Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

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For a critical moment these ambitions were realized, and in several parts of the world
simultaneously. The early organizer and promoter of conceptual art in New York, Seth
Siegelaub, and the artists that worked with him, for example, successfully developed innovative
distribution systems that restructured the relations among artists, their audiences, and the various
intermediaries. Collective statements and working relationships were developed by the
English group Art & Language, the Canadian group General Idea, and French conceptualist
Daniel Buren and his early associates (Olivier Mosset, Michel Parmentier, and Niele Toroni)
that modified existing expectations about artistic creativity and production. The form of most
conceptual art was capable of being distributed much more broadly and efficiently and therefore,
in theory, more democratically (one particularly popular idea of the period, for example,
was that an entire exhibition could be carried around in a manila folder). And the new emphasis
on transmission of ideas rather than objects helped to shift focus from the works’ formal
properties and their place in a history of style to the more immediate contextual frame where
such conventions were legitimated and consumed. 4
This last accomplishment was realized first in its most radical form in November 1968
when a group of artists in Rosario, Argentina, many of whom had been working through
aesthetic issues raised by New York–based happenings, pop art, and minimalism, dropped the
dada influence shared by these movements from the early 1960s and switched en masse to an
agit-prop aesthetic. This new position, “born from an awareness of the actual reality of the
artist as an individual inside the political and social context that surrounds him,” was reminiscent
of many of the historical avant-garde movements of the 1920s and 30s. 5 The “context”
they were addressing was the impact of government planning on sugar industry laborers in the
remote province of Tucumán. Their activism on behalf of working-class, non-art interests also
anticipated a turn many of the New York–based conceptualists would make in the mid-1970s
and one made by the conceptualism-derived “synthetic” practices of artists such as Hans
Haacke, Mary Kelly, Martha Rosler, Fred Lonidier, and Allan Sekula in the early 1970s. 6
Just as there are a variety of ways to explain the emergence of the larger New Left political
culture of the 1960s, so there are many ways to account for the particular radicalism of conceptual
art. The sense of security and willingness to take risks that come from a robust economy
might be considered, for example, or the high level of education achieved by many of the
artists that emerged in the 1960s, or the heightened critical acumen gained from the recently
revitalized tradition of the artist-critic, or the renewed influence of dada and constructivism
afforded by several important and timely books and exhibitions. 7 One crucial factor, however,
was conceptualism’s clear picture of the established interests it was fighting and defining itself
against. That picture was described well by Kosuth in retrospect: