26 April 2010

A new low?

This one is a no-brainer. You don't fire someone and hire them back at 60% of their old salary unless you are desperate to the nth degree. Good luck Euphrat Museum. You're going to need it.

Extra-Visual art

Robert Morris. He may be the poster child for (capital C) Conceptual Art. His output transitioned the from the 50's Greenberg/Abstract Expressionism era to the John Cage/anti-commodification era of high concept driven art. From Sorting Cows in an art magazine to Bodyspacemotionthings. He seemed for years, to be able to upturn the art world on a single publication or new work. Now it seems that no one wants to see his recent work or ask him to make anything else. Try to find new work online. Good luck.

My interest in him is, like others, his work from 1960 through the mid 70's. There is a promising (haven't seen it in person yet) collection of his writings, but I can't seem to find a single website, catalogue raisonné, or other new media collecting the works (is there a raisonné? I found one for prints by Christophe Cherix, but not anything else). There was a meeting of scholars in France in 08. But that's not nearly the amount of research I assumed I'd find on him.

It's a symptom of conceptual art as a historical subject. We've heard from the people who lived it, but it's about time to start digging in deep and sorting some things out. What is conceptual art and when did it happen was explored by a few books published after about 1999, but those mostly laid the groundwork for our new task, which is to explore the after effects of this era and to explain what is being made now as a reaction to that era. Although through the lens of Morris, maybe we need to do some basic work first.

The late condition of conceptual art. We don't even have a vocabulary for the separation between conceptual and contemporary. People still think that the YBA were conceptualists. They're wrong, but we don't have a developed lexicon to explain why yet. They didn't even have non-objective art. Their intentions were often (mostly I'd say) based on emotive ends rather than concept or infinitesimal thought.

That's a career right there. Being that guy that explains how and why concept gave way to intention. How we will never go back to solid Greenbergian objective art.

Edited to add this from the stuff I should have finished reading before writing this:
Has abstract and conceptual art had its day? Does figurative and representational art have a better future?

What happened in the late Sixties was equivalent to what happened with cubism. It was a new way of describing the world that looked dry and impenetrable to many people for many years, but underpinned a great deal of the art we now admire in the 20th century. The same is true of conceptual art. People describe as "conceptual" almost any work of art that has deep thought embodied in it, rather than simply the representation of an object on a canvas. By those standards, almost all the great art of the last 10 or 15 years has been conceptual because it has dealt with ideas as well as images.