It’s Art, Because They Say It’s Art : Conceptualism is the subject of an exhibition reopening the Temporary Contemporary. Some thoughts from the artists included in the show, about the halcyon days of the ‘60s.

One could make the case that Conceptualism started when Marcel Duchamp attached a bicycle wheel to a stool and called it art.

With that action and others like it, he declared that art should take place in the mind rather than the eye, and that anything could be art simply by virtue of an artist declaring it so. Duchamp proposed the radical notion of approaching art-making in terms of strategy rather than technique in 1913, but it took most of the art world 50 years to catch up with him.

Duchamp’s heirs took the form of an international art movement known as Conceptualism, which is the subject of “1965-1975: Reconsidering the Object of Art,” a show starting next Sunday that marks the reopening of exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s auxiliary space, the Temporary Contemporary in Little Tokyo.

Conceptualism burst on the scene in the mid-1960s and remained a prominent part of avant-garde discourse for 10 years, and its key ideas are central to much critically acclaimed work of the ‘90s. In its earliest, pure form, however, Conceptualism was an arid, rigorous movement whose audience was primarily within the art world.

“Reconsidering the Object,” organized by MOCA curators Ann Goldstein and Anne Rorimer, showcases works in a variety of media by 55 artists who stubbornly insisted that the essence of art is that most ephemeral of things: a thought.

Drawing further inspiration from John Cage’s revolutionary musical compositions of the ‘50s, the first works by Robert Rauschenberg and the Fluxus Movement of the early ‘60s (Fluxus was a poetic precursor to Conceptualism that was heavily laced with Dada), the first generation of Conceptualists rejected the macho bombast of Abstract Expressionism and the slickly packaged mass culture obsessions of Pop. They looked instead to philosophy and linguistic theory and approached art-making as a means of wrestling with defiantly uncommercial questions: How is meaning constructed? Why does it take the form that it does?

Herewith, some of the artists included in the show talk about what was on their minds during those halcyon days of the ‘60s:

JOHN BALDESSARI

Baldessari, one of the first to use text as a raw material for painting, will be represented by seven seminal paintings from 1967-68 .

In the early ‘60s, I was a painter working in a vacant movie theater in San Diego. My studio was literally filling up with paintings, and one day I looked around and thought: “Do I want this kind of life?” I had the feeling I was really on the wrong track and was slowly coming to the realization that there was more to art than painting and sculpture. So in 1965 I decided to stop painting.

Herbert Marcuse and Angela Davis were teaching at UCSD then, and the spirit of change was in the air--everything was being rethought and was up for grabs. I was thinking about Duchamp, John Cage and the Fluxus people at the time and had come to believe that art should have a broader definition than sixth-generation Abstract Expressionism, which was pretty much what you saw in galleries then.

I decided to try to eliminate the hand of the artist and make clear, well-explained art out of text and pictures from magazines and newspapers. The idea of using photos and text in art was completely foreign then, and when I showed some of that work at the Eugenia Butler Gallery in the late ‘60s, she was shocked when some of it sold.

Working this way has become so much a part of that language that it’s now a cliche, and you can’t make any moves anymore, because too much history has accumulated around it. In the ‘60s, however, I felt like a dog looking at a forest, seeing countless trees and thinking, “So little time, so much to do!” Now we’re down to one tree that hundreds of dogs have already pissed on.

DAN GRAHAM

In a radical re-evaluation of sculpture that involved using magazines as a creative vehicle, Graham attempted to eliminate the separation between artwork, the viewer and the environment.

Conceptualism was part of the utopian fantasy of the ‘60s, and it had a lot in common with things like the hippies’ Digger movement [a Bay Area grass-roots organization that provided free food to the public]. It was a highly idealistic style that revolved around the belief that art should be available to everybody and shouldn’t be about financial reward. Needless to say, ideals of this sort faded with the end of the ‘60s.

It all started for me in the mid-’60s, when I opened a gallery in New York as a meeting place and social experiment. I was totally naive when I began the gallery and it only survived for a year, but during that year I learned that galleries were dependent on magazines.

So after the gallery folded, I began making artworks designed to be disseminated through magazines, as an alternative to the gallery system.

The thing I wanted to communicate with the magazine pieces was immediacy, disposability and humor, and I was also attempting to dissolve the sense of awe on the part of the viewer that comes through not understanding how a thing is done.

EDWARD RUSCHA

Ruscha, known for cool paintings and drawings exploring the flirtation between pictures and words, began his career making wry, pseudo-documentary books, films and installations, in addition to the work he made using traditional forms .

I never considered myself a Conceptualist, but other people categorized me that way because of the books I started making in 1962. However, I didn’t have any particular conceptual idea in mind when I made those books--they were mostly a result of the fact that I liked driving around with a camera. I’ve never been a manifesto writer and wasn’t part of any cafe group then, but I was in contact with some of the artists in this show--Bruce Nauman, Joseph Kosuth and Lawrence Weiner--and I did feel we were on common ground.

That was a wide-open period as far as what you could get away with doing. There were lots of new ideas swirling around together, and I was doing all kinds of different things trying to use up all the air in the room. I started making drawings out of weird things like vegetable juice, and that led to “Chocolate Room,” a piece originally shown at the 1970 Venice Biennale that will be re-created at MOCA; it’s a room whose walls are covered with 360 sheets of paper silk-screened with chocolate.

I was making films during that period too, but I gave that up because it was too complicated and expensive and required the cooperation of too many other people. I regret that I stopped making films, because I had lots of ideas for them, but they’re all in the refrigerator and could come out at any time.

One of the surprising things this show reveals is that although Conceptual art was supposed to be imageless, it turns out that it’s quite pictorial. The Conceptualists snubbed their nose at art you can touch, but in the end, even a set of typed instructions tacked to the wall begins to have a look to it.

ELEANOR ANTIN

Combining elements of sculpture, literature, theater and philosophy, Antin’s largely autobiographical work of the ‘60s helped pave the way for feminist art of the 1970s.

I have a more open reading of what Conceptualism is than the purists, who saw it as being related to systems and the dematerialization of the art object. I saw it as an attempt to move away from fixed genres toward genres of real human activity--things like dieting, for instance, which is the subject of one of my pieces in the show.

There was tremendous freedom during that period, and a number of young women who were feminists started working conceptually because it allowed them to investigate personal areas of concern very precisely. Many of those early feminists have never been included in the Conceptualist canon, and that may be why many of them aren’t included in this show.

For me, the meaning of the works I have in this show has changed significantly. “Blood of a Poet,” which is titled after a film by Jean Cocteau, [comprises] blood specimens of 100 poets, so it’s a piece you simply couldn’t do now. The piece has a darker tone now than it had when I made it, because blood has become a conveyor of death. As for “Carving,” a series of 148 nude photos of me in the process of losing 10 pounds, the first time I saw those photos up in a gallery I thought, “Oh my God, all that female flesh, and it’s mine!” I was terrified of how people would take it then, but now I love it.

JOSEPH KOSUTH

Using text to create works that functioned as exercises in philosophical inquiry, Kosuth employed everyday objects to draw attention to language--and vice versa. Included at MOCA are nine works from 1965-69.

By the time I was 20 I was finding it increasingly difficult to believe in art as it was taught. I was reading [Ludwig] Wittgenstein then, and gradually the idea that art was a window to another world, and that the surface of a painting was magical but the paint on the wall it hung on wasn’t, collapsed for me. Moreover, a canvas is so loaded with prior meaning that I felt it was eclipsing what I wanted to say as an artist, so I decided to try to make work using meaning rather than forms and colors as the raw material.

I moved to New York in 1965, and the Greenberg crowd [critic Clement Greenberg was Abstract Expressionism’s most powerful champion] was still running New York then. They dismissed anything remotely experimental as “novelty art,” and when I first showed my work it was barely considered art. To this day the major American collections still tend to skip Conceptualism, and, of course, dealers never liked little videos and notebook paper pushpinned to the wall--when they got the chance in the ‘80s they brought painting back in a big way.

Oddly enough, the ‘80s were good for Conceptualism in that they made visible the entropy that’s built into painting and sculpture. The resurrection of that tradition did more damage to it than I did in 30 years of critiquing it.

In looking at this first generation of Conceptualist work, I’m surprised to discover that it’s taken on an aura of romance--I suppose that’s unavoidable because lives have been lived around it. Even though I was trying to make resolutely neutral work with no visible style, you look at it now and think, “Wow--high ‘60s style!”

JOAN JONAS

Jonas, who has explored the psychology of perception through various media, will show several videos from the early ‘70s in which she stars as Organic Honey, a persona she developed to explore issues of feminine role-playing.

The ‘60s were a period of fermentation, and during those years I was involved with dance, theater, Happenings and the theater pieces done by visual artists like Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Morris and Yvonne Rainer. However, the work I was making came out of other things. Filmmakers like Jean Viggo, Dziga Vertov, Sergei Eisenstein, Jack Smith and Kenneth Anger were important for me, as were the poets William Carlos Williams and Emily Dickinson. I was also affected by the way writers like James Joyce used mythology--I was reading lots of mythology and used it in my work.

Conceptualism was much more hospitable to women than Abstract Expressionism or Pop were, and feminist concerns were central to much of my work then. They’re certainly central to my work in this show, which questions in an abstract way the role the female plays.

Conceptualism never attracted a broad audience, because it’s abstract and is less involved with the visual. Central to Conceptualism is the idea that the work doesn’t have to be built and can exist as nothing more than a suggestion. Ian Wilson, for instance, who’s included in this show, never made anything. He made a circle, and that was it.

DENNIS OPPENHEIM

Beginning in 1967, Oppenheim created a body of work that includes performance, earthworks, body art, installation, photography, film and video. The MOCA show includes documentation from three of his first Conceptualist works .

When I moved to New York in the ‘60s, I was fresh out of several years of rigorous study of art history and theory at Stanford. I was reading most of what came out of the critical world then, and it was a highly intellectualized period for me--I really didn’t have much contact with my emotional self. Compared with the work I’m making now, I find the art I made then intellectually overbearing. At the same time, some of the works I’m most proud of come from that period. Some of the early, risk-oriented land art and body art pieces were highly inspired and do hold up for me.

Conceptualism was a hermetic school, but it was also very much reflective of the ‘60s Zeitgeist . It was hard to avoid the upheavals of those times, and we were extrapolating from the real world--the forms we developed were often awkward, but the ideas we presented were extremely catalytic. Conceptualism was not, however, a great P.R. antic. Many of us were highly idealistic and unforgiving, and we were always shooting ourselves in the foot.

Nonetheless, we managed to penetrate things quite severely because we didn’t feel the necessity to put our ideas in any traditional form--one could claim legitimacy through nothing more than a phone call. The ideas generated in the ‘60s inform much of the art being made today, and those early years were good for me. Most artists, of course, tend to look on their early period as their strongest because they’re coming from total oblivion into something. After that you either get more or less of that something.

DOUG HUEBLER

Using text and photographs to record his activities, Huebler completed a series of “duration,” “location” and “variable” pieces early in his career that were a precursor to much of the language-based art of the ‘70s.

I wasn’t living in New York in the ‘60s, and that was important to my development because I wasn’t influenced by anything going on there. I was much more influenced by the things I was reading--the phenomenologist philosophers, [Alain] Robbe-Grillet, [Roland] Barthes. I didn’t regard what I was reading as a launching point into making art, but it turned out to function that way.

I was disenchanted with the formalism of the Greenberg school and felt there was a limit to how many times you could write your autobiography on a canvas. I was never interested in following the same path repeatedly, and that’s one of the reasons why Duchamp meant nothing to me whatsoever--I associated him with ready-mades and thought that idea had been worn out by the Pop artists. So I started thinking about the sociological implications of using social systems like the post office, or natural systems like the tides, as material for making art and took off from there.

I don’t think there’s any question of Conceptualism’s continuing vitality, but it’s never had a large audience, because it doesn’t give itself over to spectacle, which is a popular preoccupation in America. It’s had a much broader audience in Europe for the simple reason that that’s a more intellectual culture. I’m not anti-American, and I participate in certain vulgarities myself, but I do find it troubling that America hasn’t gotten past the idea that art is essentially decoration.

WILLIAM WEGMAN

Wegman is known for his droll portraits of his pet Weimaraners. His earliest videotapes, photographs and drawings were a witty scrambling of fiction, truth and visual and verbal language.

My background was in painting, and I went through a big ordeal to give it up during my student years, because at that point everyone was saying painting was dead. That belief forced artists to devise other ways to make art, and that’s essentially what led to Conceptualism. It was originally conceived as an anti-elitist style designed to break through the monopoly of museums and galleries, by using publishing, video and broadcast to present art instead. Despite its populist ideals, Conceptualism was dismissed by most people as obtuse and remote.

I did my most radical work around 1971, and this show includes seven reels of videos I made during that period. They still seem kind of fresh--at least I hope they do. The first four photographs I took are also in the show, and I think they’re good too. The later ones got really lousy, probably because I moved to New York, got caught up in the art world and started trying to make my work fit that scene. I was involved in these heavy dialogues with artists like Robert Smithson, but the work I’d been making in L.A. turned out to be better than the New York work from those years.

One of my central goals as a young artist was to reach a larger audience, and I find it ironic that now, through my books of dog photographs and the videos I do for “Sesame Street,” I’m reaching a huge audience. I’ve come to be identified as “the artist who photographs dogs,” but pictures of dogs actually [constitute] a small percentage of my output. Nonetheless, none of the work I made in the late ‘60s has reached that audience, even though that was when I wrote my manifesto, so to speak.

I started making paintings again in 1985. When I paint I feel like I’m doing something irrelevant, but I no longer care. Aspects of Conceptualism continue to permeate my work, but the way my early work happened is over. When you first emerge as an artist there’s a feeling of exhilaration you can only experience once. I feel very nostalgic about the “eureka!” moments that occurred in this early work.

* “1965-75: Reconsidering the Object of Art,” the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Temporary Contemporary, 152 N. Central Ave., downtown. Next Sunday through Feb. 4. Tuesdays-Sundays, 11 a.m.-5 p.m.; Thursdays, 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Admission: adults, $6; senior citizens and students with ID, $4; MOCA members and children under 12, free. (213) 626-6222.