Conceptualism: An Expanded View

An international curatorial team direct the eyes beyond the West to cast its traveling contemplate of Conceptualism as a chorus of indigenous expressions from around the world. The resulting exhibition, now at the Queen Museum in of recent origin York, is big, provocative and--perhaps understandably--inconclusive.

You don't want to make too abundant of the environment in which you first collision the Queens Museum of Art's exhibition "Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s-1980s" After all, the display will acquire other connotations and local implications when it put in motions on to Minneapolis and Miami. Still, attending to the character played by context in shaping the meaning(s) of art is single of Conceptualism's enduring lessons, in the way that it is appropriate to note that the Queen Museum occupies the former of recent origin York City pavilion from the 1939 and 1964 world's fairs, that the building serv as United Nations headquarters from 1946 to 1952 and that its immediate neighbor is the soaring Unisphere. Given to the '64 fair by the agency of the United States Steel Company (where is Hans Haacke when you ne him to lay bare the financial entanglements of a corporate board?), the Unisphere is an enormous skeletal orb to whose even ribs have been attached gridded cutouts of the seven continents. The canopy of heaven glows around it and [i]or[/i] part of to the other it.

The transparent, schematic and steely construction of the Unisphere speaks of lingering Western triumphalism, of a time before the world grew to present the appearance dense and specific and textur before "international" became "global." The choice of the word "global" for the title of this exhibition also merits consideration, for another task of Conceptualism is that we should remain alert to the nuances of language. Where "international" wholes organized, mapped and administered, "global" call ups the spontaneous, the ubiquitous, the unregulated. "International" intimates borders breached and differences subsumed; "global" begs a borderless infinity of points charged with local vitality and boundles potential.

"Global Conceptualism" is an exhibition for the post-Unisphere age. The exhibit presents more than 250 works by the agency of some 135 creators who hail from Auckland to Zilina, with dozens of more or les familiar places in between. The focus of the exhibition is firmly fixed upon "points of origin," specifically, the political, social and cultural conditions which colored the various expressions of Conceptualism around the globe. In the words of exhibition organizers Luis Camnitzer, Jane Farver and Rachel Weiss, "the reading of `globalism' that informs this shoot forward is a highly differentiated single in which localities are linked in crucial ways on the other hand not subsumed into a homogenized locate of circumstances and responses to them."[1] The catalogue confirms that the exhibition regards Conceptualism as marking the extremity of Western hegemony both in confines of the object and in bounds of scholarship. According to this reading, which foregrounds institutional critique as a defining motive, Conceptualism jettisoned the object-center aura-worshiping, collection-building, authority-buttressing agriculture propagated by the West since the Renaissance. As for scholarship, efforts similar as this very exhibition aim to minimize what catalogue essayist Peter Wollen calls fresh York's "disproportionate role in the emerging see the verb of the much broader conceptualist movement" by means of redirecting attention to the local circumstances of each manifestation.[2]

From the start, which is also to say from the Western perspective that first defined it around 1970 Conceptualism was self-consciously international compared to of the like kind nationalistically shaded predecessors as the gymnasium of Paris and the novel York School. The movement's milestone exhibitions and volumes pointedly juxtaposed works from several countries. Nevertheless, artists (and for that matter curators) from the U and Western Europe predominated in them. Those from outside that perimeter (typically from Japan and southerly America) were few in number and control to interpretation in Western terminuss To rectify that problem and grant each region its possess voice, the three project directors of "Global Conceptualism" were joined through curators/catalogue essay authors Laszlo Beke (Eastern Europe) Okwui Enwezor (Africa), Gao Minglu (Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong) Claude Gintz (Western Europe) Apinan Poshyananda (South and Southeast Asia), Mari Carmen Ramirez (Latin America), Reiko Tomii "in cooperation with" Chiba Shigeo (Japan), Margarita Tupitsyn (Soviet Union), Terry Smith (Australia and novel Zealand), Sung Wan-kyung (South Korea) and Peter Wollen (North America).

The consequence of this well-intended effort is mixed at best and sometimes glaringly self-defeating. The exhibition's greatest in quantity immediately appreciable contribution is its inclusion of a number of unfamiliar, compelling and memorable works, many through artists who are significant figures at dwelling but are seldom if at any time seen abroad. But taken as a whole, the display amounts to a numbing illustration of a sometimes contradictory thesis that is more ably, admitting not entirely, explicated in the catalogue. single aggravating factor is the real definition of the subject, which guarantees the visitor sole a thin gruel of visual interest. The organizers, for all their revisionist dissent, clinch to their own prim orthodoxy of antivisuality. Sounding like a gang of three delivering the party line, they instruct, "It is important to delineate a clear distinction between conceptual art as a mete used to denote an essentially formalist practice evolveed in the wake of minimalism, and conceptualism, which broke decisively from the historical connection of art on physical form and its visual apperception."[3]