CURATED LIBRARIES

Conceptual Art Library

Possibly the most abused word in the art lexicon, “conceptual” refers to any art work in which the idea is the work’s most important aspect. “When an artist uses a conceptual form of art,” wrote Sol LeWitt in his 1967 “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” “it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.” While the question of whether the idea outweighs the work’s execution can often only be answered intuitively, conceptual art is nonetheless associated with a certain look: serial forms (since the idea often generates serial examples of itself), industrial/nono-manual production and the use of graphically emphatic language (as in Lawrence Weiner). Weiner, LeWitt, Mel Bochner, Joseph Kosuth and the Art & Language collective were among the first generation of conceptualists; included in our conceptualism library are examples from subsequent generations of artists who have extended their legacy.

Inserts advertising supplement to the Sunday New York Times, May 22, 1988. Commissioned by Group Material, Inserts featured single-page artworks by Mike Glier, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Carrie Mae Weems, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Nancy Spero, Nancy Linn, Hans Haacke, Richard Prince and Louise Lawler. Image is reproduced from Show and Tell: A Chronicle of Group Material.

"When artworks are engendered as persons in dialogue, the experience of art can make a rebellion."

Doug Ashford of Group Material