Toward a Definition of Conceptual Art

Leonardo,Vol. 5, pp. 49-50. PergamonPress 1972. Printed in Great Britain TOWARD A DEFINITION OF CONCEPTUAL ART Donald Brook* I should like to be clear about what conceptualart is and have found both the presented objects and their associated apologetics more or less confusing. The many kinds of object and process that are offered under this label seem not to sustain any single coherent account of what is distinctively conceptual about them and writings on the topic are mostly in gibberish. A close study of particular cases runs the risk of seeming to beg important questions by the very choice of examples or of provoking unhelpful argument over points of interpretation. I shall, therefore, at some risk of seemingmore Aristotelian than Galilean, try to construct a general account of what conceptual art might be. Of course, it is not an essay brought from Mars: the world that it fits, or tries to fit, should seemfamiliar enough to thosewho get around among contemporary art and artists. I should like above all to be clear, so that the points on which I am mistaken are in no way obscured and attention may be drawn to them as clearly in subsequent discussion. The first thing that must be said is that no single use of the phrase conceptualart has secured defact0 general acceptance. I have distinguished four principal sensesthat are different enough to warrant separate mention, although they are certainly not distinct in all respects but, on the contrary, interestingly connected. 1. The concept/percept contrast (sensory mode indcflerent) One way of getting the sense of ‘concept’ is by contrast with ‘percept’. A longstanding theory of art holds that the arts, or at any rate some of them, just are ‘aesthetic’ by virtue of their appeal to or through the human senses-and the Greek derivation intimates as much. Visual art is the art appropriate to the sensory mode of sight and Op art might be counted a paradigm of visual art precisely because its reliance on visual sensoryphenomena, such as the retinal fatigue effects, is so much at the heart of it. Contrasted withaperceptualartlikeOp,a language art like poetry (neglecting odd or hybrid cases such as concrete poetry and lieder) could be regarded as conceptual and this distinction be thought of as * Senior Lecturer, Power Institute of Fine Arts, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia. (Received 1 0September 1971.) amounting to the recognition that a poem does not need to make itself felt through any particular sensory mode or combination of modes. We may read a poem from the printed page, or hear it recited to us, or arrange to have it tapped out in some sort of code on our skin. The poem, is in general, sensory mode indifferent. On this understanding of the matter, arts or works of art will beperceptual as they resemble such a paradigm as Op and conceptualto the extent that they resemble the paradigms of literature. 2. The physical-object!idea contrast (sensory mode independent) The foregoing remarks have an epistemological flavour, emphasizing as they do the way in which we obtain access to works of art by means of the senses. A more metaphysical account can be given quite independently of any supposition about the role of the senses in the appreciation of art. Works of art have been held by some theorists to be material or physical objects and, contrastingly by others, to be imaginative entities or ideas of some sort. One may discern a current use of the phrase conceptualart that amounts in effect to the designation of an art of ideas, as contrasted with an art of physical objects. This may be no more than the traditional aesthetic idealism in modern dress or it may represent a genuine attempt to distinguish two varieties of art (physical art and conceptual art) and to arguetheir respectivemerits. Traditional idealism maintains, of course, that no work of art isa physical object and, if parity of reasoning were strictly preserved in the revised jargon, it would seem that all works of art are in any case conceptual willy-nilly and there is,therefore, no battle to bejoined between conceptualists and the rest. If anything at...