The Concept of Conceptual Art:
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itself is the idea of putting the urinal on the wall. Once you are familiär with the
idea, you are in the presence of the art.
There are art critics who argue that all art after Duchamp has been
necessarily conceptual because he forced us to reconsider the nature of the
aesthetic experience at an ontological level. Phenomenologically, at least we can
say that it is certainly the case that a urinal on a museum wall is experienced
differently than a urinal in a restroom. The latter seems to have little sense of the
aesthetic to it.
Perhaps. But one of the most important things we can leam from
conceptual art is that it is likely the case that aesthetics is always a mode of
appearing, not merely a category for understanding the being of traditional
works of art displayed and presented in traditional spaces and manners. That is,
when a urinal is placed in a museum one of the things we are forced to
contemplate is the beauty that is in the urinal—the smooth flow and curve of the
lines, the sheen of the porcelain, the careful choices that went into the design,
etc. The fact that the artist himself did little to create this object—all he did,
really, was sign it and ask us to consider it as a work of art—means that we are
then retroactively forced to think about the way in which such qualities were
already there in the everyday urinals we have been seeing all our lives and
taking for granted. The aesthetic, that is, is always already operational in our
lives, though we have, perhaps, been taking it for granted and not giving it our
full attention.
What constitutes art is, at least in part, a function of how we experience
something. Context and setting can tum something into a full-blown aesthetic
object even as it hints that all objects are aesthetic objects to some degree. When
we take something as art rather than as some other sort of thing, it is not as if a
new object appears in the world. Rather, an aesthetic object appears as one way
in which an object can appear. Taken to the extreme, this becomes the claim that
anything at all can be anything at all if we simply say it is and take it to be such.
“Ceci n’est pas une pipe”? Well, it is and it isn’t. And this is not just a urinal? It
is and it isn’t. In 1961, Robert Rauschenberg was asked to participate in an
exhibition of portraits at “Galerie Iris Clert” and rather than painting something,
he sent a telegram reading: “This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so.” And it
was—and it wasn’t. What Rauschenberg was exhibiting was an idea. And the
idea itself was the object of art, supposedly making the telegram into a portrait
and the entire concept of doing so into the aesthetic experience for the audience.
Nineteen-sixty-one was a good year for art. Apart from Rauschenberg’s
telegram, there was M. C. Escher’s Waterfall, David Hockney’s We Two Boys
Together CIinging, Jasper John’s Maps, and several performances of Rachel
Rosenthal’s InstantTheater} It is also the year that Yves Klein Blue was given a
patent. The synthetic ultramarine pigment had been developed by Klein and a
team of chemists, and once the patent was given so that Klein essentially owned
that particular hue of blue (and thus, in some sense, all works of art anyone eise
might ever create using that pigment), the artist moved toward even further