RECORDINGS
Part 1
Part 2
SLIDES
CLIPS
LINKS
SFMoma: Untangling the Puzzle of Sol Lewitt’s Open Cubes
Land Art of the West on Google Maps
SFMoma: Hans Haacke: News
David Rokeby: Very Nervous System
QUOTES
In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of 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.
—Sol Lewitt
As there wasn’t enough money for me to travel to Nova Scotia, I proposed that the students voluntarily write ‘I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art’ on the walls of the gallery, like punishment. To my surprise they covered the walls.
—John Baldessari
There is nothing there, yet it is still a sculpture.
—Michael Heizer
No to spectacle. No to virtuosity. No to transformations and magic and make-believe. No to the glamour and transcendency of the star image. No to the heroic. No to the anti-heroic. No to trash imagery. No to involvement of performer or spectator, No to style. No to camp. No to seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer. No to eccentricity. No to moving or being moved.
—Yvonne Rainer
Interactive artists are engaged in changing the relationship between artists and their media, and between artworks and their audience. These changes tend to increase the extent of the audience’s role in the artwork, loosening the authority of the author or creator. Rather than creating finished works, the interactive artist creates relationships.
Interactive artists, at a privileged position at the junction of culture and technology, have the potential to contribute significantly to this discourse. In the process they must carefully avoid becoming merely public relations devices for government and industry. The artists’ role is to explore, but at the same time, question, challenge and transform the technologies that they utilize.
—David Rokeby
Regardless of points of intersection, and the fact that conceptual art emerged during a moment of intensive artistic experimentation with technology, few scholars have explored the relationship between conceptual art and art-and-technology. Indeed, art-historical literature traditionally has drawn rigid categorical distinctions between conceptual art and art-and-tech.
—Edward Shanken
In terms of the art world, no group of artists involved with computers and electronics is going to win compliments for their humanistic endeavors.
—Jack Burnham
At some point an attempt needs to be made to put the issues of all contemporary communication, not just esthetic communication, into a questioning frame of reference.
—Jack Burnham
READINGS
This presentation is indebted to Edward Shanken’s exploration of the suppressed relationships between “conceptual art” and “art-and-technology.” Please read:
Shanken makes extensive reference to Jack Burnham’s 1970 exhibition SOFTWARE. While reading, please refer to:
SOFTWARE | Information technology: its new meaning for art (exhibition catalog)
There may be Final Exam questions derived from these readings!