Dematerializing Formalism: Lucy Lippard and John Chandler’s Conceptual Challenge to Clement Greenber

Art critics Lucy Lippard and John Chandler published their landmark essay “The Dematerialization of Art” in the February 1968 issue of Art International. Lippard and Chandler used the term dematerialization to describe an emergent “ultra-conceptual” art that would render art objects obsolete by emphasizing the thinking process over material form, and the notion has since entered art historians’ lexicons as a standard means to characterize Conceptual Art. This paper examines how Lippard and Chandler developed their notion of dematerialization in rivalry to the formalism of Clement Greenberg. While such art historians as Francis Colpitt has suggested that Conceptual Art emerged as an attempt to overcome the tyranny of formalism, this paper will specifically consider how Lippard and Chandler viewed Greenberg and his formalist criticism as a primary reason for increased commercialism and stratification of the art world.