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Populär Culture Review
distancing himself from the physical aesthetic object by having naked women
covered in the pigment roll around on blank canvases as per his directions—
directions he had given remotely, hundreds of miles away—thus making
“paintings by Yves Klein.”
It was in the early ‘60s, too, that Christo’s work began gaining
popularity. His Iron Curtain was a mass of oil barreis jammed into a Paris Street
in Order to create a traffic jam—and the viewer was asked to consider the traffic
jam and the idea of oil barreis creating a traffic jam itself as the work of art. By
1972, Fred Forrest had done something ostensibly nicer for the citizens of Paris
by spending money to buy a blank page in Le Monde on which readers were
encouraged to construct their own works of art. The work of art, he claimed, was
the idea that there were so many different works of art to come out of the project
and the idea that everyone had the freedom to make his or her own contribution
in secret. In the later ‘70s, Walter De Maria ordered a one-kilometer long brass
rod to be constructed in Germany and buried it vertically in the ground so that
only a few centimeters were sticking out. Essentially, like Forrest’s private
newspaper drawings, this Vertical Earth Kilometer work could not be seen by
anyone for what it was, but the idea that there was a kilometer of brass buried
beneath the viewer and the idea that the object of art was essentially hidden
from experience was the real work of art—a work of art, unlike the rod itself,
that was thought to be accessible to everyone.
Certainly, the 1960s and ‘70s in general marked the ascendance of
conceptual art as a full-fledged cultural movement, though this time period did
not invent the idea of conceptual art. Duchamp’s Fountain had come five or six
decades earlier and surely there are instances of conceptual art that can be traced
back to the earliest aesthetic acts of humans. Diogenes, a Contemporary and
frenemy of Plato, was doing conceptual performance art in the guise of stand-up
philosophy two-and-a-half millennia ago. This is, after all, the genius who
refiited Zeno’s argument that motion is not possible by Standing up at the
lecture, saying “I refute you,” and then walking out. The same man who carried
around a lantem in broad daylight and told the citizens of Athens, holding it up
to their faces, that he needed it to help him see if he could find a true man
because so far, no luck. He is the same artist who was called a dog by his
detractors, so he urinated on them and bit them when they came too close. Zeno
lived his life as “Zeno,” as a true ‘70s happening (i.e., the 370s BCE), as the
socially conscious and philosophically complicated Ziggy Stardust of Ancient
Greece. And in making the concepts of philosophy into a work of art, he
simultaneously made his life into a work of art, thereby showing us that life is,
for all of us, already art. Living, Diogenes knew, is about ideas and about how
we embody and enact them.
The first thing that conceptual art does, then, is open a space that allows
us to think of all objects—of the world and even ourselves—as art. But there are
still more specific questions that can be raised precisely conceming the way in
which we wonder about the relationship between ideas and objects.