260. Conceptual Art

-->

 

-->

Why can't I just be bored by conceptual artists and keep my mouth shut?  Because I'm offended by the compliments they get.

I look at a photo of a Renault automobile on its side and somebody near me says "deep."  I argue for the presence of flaws in a friend's concept of omnipotence and nobody around us ever calls us deep. We're just "picky."

With the car on its side I'm out of the circle if "cool" is all I can work myself up to.  This is conceptual photography.  See the concept?  See it?

Shift to me trying to see, or understand, my friend's concept of an all-powerful, or omnipotent, Being.  We agree that a Being who can create a separate being is more powerful than a Being who can't, and that unless that being is free he's not separate.  He's just an extension of the Supreme Being.  A free being can choose to do things that the Supreme Being doesn't want him to do, like eat forbidden fruit.  If the Supreme Being prevents him he's turned him back into an extension of himself.  So we've got an all-powerful Being who can't do certain things.  This concept needs some work.  At it we go.

Using words.  Words, words, they're what you work with if you're interested in concepts.  And it's hard work.  If you don't think so ask English majors trying to get "the dissociation of sensibility" straight. 

You conceptual artists, you just lay your thing out there and let somebody else do the work.  If they don't get it done it's not your fault.  Maybe they're not deep enough.

How different you are from my friend, who has to get it out there clearly, the whole thing, and explain, and defend, and find the right words, until he satisfies you. 

Surely artists in the past have found that they weren't working with the best material for the job.  We had a sculptor in my town who wanted to make wavy structures out of brick.  The results were new and striking and some of them, with their wide curves away from plumb, made you gasp at the dare to gravity.  But when he came to build fireplaces with chimneys I think he saw he had his medium wrong.  People around a fire are uncomfortable seeing bricks hanging over them; gases want to go up, straight up, and smoothly. 

Use paint or a camera to lay out a concept and you use the wrong material for the job.  Words are the right material. But alas, they are very hard to use.  You have to work with them and work with them.  You often fail.  That's why success in it is so satisfying and compliments so pleasing. 

Here's an example of the difficulty.  You artists used words when you called what you are doing "conceptual art."   I want to know what "art" is doing in that expression. Say you give me this thing you've produced.  Its appeal is supposed to be conceptual.  Suppose I feel the appeal.  "What a concept!"  Where has "art" gone?  There's nothing left for it to do for me, or to have done for me.

Ah, but suppose I don't feel the appeal.  Here's where "art" goes to work.  On the bored, or the exasperated.  "But this is art."  The word lays on an appeal the producer, by himself or herself, hasn't produced.  And by doing something to me it does something for him, handing him a compliment.

You, conceptual artists, don't want me, your reader, your picky reader, thinking that way.  In a moment we'll be calling you "thinkers on the cheap."  This concept of concepual art needs more work.  I'd advise you and your friends to go at it.

NOTE. From Museum notices, New York Times, 10-10-14:

MUSEUM OF MODERN ART: 'CHRISTOPHER WILLIAMS: THE PRODUCTIOON LINE OF HAPPINESS' (through Nov. 2)  This meticulously considered and assembled survey of one of the deepest thinkers of the Pictures Generation is as beautiful as it is demanding.  No aspect of photography — as art, craft, science or commerce — or of exhibition making, has been left unturned, leaving a show that is a big brainy work of art unto itself.  (Roberta Smith)