Joseph Kosuth, "It was it" No. 4, 1986; phototext by Sigmund Freud from "Psychopathologie of Everyday Life" with Neon "Description of the same content twice / It was it"; white neon letters and blue neon-line; size 125 x 267 cm
One and Three Chairs by Joseph Kosuth
Conceptual art is about the idea rather than the work itself. This was also the beginning of the term Design, because Design has a purpose, a decorative object is not design it does not give us information or knowledge but pure Design is said to be our understanding of nature and something that operates on a logic.
The design is about a purpose, but then the shape, form and use of materials can be assembled to make it attractive or interesting etc.
The most prominent American Conceptual artist was Joseph Kosuth, who abandoned painting in 1965 and began to work with language. His One and three chairs present an actual chair, a full-scale black-and-white photograph of the same chair, and a dictionary definition of the word chair. By doing this he leads the viewer from the physical chair to the purely linguistic ideal of “chairness” and invites the question of which is the most “real”. The question is the pure essence of conceptual art.
Some Conceptual artists used their bodies as an artistic medium and engaged in simple activities or performances that they considered works of art.
John Cage (1912-1992) was a musician and philosopher,who I have mentioned before with his connection to the Fluxus movement , that influenced a lot of artists with his ability to turn everyday experience and pure chance into his compositions as well as incorporate that into other areas of art such as theatre, music, dance and the visual arts.
Cage’s friend, Allan Kaprow, gave us painting for loosely scripted, multimedia events they called Happenings.
In Japan this developed the Performance Art movement while in Paris Yves Klein (1928-1962) who after 1957 worked only in blue, which he considered the most spiritual colour, later produced Anthropometries of the Blue Period in 1960. This was created by covering three models in his characteristic blue paint and then pressed them against large sheets of paper. This was an attempt to spiritualize the flesh. Klein’s Monotone Symphony- twenty minutes of single notes followed by twenty minutes of silence- accompanied the performance.
This shows how the artist is taking one step further from the work of art and incorporates elements to have an input of the overall experience. The work of art, let’s imagine a traditional painting on a canvas, is being removed from the gallery wall by the artist and while he/she has it in his/hers arms it is up to the artist how to show it, how the viewer will experience the work. It might not be totally controlled, one can never be sure of how someone else is reacting, but it becomes an event to remember instead of just looking at something at a distance, all of a sudden you are a part of the work of art. The distance in-between the performance and reality is fading out.
