ART REVIEW : An Ambitious Collection of Conceptualism

“Knowledge: Aspects of Conceptual Art” is an ambitious and often engaging exhibition, even though it has ultimately bitten off more than it could possibly chew. The show looks at a central development in (mostly American) art of the last 25 years, juxtaposing Conceptual art of the the 1960s with Post-Conceptual work made since the 1980s. Although not comprehensive, threads of continuity and elements of distinct change emerge.

The show, which is at the University Art Museum at UC Santa Barbara through Feb. 23, was organized by art historian Frances Colpitt, a former faculty member at UCSB now at the University of Texas, San Antonio, and by Phyllis Plous, the highly regarded curator who retired from the museum’s staff last June after 28 years of service. As her final UCSB exhibition, “Knowledge” can be seen as something of a summing up for Plous.

The show surveys a period coincident with her tenure at the university. In choosing as its focus the impact and influence of Conceptualism, a radical and challenging mode that put art at the service of philosophical ideas, rather than of aesthetically pleasing objecthood, it doesn’t shy away from the difficult and sometimes abstruse.

By connecting the work of well-established artists with that of more recent ones, it also means to make sense of the present through an appeal to history. And through the inclusion of younger artists, ranging from the increasingly significant (Mike Kelley) to the little-known (Antonella Piemontese), it speaks of a committed engagement with the on-going life of culture.

Moreover, in light of the current budget crisis within the University of California system, it is impossible to look at the pointedly titled “Knowledge: Aspects of Conceptual Art” without regarding the presentation as a firm declaration of the centrality of art within higher education. At universities no less than at elementary and secondary schools, the American tendency to marginalize art is strong, and marginality is what makes the budget ax easy to wield. “Knowledge” examines a moment when critical thinking became a primary concern to a variety of important artists, while insisting on its continuing significance to art of the present day.

The 46 works in the show include nine from the 1960s by the first generation of Conceptualists, including John Baldessari, Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth, Lawrence Weiner and the team of Terry Atkinson and Michael Baldwin, who founded the polemical British group known as Art & Language. At issue in all their work is the matter of aesthetics--of the social and cultural construction of that odd and enduring thing we call “art” and the ever-changing formal parameters that inevitably come to define it.

Like the Minimal and Pop art with which it was roughly coincident, Conceptual art meant to explode the rigidity of conventional attitudes that had congealed around contemporary art. Unlike Minimal and Pop, which used the established mediums of sculpture and painting to do it, Conceptualism sought to displace art’s traditional objects.

The principal target of its criticism was the formalist interpretation of painting and sculpture, especially as described by the most prominent American art critic of the 1940s and 1950s, Clement Greenberg. Using painting as his most common example, Greenberg held that art’s most exalted job was continually and progressively to refine the properties of the medium. Into this narrow and restrictive assertion, in which aesthetic purity assumed the role of a moral lesson, Conceptualism lobbed a weighty monkey wrench.

The earliest work at UCSB demonstrates the general nature of the assault. Kosuth’s “One and Three Hammers” (1965) hits the formalist nail squarely on the head by juxtaposing as equivalents an actual hammer, a photograph of a hammer and a dictionary definition of a hammer. From the materiality of wood and metal through the light-created image to the ephemerality of the described idea, there’s no telling which of these three representations is the most “real,” and thus the one capable of being claimed as the hammer’s purest embodiment.

Art & Language stuck their collective tongue firmly in their communal cheek with “Two Black Squares: Paradoxes of the Absolute Zero” (1966) by juxtaposing a painted black square, evocative of such Modern painters as Kazimir Malevich and Ad Reinhardt, with handwritten quotations from “The Nature of Thermodynamics,” a text by scientist P.W. Bridgman. Wickedly, a comparison was drawn between Greenberg’s reductive formalism and higher physics, which functioned on a belief in absolute zero while acknowledging its purely theoretical nature. As an unreachable point at which a substance would cease to have molecular motion, absolute zero starkly conjures the ultimate inertia of death--a conventional metaphysical concern for art and artists.

These two examples--and others could be cited from this astutely selected show--demonstrate that a new but basic strategy for these artists was to make revelatory comparisons between things. Like Pop and Minimalism, Conceptual art eschewed the formalist imperative of examining art-in-itself; instead, it considered myriad complex relationships between art and the world. Thus was art’s inevitably political dimension pushed into view--a watershed event that hardly seems surprising in retrospect, given the unprecedented turmoil of the 1960s.

“Knowledge” updates its ‘60s origins with at least one recent work by each of these six artists. Although the forms might differ sharply, a continuity of interest can at least be inferred. Douglas Huebler’s “Crocodile Tears: The Signature Artist (Napoleon)” uses a triptych that includes a painting of the conquering French emperor in a wry rumination on cultural ambition and the artist’s role in relation to it, which echoes against a 1969 work in which he offers a reward for the capture of a criminal shown in an ordinary post office wanted poster.

It is the work of the dozen younger artists, however, that constitutes the Post-Conceptual link posited between past and present. Some connections are intriguing. Hanging across from pivotal ‘60s works by Kosuth, which incorporate citations from the dictionary, the marvelous drawings of a locked book and a volume of Cliff’s Notes in Mike Kelley’s “Know Nothing: If You Don’t Want to Know the Definition, Don’t Open the Dictionary” (1982-83) take on particular resonance.

Other relationships are surprising, as between Art & Language’s deathly absolute zero and Christopher Williams’ installation, “Bouquet, for Bas Jan Ader and Christopher D’Arcangelo” (1991). Consisting of a wall, reconstructed from plans of one built by the late D’Arcangelo, on which hangs a photograph of a bouquet of flowers, symbol of tribute and, like all photographs, an image of a moment that is lost and irrecoverable, the installation is dedicated to an artist (Bas Jan Ader) who attempted a solo crossing of the Atlantic Ocean and was lost at sea. Composed entirely from pre-existing materials, like Art & Language’s black square and quotations, Williams’ “Bouquet” ceremoniously performs art’s memorializing function.

If the show falters, it is in the necessarily arbitrary selection of Post-Conceptualists. Sarah Charlesworth and Richard Prince are included as artists who picked up the Conceptualist thread in the lean years of the 1970s, early in the development of their mature work (Charlesworth, for instance, was a student of Huebler’s). But they were not the only ones who did.

And younger artists as diverse as Thomas Locher, who makes life-size Cibachrome photographs of heavily locked and bolted doors that he has fabricated for the purpose, and Glenn Ligon, who repeatedly stencils on doors statements from a 1928 essay by Zora Neale Hurston (“I am not tragically colored” and “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background”) cohabit easily here; but, their compatibility doesn’t derive from any direct and identifiable experience with 1960s Conceptualism.

Instead, the multiple artistic watersheds of the 1960s changed everything that would follow. The precedents of Pop and Minimalism profoundly inform the work of Locher and Ligon, as much as does Conceptualism. Like countless others, their art simply springs from common ground.

“Knowledge: Aspects of Conceptual Art,” University Art Museum, UC Santa Barbara, (805) 893-2951, through Feb. 23. Closed Mondays.