Authors: Tony Godfrey
ISBN-13: 9780714833880, ISBN-10: 0714833886
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Phaidon Press, Incorporated
Date Published: November 1998
Edition: REV
What is art? Must it be a unique, saleable luxury item? Can it be a concept that never takes material form? Or an idea for a work that can be repeated endlessly? Conceptual art favours an engagement with such questions. As the variety of illustrations in this book shows, it can take many forms: photographs, videos, posters, billboards, charts, plans and, especially, language itself. Tony Godfrey has written a clear, lively and informative account of this fascinating phenomenon. He traces the origins of Conceptual art to Marcel Duchamp and the anti-art gestures of Dada, and then establishes links to those artists who emerged in the 1960s and early 1970s, whose work forms the heart of this study: Joseph Kosuth, Lawrence Weiner, Victor Burgin, Marcel Broodthaers and many others.
Introduction: What is Conceptual Art? | 4 | |
1 | Anti-Art Gestures in Early Modernism: Duchamp and Dada | 17 |
2 | The Postwar Period: Alternatives to Painting | 53 |
3 | False, Radical and Obdurate: Realities in the Early 1960s | 83 |
4 | The Dematerialized Object, Almost Eight Conceptual Artworks | 121 |
5 | Who Were the Brain Police?: Varieties of Conceptual Art | 145 |
6 | The Crisis of Authority: Political and Institutional Contexts | 185 |
7 | The End?: Decline or Diaspora of Conceptual Art? | 239 |
8 | Where Were They?: The Curious Case Of Women Conceptual Artists | 279 |
9 | Looking at Others: Artists Using Photography | 299 |
10 | What is Your Name?: Artists Using Words Since 1980 | 343 |
11 | Who Are the Style Police?: Controversies and Contexts in Recent Art | 377 |
Glossary | 426 | |
Brief Biographies | 428 | |
Key Dates | 433 | |
Map | 436 | |
Further Reading | 438 | |
Index | 441 | |
Acknowledgements | 446 |