Conceptual Art Motion, Artists And Main Works
Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. It was not just the structures of the art world that many conceptual artists questioned, there was usually a powerful socio-political dimension to much of the work they produced, reflecting wider dissatisfaction with society and government policies.
Whereas Joseph Kosuth offers particular prominence to language and continuously references Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language and Freud’s psychoanalysis, Sol LeWitt, who used completely different media in his work, centered on idea itself, saying that idea is like a machine that makes the art.
In 1969, New York’s Museum of Fashionable Art gathered a variety of artists from the motion for an exhibition titled “Info.” This occasion was not to be taken without a grain of salt, since Conceptualism was largely vital of the institutional museum system and its market-driven pursuits, the system within which they exhibited.
The primary quintessential conceptual artwork was Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953) by Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) which, as the name signifies, is a drawing by the Summary Expressionist Willem De Kooning (1904-ninety seven) which Rauschenberg erased.
Sol LeWitt, the High Priest of Conceptualism attached nice significance to the primacy of ‘the thought’, admitting in his Paragraphs on Conceptual Artwork (1967) that “all of the planning and selections are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair.