Friday, October 19, 2012

John Murray classes week of Oct. 22, 2012


Art Review

Planter of the Seeds Of Mind-Expanding Conceptualism



  • Anyone who wants art to be more radical, anti-market and otherwise against the establishment should hasten to the Brooklyn Museum to see “Materializing ‘Six Years’: Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art.” Traditionalists who bemoan the triumph of mind over matter brought to us by Bruce Nauman, Sol LeWitt, Adrian Piper and scores of others in the mid-to-late 1960s will also profit, for they will here become better acquainted with their enemy. Today’s booming market for attractive objects notwithstanding, most of the ideas, values and fantasies that animated the conceptual turn half a century ago are still in play in the more intellectually fashionable circles of the art world.

A notebook page by Lee Lozano for “No Title (Grass Piece)” (1969), a performance work for which she tried to stay stoned on marijuana for 30 days.

An image of Vito Acconci in his “Following Piece” (1969).
The show is not a conventional museum period survey. Rather, it approximates how the rise of Conceptualism was seen, while it was happening, by one person: the curator, critic and writer Lucy R. Lippard. Ms. Lippard (born in 1937) is known today mainly as a feminist and leftist activist, but in the years addressed by the exhibition — 1966 to 1973 — she was an extraordinarily energetic participant in, and promoter of, what was then seemingly a relatively apolitical trend.
Organized by Catherine Morris, curator of the museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, and Vincent Bonin, an independent curator and writer, the exhibition is designed to reflect the chronological structure of the seminal book Ms. Lippard published in 1973 to document her involvement with the Conceptualist movement. Its lengthy, unlovely title is worth citing in full, as it reflects the dauntingly cerebral tenor of much of the art it describes: “Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972: a cross-reference book of information on some esthetic boundaries; consisting of a bibliography into which are inserted a fragmented text, art works, documents, interviews, and symposia, arranged chronologically and focused on so-called conceptual or information or idea art with mentions of such vaguely designated areas as minimal, anti-form, systems, earth, or process art, occurring now in the Americas, Europe, England, Australia, and Asia (with occasional political overtones), edited and annotated by Lucy R. Lippard.”
Yes, that is like a mouthful of sawdust, and a lot of what is in the show is similarly dry and technocratic. There are charts, maps, magazines, exhibition catalogs and pages of dense verbiage. Among dozens of aesthetically indifferent photographs are examples from Douglas Huebler’s impossible mission to take a picture of every person in the world, and images of Vito Acconci performing his “Following Piece,” in which he tailed strangers on the street until they went indoors. Notebooks by Lee Lozano are filled with carefully hand-printed texts describing, for example, a performance work called “No Title (Grass Piece),” for which she tried to stay continuously stoned on marijuana for 30 days.
Some things are weirdly disconcerting, like Mr. Nauman’s video of his hands kneading his own hairy thigh into different shapes. Some are comical. William Wegman’s video “Spit Sandwiches” offers a close-up view into the artist’s mouth as he sings a nonverbal, percussive tune. Bas Jan Ader’s “Fall I, Los Angeles” is a 34-second film showing him tumbling off the roof of a one-story house. Generally, though, there is not a lot of hilarity to be found. And excepting a Minimalist diptych by Jo Baer, conventional painting is entirely absent. It is not a visually ingratiating show.
Oddly, there is little acknowledgment of world events. An exception is the famous poster picturing victims of the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War, overlaid by the text reading “Q. And babies? A. And babies,” which was distributed by the Art Workers Coalition in 1970. But the overall impression is of a nearly autistic, self-reflexive insularity.
Conceptualism’s political import is better understood when considered against the background of the mainstream art world at the time. Abstract painting, championed by the powerfully influential critic Clement Greenberg, was ascendant, and the market for contemporary art was booming, thanks to Pop Art. Young radicals viewed the commercial gallery system as a cog in the capitalist machine that they believed responsible for the war in Vietnam. Refusing to produce goods for sale to comfortable collectors and instead making “dematerialized” works that sharpened and elasticized thought were construed as forms of political resistance.
This helps to explain what seems in retrospect to be the messianic nature of Ms. Lippard’s involvement. Between 1969 and 1973 she organized a series of four exhibitions in four cities. This she did by traveling to each place with many of the works in a suitcase in the form of artists’ instructions for realizing the pieces on site. Each show had for its title a number signifying the population of the host city. One in Seattle in 1969, for example, was called “557,087”; “2,972,453” took place in Buenos Aires in 1970. She was, you could say, the Johnny Appleseed of Conceptual Art, planting germs of mind-expanding thought that would grow and flourish around the world.
In the early ’70s Ms. Lippard’s commitments changed in response to a pertinent question asked by some: Why were there so few female artists among the cohort she was promoting? In 1973 in Valencia, Calif., she organized her last numbered show, “c. 7,500,” which included Conceptual works by 26 women, including Agnes Denes, Martha Rosler and Yoko Ono. In the decade after that she devoted herself to promoting female artists of all kinds. In some ways this was a reversal of field, from a mandarin preoccupation with pure thought to a populist concern for the economic and political conditions of living people in the real world.
But as Ms. Lippard notes in an essay in the Brooklyn exhibition’s excellent catalog, it was not a rejection of where she was coming from: “Conceptual Art in the broadest sense was a kind of laboratory for innovations in the rest of the century. An unconscious international energy emerged from the raw materials of friendship, art history, interdisciplinary readings and a fervor to change the world and the ways artists related to it.” That energy can still be felt in this richly illuminating show.

“Materializing ‘Six Years’: Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art” is on view through Feb. 3 at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park; (718) 638-5000, brooklynmuseum.org.

Roy Lichenstein at the National Gallery of Art Washington DC



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