Conceptual art

Conceptual art, artwork whose medium is an idea (or a concept), usually manipulated by the tools of language and sometimes documented by photography. Its concerns are idea-based rather than formal.

Conceptual art is typically associated with a number of American artists of the 1960s and ’70s—including Sol LeWitt, Joseph Kosuth, Lawrence Weiner, Robert Barry, Mel Bochner, and John Baldessari—and in Europe with the English group Art & Language (composed of Terry Atkinson, Michael Baldwin, David Bainbridge, and Harold Hurrell), Richard Long (English), Jan Dibbets (Dutch), and Daniel Buren (French), among others. Conceptual art was first so named in 1961 by the American theorist and composer Henry Flynt and described in his essay “Concept Art” (1963). The term had international currency by 1967 when LeWitt published his influential “Sentences on Conceptual Art.” By the mid-1970s conceptual art had become a widely accepted approach in Western visual art. Despite the resurgence of “traditional” image-based work in the 1980s, conceptual art has been described as one of the most influential movements of the late 20th century, a logical extension of the work begun by the French artist Marcel Duchamp in 1914 to break the primacy of the perceptual in art. Along with its critique of the visual, conceptual art involved a redefinition of the traditional relationship between artist and audience, empowering artists and enabling them to operate both inside and outside the gallery system.

Other fields of study—such as philosophy, literary theory, and social science—played a major role in the experience of conceptual art. A variety of projects, proposals, and exhibitions were circulated in publications—including catalogs, artists’ books, pamphlets, posters, postcards, and periodicals—which became the primary medium conceptual artists used to publicize ideas and distribute documentation. Photography gained added interest as a means of recording an artist’s performance of an idea and as a historical document of the performance that could be circulated. The influence of conceptual art was widespread, and it continued to be seen in the 1980s in the work of artists such as the photographer and image appropriator Sherrie Levine and the image and text manipulator Barbara Kruger and in the 1990s in the work of artists as disparate as the Scottish video and installation artist Douglas Gordon and the French photographer Sophie Calle.