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
