Fugitive Conceptualisms

In subordinating the art object to the idea, Conceptual Art in the late 1960s introduced new and innovative relationships between artist, artwork, audience, and world. And yet, conceptualism still functioned as a dominant mode with its own boundaries and norms. Eve Meltzer and Nizan Shaked have offered reframings of conceptual art’s history through its perceived incommensurabilities, foregrounding the importance of subjectivity, narrative, and the politics of identity to this arena of practice. In the 1990s, amid broader revisitings of the era, artists were doing the same: Charles Gaines asserted conceptualism’s “hidden project” not as the reinvention of the idea of art “but the reinvention of an open-ended aesthetic/political space of subjectivity, narrative and meaning.” And Adrian Piper agreed that political consciousness was the most significant legacy of conceptual art’s self-interrogation: “the confrontation of racism, sexism, and economic exploitation—that is, xenophobia—became the last outpost of the avant-garde.” Non-western conceptualists such as Mladen Stilinović and Gordon Bennett offered self-conscious rethinkings of its strategies to address the politics of labor and representation that pertained to totalitarian and colonial legacies in their own countries, while others engaged conceptual vocabularies to convey experiences of global movement and migrant identity (e.g. Miljenko Horvat, On Kawara, Marta Minujín, or Teching Hsieh). This panel considers conceptualisms that reflect conditions of diaspora and displacement, but also conceptually-informed practice “in refuge” from conceptualism’s own histories or modes of analysis. We welcome papers that examine minoritarian conceptualisms; international networks; curatorial strategies; lost processes; and innovative contextual frameworks.