Conceptualism: An Expanded View

Art in America, July, 1999 by Marcia E. Vetrocq

An international curatorial team looks beyond the West to cast its traveling survey of Conceptualism as a chorus of indigenous expressions from around the world. The resulting exhibition, now at the Queens Museum in New York, is big, provocative and--perhaps understandably--inconclusive.

You don't want to make too much of the environment in which you first encounter the Queens Museum of Art's exhibition "Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s-1980s." After all, the show will acquire other connotations and local implications when it moves on to Minneapolis and Miami. Still, attending to the role played by context in shaping the meaning(s) of art is one of Conceptualism's enduring lessons, so it is appropriate to note that the Queens Museum occupies the former New York City pavilion from the 1939 and 1964 world's fairs, that the building served as United Nations headquarters from 1946 to 1952, and that its immediate neighbor is the soaring Unisphere. Given to the '64 fair by the United States Steel Company (where is Hans Haacke when you need him to lay bare the financial entanglements of a corporate board?), the Unisphere is an enormous skeletal orb to whose smooth ribs have been attached gridded cutouts of the seven continents. The sky glows around it and through it.

The transparent, schematic and steely structure of the Unisphere speaks of lingering Western triumphalism, of a time before the world grew to seem dense and specific and textured, before "international" became "global." The choice of the word "global" for the title of this exhibition also merits consideration, for another lesson of Conceptualism is that we should remain alert to the nuances of language. Where "international" sounds organized, mapped and administered, "global" evokes the spontaneous, the ubiquitous, the unregulated. "International" suggests borders breached and differences subsumed; "global" conjures a borderless infinity of points charged with local vitality and boundless potential.

"Global Conceptualism" is an exhibition for the post-Unisphere age. The show presents more than 250 works by some 135 creators who hail from Auckland to Zilina, with dozens of more or less familiar places in between. The focus of the exhibition is firmly fixed on "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 project is a highly differentiated one, in which localities are linked in crucial ways but not subsumed into a homogenized set of circumstances and responses to them."[1] The catalogue confirms that the exhibition regards Conceptualism as marking the end of Western hegemony both in terms of the object and in terms of scholarship. According to this reading, which foregrounds institutional critique as a defining motive, Conceptualism jettisoned the object-centered, aura-worshiping, collection-building, authority-buttressing culture propagated by the West since the Renaissance. As for scholarship, efforts such as this very exhibition aim to minimize what catalogue essayist Peter Wollen calls New York's "disproportionate role in the emergence of the much broader conceptualist movement" by 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 such nationalistically shaded predecessors as the School of Paris and the New York School. The movement's milestone exhibitions and books pointedly juxtaposed works from several countries. Nevertheless, artists (and for that matter curators) from the U.S. and Western Europe predominated in them. Those from outside that perimeter (typically from Japan and South America) were few in number and subject to interpretation in Western terms. To rectify that problem and grant each region its own voice, the three project directors of "Global Conceptualism" were joined by 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 New Zealand), Sung Wan-kyung (South Korea) and Peter Wollen (North America).

The outcome of this well-intended effort is mixed at best and sometimes glaringly self-defeating. The exhibition's most immediately appreciable contribution is its inclusion of a number of unfamiliar, compelling and memorable works, many by artists who are significant figures at home but are seldom if ever seen abroad. But taken as a whole, the show amounts to a numbing illustration of a sometimes contradictory thesis that is more ably, though not entirely, explicated in the catalogue. One aggravating factor is the very definition of the subject, which guarantees the visitor only a thin gruel of visual interest. The organizers, for all their revisionist dissent, hold 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 term used to denote an essentially formalist practice developed in the wake of minimalism, and conceptualism, which broke decisively from the historical dependence of art on physical form and its visual apperception."[3]