Discuss arguments for and against the view that Conceptual Art should be regarded not simply as a break with previous conventions of visual art

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Jennifer Sanders

Discuss arguments for and against the view that Conceptual Art should be regarded not simply as a break with previous conventions of visual art, but as a category of art - with reference to specific works from the period 1965-75

Conceptual Art has become the term given to works intended to convey an idea or concept to the perceiver, in the spirit of resistance to traditional materialist views of art works as precious commodities.

Conceptual Art was first recognised as a movement in the 1960s. Art objects were rejected entirely, and replaced by analysis - concepts. A new intellectualism was sweeping through the art world, and art objects alone were no longer enough, a meaning was suddenly imperative. Conceptual Art is so dependent upon its supporting text that the original point of creative work sometimes appears to have been entirely subsumed in textual exegesis. The question is to what degree works with so little of art about them can still be named, or understood, as art. And if we cannot understand them as art, how are we to understand them?

Fried's 1967 essay Art and Objecthood will form the backbone of this essay. The seminal and highly controversial work was a kind of riposte to Judd and Morris, who he decried as literalists, coining the term to describe attitudes in opposition to his abstractionist interpretation of Modernism. For Fried, its theatricality has always represented a symptom of the decadence of literalist works of art, a decadence which establishes a staged relationship between object and beholder. The theatricality that so bothered Fried incorporated not only a regrettably mimetic space, but a mimetic time, too. Fried preferences a kind of Modernism that is more authentically abstract: insisting Modern artworks should be abstracted from pretence, from time and from a sense of object. The publication of Fried's essay brought to light to divisions within the Modernist tradition, and seemed to indicate that the heart of these divisions lay in the philosophical conflicts between Idealism and Materialism.

So Fried's dislike of the term Minimal Art or Conceptual Art has caused him to rename it Literalist Art. He points out that the ambition of Judd and his contemporaries is to escape the constraints of painting: the restrictions imposed by the limitations of the canvas. Composition and the effort to create a pictorial illusion are never, according to Fried, quite convincing enough, quite original enough, to be satisfying. Donald Judd explained the problem:

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When you start relating parts, in the first place, you're assuming you have a vague whole- the rectangle of the canvas- and definite parts, which is all screwed up, because you should have a definite whole and maybe no parts

According to Fried and his school, painting is doomed to failure, but perhaps some resolution will arrive with the introduction of a new dimension. He pronounced conceptual (literalist) art as something novel, a category of modern art for all those barely representative works that required a literary back up. In practice, the new dimension brings with it a new focus ...

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