Post-conceptual art

Post-conceptual, postconceptual, post-conceptualism or postconceptualism is an art theory that builds upon the legacy of conceptual art in contemporary art, where the concept(s) or idea(s) involved in the work takes some precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns.^[1] The term first came into art school parlance through the influence of John Baldessari at the California Institute of the Arts in the early 1970s. The writer Eldritch Priest, specifically ties John Baldessari's piece Throwing four balls in the air to get a square (best of 36 tries) from 1973 (in which the artist attempted to do just that, photographing the results, and eventually selecting the best out of 36 tries, with 36 being the determining number as that is the standard number of shots on a roll of 35mm film) as an early example of post-conceptual art.^[2] It is now often connected to generative art and digital art production.^[3]

Post-conceptualism as an art practice has also been connected to the work of Robert C. Morgan, specifically his Turkish Bath installation at Artists Space in 1976, and in Morgan's writing in Between Modernism and Conceptual Art: A Critical Response from 1997.^[4] It has been connected to the work of Robert Smithson,^[5] Mel Bochner, Vera Molnár, Robert Barry, Peter Nagy, François Morellet, Jennifer Bolande, Yves Klein,^[6] Piero Manzoni,^[7] Lygia Clark,^[8] Roy Ascott, Joseph Nechvatal,^[9] Allan McCollum, Harold Cohen, Mary Kelly, Annette Lemieux,^[7] Matt Mullican, and the intermedia concept employed in the mid-sixties by Fluxus artist Dick Higgins.^[10]

Conceptual art focused attention on the idea behind the art object and questioned the traditional role of that object as the conveyor of meaning. Subsequently, those theories cast doubt upon the necessity of materiality itself as conceptual artists "de-materialized" the art object and began to produce time-based and ephemeral artworks. Although total dematerialization of the art object never occurred, the art object became flexible – malleable – and that malleability, coupled with semiotics and computer processing, has resulted in the post-conceptual art object.^[12]

Conceptual art at the end of the 20th Century spread to become a general tendency, a resonance within art practice that became nearly ubiquitous.^[13] Thus the widespread use of the term “post-conceptual” as a prefix to painting such as that of Gerhard Richter^[14] and photography such as that of Andreas Gursky.^[13] Benjamin Buchloh in Art After Conceptual Art points out that post-conceptual art is already emerging in the late 1970s and early 1980s in the photo-based appropriation art of Martha Rosler, Louise Lawler, Cindy Sherman, Peter Nagy, Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, Barbara Rosenthal, and Dara Birnbaum.^[15]

The idea of post-conceptual art was clearly articulated by Tricia Collins and Richard Milazzo in the early 1980s in New York City,^[16] when within their Collins & Milazzo Exhibitions they brought to prominence a new generation of conceptual artists through their copious writings and curatorial activity.^[17] It was their exhibitions and writings^[18][19] that originally fashioned the theoretical context for a new kind of neo (or post) conceptual art; one that argued simultaneously against Neo-Expressionism and The Pictures Generation.^[20]

British philosopher and theorist of conceptual art Peter Osborne makes the point that "post-conceptual art is not the name for a particular type of art so much as the historical-ontological condition for the production of contemporary art in general...."^[21] Osborne first noted that contemporary art is post-conceptual in a public lecture delivered at the Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Villa Sucota in Como on July 9, 2010. Osborne's main thesis is that the convergence and mutual conditioning of historical transformations in the ontology of the artwork and the social relations of art space make contemporary art possible.^[22]

• Computer art
• Cyberarts
• Electronic art
• Internet art
• Neo-conceptual art
• New Media Art
• Post-convergent
• Postdigital
• Postminimalism
• Postmodern art
• Systems art
• Virtual art

• Alberro, Alexander; Buchmann, Sabeth (2006). Art after conceptual art. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-51195-7. OCLC 65205170.
• Alberro, Alexander (2003). Conceptual art and the politics of publicity. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-51184-3. OCLC 50023702.
• Alberro, Alexander; Stimson, Blake, eds. (1999). Conceptual art : a critical anthology. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-01173-5. OCLC 40555800.
• Aliaga, Juan Vicente; Cortés, José Miguel G., eds. (1990). Arte conceptual revisado/Conceptual art revisited. Valencia: Departamento de Escultura, Facultad de Bellas Artes, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Servicio de Publicaciones. ISBN 84-7721-108-6. OCLC 23141143.
• Battcock, Gregory (1973). Idea art : a critical anthology (1st ed.). New York: E. P. Dutton. ISBN 0-525-47344-0. OCLC 741642.
• Corris, Michael, ed. (2004). Conceptual art : theory, myth, and practice. New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-82388-9. OCLC 51728777.
• Dreher, Thomas (1991). Konzeptuelle Kunst in Amerika und England zwischen 1963 und 1976 (PDF). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
• Godfrey, Tony (1998). Conceptual art. London: Phaidon. ISBN 0-7148-3388-6. OCLC 39676995.
• Goldie, Peter; Schellekens, Elisabeth (2009). Who's afraid of conceptual art? (1st ed.). London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-42282-6. OCLC 654781097.
• Honnef, Klaus (1971). Concept art. Köln: Phaidon Verlag. ISBN 3-87635-035-2. OCLC 864279.
• Lippard, Lucy R. (1973). Six years: the dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972; a cross-reference book of information on some esthetic boundaries ... London: Studio Vista. ISBN 0-289-70332-8. OCLC 973178.Meyer, Ursula, ed. (1972). Conceptual art (First ed.). New York: E. P. Dutton. ISBN 0-525-47271-1. OCLC 489115.
• Marzona, Daniel (2005). Grosenick, Uta (ed.). Conceptual art. Köln: Taschen. ISBN 3-8228-2962-5. OCLC 61260740.
• Migliorini, Ermanno (2014). Dal Sasso, Davide (ed.). Conceptual art (Nuova edizione ed.). Milano. ISBN 978-88-575-2228-9. OCLC 902633610.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• Morgan, Robert C. (1994). Conceptual art : an American perspective. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland. ISBN 0-89950-950-9. OCLC 29519924.
• Morgan, Robert C. (1996). Art into ideas : essays on conceptual art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-47367-5. OCLC 32625348.
• Newman, Michael; Bird, Jon, eds. (1999). Rewriting conceptual art. London, UK: Reaktion Books. ISBN 1-86189-052-4. OCLC 50661369.
• Osborne, Peter (2013). Anywhere or not at all philosophy of contemporary art. London: Verso Books. ISBN 978-1-78168-478-8. OCLC 1200107302.
• Roberts, John (2007). The intangibilities of form : skill and deskilling in art after the readymade. London: Verso. ISBN 978-1-84467-163-2. OCLC 154706791.
• Rorimer, Anne (2004). New art in the 60s and 70s : redefining reality (1st ed.). London: Thames & Hudson. ISBN 0-500-28471-7. OCLC 63665444.