The Conceptual Dimension of Art

Recent publishing events have prompted a return to Conceptual Art, and a close look at the evolution of current art through its somewhat conceptual dimension, in the visual sense that we can lend this term. So Tony Godfrey proposes a history of Conceptual Art in the 20th century, which chronologically follows its major artistic developments. Divided into thematic chapters ("The anti-art gestures of the beginnings of modern art", "The postwar period: the alternatives to painting", "Phoney, radical, and dogged: realities of the early 1960s", "What's your name?: artists and words since 1980"...), this generously illustrated and well-documented book can also be read like a general epic of creation and its metamorphoses. The references to the current events of the period in question make it possible to recontextualize the activities of artists and lend a political and social depth to many of the inventions mentioned. Even if Conceptual Art as such-that is to say clearly identified as a "movement" with its own theoreticians and artistic figures-appeared explicitly in the 1960s-at the exhibition Preparatory Drawings and other Visible Objects on Paper not Necessarily to be Regarded as Art, organized by Mel Bochner in 1966, T. Godfrey uses this term for usually earlier works and activities, or those contemporary with it without being historically assimilated to it. So Marcel Duchamp, Yves Klein and Joseph Beuys, for example, to stay just with these three names in a list which could be considerably longer, are, according to the author, participants in Conceptual Art. In reality, T. Godfrey does not make any clear distinction between conceptual praxis and Conceptual Art, properly so-called, with the result that the reading of this artistic saga

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