How’s This for a Concept?

One of the most compelling art books published recently is a slender, 16-page, softcover volume by L.A.-based artist Michael Asher. Issued this spring and titled “Painting and Sculpture From the Museum of Modern Art: Catalog of Deaccessions, 1929 Through 1998,” it’s a straightforward listing, alphabetically by artist, of all 403 objects sold or traded from the venerable institution’s permanent collection [sic] since the museum was established 70 years ago.

Because deaccessioning is the most controversial, even volatile practice in which a museum can engage, this simple compendium makes for unusually riveting reading. It comes with an informative statement of general deaccession policy by MOMA, but without an object-by-object explanation for individual sales--which lets the imagination wander. The listing is like a latter-day version of the old 19th century “salon des refuses,” or “gallery of those not accepted,” wherein artists rejected for the big-time by the French Academy got a consolation prize of public exhibition, so that the people--not just the institutional insiders--could decide their merits.

Except here, the big-time rejects from MOMA’s collection include pictures by Cezanne, Van Gogh, Picasso and Matisse.

Asher’s captivating little book is proof, if such were needed, that Conceptual art is alive and well in 1999. (The project was his savvy, scene-stealing contribution to MOMA’s recent exhibition, “The Museum as Muse: Artists Reflect.”) Conceptual art has long since become an established, mainstream genre. After four decades, the form is no longer capable of pugnaciously challenging what used to be called “the hegemony of the object over ideas” in art, if only because today’s art world is characterized by the reverse: the prominence of ideas over objects.

How this transformation happened can be seen at the Queens Museum of Art, where the sprawling exhibition “Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s-1980s” surveys the work of some 135 artists from Europe, Africa, Australia, Asia and the Americas. If it accomplishes nothing else, the big survey and its informative catalog should confirm once and for all the degree to which Conceptual art is now a thoroughly institutionalized practice. After all, the Museum of Modern Art may have been a bit nervous about possible repercussions from Asher’s venture into desktop publishing, but finally it did go along with his Conceptual project. (How could it not?)

In establishing the movement’s international breadth, the main thrust of “Global Conceptualism” is to undermine any assumption that Conceptual art is an American phenomenon that spread around the world. Curators Jane Farver, Luis Camnitzer and Rachel Weiss enlisted the aid of 11 international colleagues in assembling the show, in order to abolish the distinction between center and periphery.

They’re somewhat successful--though not always. Much American and European Conceptual art was born in reaction to very specific artistic traditions unique to Western culture. When China’s Xu Bing invents senseless Chinese characters in his calligraphy, or Colombia’s Antonio Caro paints his country’s name in script derived from the ubiquitous Coca-Cola logo, it’s of a different order from Joseph Kosuth enlarging a black-and-white photostat of a dictionary definition of the word “meaning.” Bringing these disparate works together under an umbrella of “Global Conceptualism” can tend to homogenize them.

In a way, globalization is being perceived today the way modernization used to be. Modernity was identified with the West, which posed a dilemma for non-Western nations eager to modernize without also becoming Westernized. Today, the United States is identified with globalization. In actuality, though, globalization is a corporate phenomenon, not an enterprise of nation-states. These nuances are rather difficult to parse in the exhibition.

The 240 works in “Global Conceptualism” are arranged by region and loosely divided into two periods. The first--the 1950s through 1973--surveys the initial, often rambunctious phase when Conceptual art was genuinely radical or novel. The second--1973 through the 1980s--surveys a period of consolidation, as Conceptual art slowly but surely became a cultural norm.

It’s a somewhat daunting show. Conceptualism is characterized by what one critic has called “the withdrawal of visuality” from art. Romanian Paul Neagu, for example, in 1969 made a group of mundane objects meant to be experienced by feeling them in the dark, rather than by looking at them. Thirty years after the fact, this poses a curatorial problem for an art museum: The visually uninteresting objects in Neagu’s “Palpable Art” hang spotlighted on the wall, where they can only be looked at, not touched. It’s sort of like having a dull magic trick explained.

The pro-idea, anti-object quality of much Conceptual art means that a good deal of what is here is photographic or written documentation of ephemeral events. The show’s overall look is gray.

Documents recall the Moscow-based Collective Actions Group, which produced late-1970s happenings in the rural countryside because urban art in the Soviet Union was inevitably associated with Socialist Realism; France’s Yves Klein, who in 1962 sold 16 gold ingots to L.A. collector Michael Blankfort, then threw them into the Seine River; Canada’s Mr. Peanut (Vincent Trasov), who ran for mayor of Vancouver in 1974; and Poland’s Tadeusz Kantor, who conducted a 1967 “Sea Concerto” by standing atop a ladder in white tie and tails and waving his baton at the waves of the sea.

Works like these can indeed be interesting to think about, but they’re just as interesting to think about after reading of them in a book or hearing someone tell you about them on the phone. The experience of most of what’s actually in the galleries is akin to research, and the limits of doing research in an exhibition make the experience generally unsatisfying.

The Conceptualist effort to undermine traditional art’s emphasis on visual perception means that, quite literally, there’s often not a lot to see. And when there is, the context can play havoc with the art.

The group Art & Language, for instance, which was composed of a shifting alliance of artists from the United Kingdom, Australia and the United States, made a practice of critiquing the ideological contexts within which art was made, promoted and received. In 1974 it published Volume 1 of “A Draft for an Anti-Textbook.” Placed on a pedestal and secured inside a plexiglass vitrine, the “anti-textbook” is transformed into a sacred relic whose significance must be taken on faith.

Elsewhere, the 24-carat-gold human ear in Argentinian Eduardo Costa’s “Fashion Fiction I” (1967) found its way from an originally faked fashion spread into an actual issue of Vogue, modeled by Marisa Berensen and photographed by Avedon. The original prank is almost as wry as seeing a page from Vogue displayed in an art museum now.

In some respects, curling up with the show’s information-packed, 280-page catalog is as good as--or even better than--standing in the bland galleries reading the lengthy descriptive labels or looking at one of the many video monitors embedded in the walls (picture placement that, ironically, mimics paintings). The show almost has the feeling of being a good excuse for the book.

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* “Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s-1980s,” Queens Museum of Art, New York State Building, Flushing Meadows, N.Y., (718) 592-9700, through Aug. 29. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays.