museum of Modern Art’s board only made things more uncomfortable for MoMA, which for Haacke was precisely the point. Haacke’s purpose was to underscore the transactional nature of much contemporary art, in which “what we have here is a real exchange of capital: financial capital on the part of the sponsors and symbolic capital on the part of the sponsored.”

Adrian Piper, The Mythic Being (1973)<br></br><br></br>A pioneer in both philosophy and conceptual art, Adrian Piper is a light-skinned woman of biracial heritage who created an alter ego in 1973 that she called “the mythic being.” Piper would put on an Afro wig, a fake mustache, and adopt masculine mannerisms. Then, she would go out in public and record how people reacted to her. As a “black male” with exaggerated masculine mannerisms, she discovered that white people would sometimes react to her in fear, but on the other hand, Adrian Piper herself was such a petite woman in real life that her on-the-street performances had a tendency to make white people look more ridiculous than her own alter ego. The artworks that Piper derived from this conceptual piece proved to make a powerful statement about how black men are treated as the Other in American society.

Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge, It’s Still Privileged Art (1975)<br></br><br></br>When Condé and Beveridge started to grow concerned that their art was becoming apolitical, they hit upon the idea of repurposing Maoist posters of artists, but including themselves in the posters. Eventually, this led to the duo creating a larger series about how their politics began to influence their art, using a simple black, white, and red color scheme borrowed from Maoist comic books used in China during the period. The text is simultaneously didactic yet filled with ironic detachment about the collaborators’ realization about how art cuts them off from politics.

Komar & Melamid used polling and marketing research techniques to create paintings that would be the respective "most wanted" and "least wanted" paintings in different countries. Instead of taking the elitist route and avoiding "pandering," Komar & Melamid took pandering to mass popular taste to almost ridiculous levels, thereby creating completely bizarre artworks in the process, as if to say, "The public wants what it wants, but not too much of what it wants."

To commemorate a recent retrospective of Marina Abramovic's performance art work at the Museum of Modern Art, Abramovic did another performance piece "The Artist Is Present," which consisted of nothing but Abramovic sitting silently immobile on a chair, while members of the public were encouraged to queue up for the chance to sit across from her. In total, Abramovic sat in for 736 hours, never speaking the whole time, sometimes returning the gaze of the person sitting across from her, sometimes not. Although the basic concept might appear to have "no there there," gallery-goers who participated in the work found the experience to be so intense that a "Marina Abramovic Made Me Cry" support group developed on Facebook.


This work is a significant piece of the Land art movement of the late 1960's, which began in the Southwestern United States. This piece lives in an obscure desert plain near Quemado, New Mexico, specially selected for its frequent lightning storms and isolation. The work incorporates the natural environment into art in a meaningful way, seeing the land as a critical aspect of the work, not merely a site for it. The locale was scouted precisely for its distance from other signs of human development and its ability to reflect the enormity of the landscape. The work communicates a variety of experiences of being in the landscape, and simultaneously asks individual visitors to meditate on the moment, while contemplating shifts in light and perceptions of time and space in their changing vastness.
The poles were placed outside, rather than in a museum or gallery so the work reveals the significance of the setting, beyond the built, sculptural aspect. The title calls attention to the tantalizing possibility of highly ephemeral illumination from irregularly occurring natural lighting strikes, potentially drawn down from the sky into the field by the rods. It also calls for awareness of the surrounding landscape, and the relationship between art and nature. The earth is an integral part of the artwork and acts as a canvas while also drawing attention to the sky as part of the larger environment, and our relationship to it. Visitors must travel to this remote location in order to view the work, therefore incorporating the journey away from the everyday as part of the experience of the piece, which initiates a total immersion of the senses while creating an unusual degree of intimate encounter with a liberating spirit.



Broodthaers' attempt with this work was to transform the refined poetry to which he had dedicated himself into an aesthetically "ugly" object. The conversion accomplishes two ends: it reveals the absence of a link between either hard work or beauty and eventual success, and it recontextualizes his past experience as a writer into something else entirely - into a form whereby his words would be preserved, rather than forgotten. Ironically, therefore, his polished verses had to be degraded into a "mess" in order to be positively received.
In a way, Pense-Bête showed Broodthaers mocking both his own history and his fellow contemporary artists. There is a certain humor in the fact that the title refers to the means by which his apparently forgettable poetry would become memorable. The rather haphazard way in which the plaster and ordinary materials are applied to the volumes of text pokes fun at the usually careful nature of the construction of artworks as a product of great technical skill. The title also contains a bit of humor in its translation as "Memory Aid," yet the conglomeration of materials grouped around the books do not immediately remind the viewer of anything specific and remain ambiguous as a referent. The transformation of the original poetry, meanwhile, does not make the text of the poetry itself any more memorable - it only achieves lasting fame as a piece of a larger work. Books, paper, plaster, plastic balls on wood base 11 4/5 x 33 3/10 x 16 9/10 in - Collection Flemish Community, long-term loan S.M.A.K.



The Date Paintings are partly documents of a repetitive, meditative composition process which took on something of the quality of a ritual or liturgy, marking the passage of time, and of the artist's life. Kawara set two main formal parameters when producing the paintings: first, each date was formatted using the writing customs of the country in which it was composed, and written in the relevant language; second, each painting had to be completed on the day in question. If Kawara did not finish a painting by midnight, it was destroyed. A later work, the 100 Years Calendar (1984), used a color coding system to mark each day of Kawara's life when a painting was successfully produced. The craftsmanship involved in producing the Date Paintings was remarkable: each ground-wash was created using four separate coats of paint. The outlines of the letters and numbers were then hand-written, carefully spaced out to make sure the date sat perfectly in the center of the canvas, and filled in with several coats of white paint, using tapered brushes, a ruler, and a set square. The Today series is thus partly a monument to an investment of time, care, and labor which is almost invisible in the finished works, whose appeal to the viewer is immediate, not to say ephemeral.
Once the hidden craftsmanship of the pieces becomes evident, the Date Paintings suggest a series of engaging analogies between the present moment and the past which informs it. Because the date of each painting has necessarily passed by the time of its viewing, the pieces also suggest the ephemerality of the present moment: its instant passage into the past. In these ways, the Today series is classic Conceptual art, its idea-content, often informed by philosophy, more significant than its aesthetic content. At the same time, there remains visual variation and interest in the Date Paintings; the regularity of the paintings partly provides a backdrop against which elementary changes in color, size, wording, and so on, assume an exaggerated significance to the viewer.
Today is one of the longest-lasting series of works to be produced by an individual artist, and quite possibly one of the most methodically continuous activities ever undertaken by a human being. It is also broadly agreed to be one of the most important works of Conceptual art. As regards the development of Kawara's career, Today marked a definitive shift from figurative art to the conceptual, process-based projects, concerned with temporal and spatial location, which would characterize his most valuable contributions to modern art. Synthetic polymer paint on canvas - Museum of Modern Art, New York



