Book Description

Reconsidering the Object of Artexamines a generally underexposed (and therefore often misunderstood) period in contemporary art and highlights artists whose practices have inspired much of the most significant art being produced today. It illustrates and discusses many crucial, ground-breaking works that have not been seen within their proper historical context, if they have been individually seen at all. By 1969 such artists as Michael Asher, John Baldessari, Marcel Broodthaers, Dan Graham, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth, Lawrence Weiner and others had begun to create works using a variety of media that sought to reevaluate certain fundamental premises about the formal, material, and contextual definitions of art. This first comprehensive overview of Conceptual art in English documents the work of fifty-five artists, work that marked a significant rupture with traditional forms and concepts of painting, sculpture, photography, and film. Also included are essays that elucidate the significant aesthetic issues that gave rise, in both America and Europe, to the highly individual, but related, modes of Conceptual art. Lucy Lippard (art historian) writes on the broader sociopolitical milieu in which this work was made; Stephen Melville (Professor of Art History, Ohio State University) probes the theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of Conceptual art; and Jeff Wall (artist) discusses the relationship between Conceptual art and photography. Anne Rorimer and Ann Goldstein (curators of the exhibition the book accompanies) respectively take up the role of language in this work, and discuss each of the artists. Copublished with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles