Link to the article published in A*DESK
Museums have long since recovered and studied in depth the works of conceptual artists, but now it is the market that brings them to the forefront, as well as younger artists who quote, reread and research their references.
Lawrence Wiener already wrote this in his famous “Declaration of Intent” (1968):
– 1. The artist may construct the piece.
– 2. The piece may be fabricated.
– 3. The piece need not be built.
– Each being equal and consistent with the intent of the artist the decision as to condition remains with the receiver upon the occasion of receivership.
A couple of decades ago, museums began to recover and study all those practices that had taken place in the 60s and 70s and that, precisely in opposition to the museum-institution-art system, opted for strategies that escaped the limits and codes of said institutions. Events, performances, meetings, documents, audios and videos became the records or the materialisation of projects that were more committed to identifying art and life, that is, to the here and now than to their durability and musealisation. In the last twenty years, large and small museums around the world have been responsible for recovering, studying and documenting all these works, from Hans Haacke to Vito Acconci or Marina Abramovic, passing through all the groups of conceptual artists from Catalonia, the former Eastern European countries or the various Latin American countries.
In parallel, some collectors were generating reference collections, such as the Herbert couple in Belgium, who understood their role as taking an active part in a social and political movement and offered their support to artists such as Lawrence Weiner, Robert Barry or Ian Wilson, among others, or the editor Guy Schraenen, who collected art between the 60s and 80s, without forgetting to collect all the parallel documentation (posters, invitations, photos, films, etc.) related to the works. Both collections have also been shown extensively in different museums and have served as a reference and model for other collections founded more recently.
Conceptual art has not only been revived but is also recognised by the market, as confirmed by the recent edition of the Basel art fair held just a few weeks ago, where works by artists such as Lawrence Weiner, Helena Almeida, Nancy Spero, Antoni Muntadas and filmmakers such as Harun Farocki and Agnès Varda could be found. The revival continues and a good example is the early works and documents of General Idea that A.A. Bronson, the only member of the group still alive, is producing.
There are many artists from the younger (and not so young) generations who have drawn from the sources of conceptual art, from its content, attitudes and/or from its forms. Some of these artists, such as Mario García Torres, not only investigate with their work some unknowns related to conceptual works (Alighiero Boetti’s Hotel One in Afghanistan or the work that Robert Barry proposed to his students when he was teaching in Halifax) but also curate exhibitions with artists of this generation, such as “Objetos para un rato de inertia” (Objects for a moment of inertia), which took place at the beginning of this year in the Elba Benítez gallery in Madrid and which brought together the works of David Askevold, Alighiero e Boetti, Luis Camnitzer, Barry Le Va and Francesc Torres. The declaration of principles was clear: “History, despite its insistence to the contrary, belongs to the present time. History is always being forged. It is a process, not a result. History and the writing of History are one and the same thing.”
The use of slides and slideshows, documents, inventories, diagrams, the investigation of facts and situations to make things evident, or performances that are diluted in public space… constitute an Ariadne’s thread (more the one referring to the techniques of navigation on Web pages than to the mythological one) that begins in the 60s and 70s and leads us directly to the performances of Dora García or Tino Seghal and their questions about the relationships between artist, work and public, to the search for vacant lots or the inventories of materials by Lara Almarcegui, to the lists of Ignasi Aballí, to the stories of Francis Alÿs, to the relationships between apparently distant facts by Simon Starling, to the evidence of Sean Snyder or to the “displays” of Erick Beltrán. This is a direct Ariadne’s thread, with less than six degrees of separation (since we are establishing literary parallels), although on too many occasions the legacy of the leitmotiv “when attitudes become form” has been left only with the forms.
