The Concept of Conceptual Art: “You are Here” and Not Here

You Are Here: An Olfactory Map of Life, 2008 (Chicago)1 Birth Contents: “gauze, blood, bleach, hope, afterbirth” Home (that never was) Contents: “cookies, soap, apple pie, nurturing, freshly mown grass” School Contents: “pencil shavings, textbooks, chalk, conformity, Tater Tots” War Contents: “shell casings, oil, medals, honor, rotting flesh” Truth Contents: “truth” Death Contents: “ashes, soil, pine, regret, formaldehyde” Materials used: Funnels, oxygen concentrator tubing from a nursing home auction, antique hemp rope, antique metal stools, Canadian 120-year-old red barn wood, rusted wire, paper toe-tags, U.S. Army ammunition box, 150-year-old pine box, primitive golden oak glove box, antique W & J LANG Cake Biscuit Bakers box, lead school delivery box from the early 1900s, antique embalming fluid box, small fans, latex paint, unnamed contents of boxes. Detail of An Olfactory Map of Life. Photograph by Monika Lozinska-Lee In conceptual art, the idea driving the art is usually taken to be more important than the work of art itself. One might even say that the idea is the work of art itself and thus any physical object becomes superfluous. That is, someone could have the idea of constructing a map that could be navigated by means of smell, and though the particular sensory way of interacting with such a work of art might seem to be central to the art itself, it is truly more about the idea of an olfactory map than about actually smelling anything. One could read the description of such an installation and legitimately ask, “How much have I missed by not actually, physically interacting with the objects as they have been described?” The idea behind conceptual art is thus not only central to the art but seems to have become the aesthetic object itself. As a one-sentence definition of the movement, this does about as good a job as any of defining what is meant by “conceptual art;” yet it also leaves far too much unsaid. Ideas are always important in art. And is it truly the case that art can consist of merely ideas? It is unclear when conceptual art per se began. Most art historians argue that the work of Marcel Duchamp, close to a century ago, marked its birth. The idea, that is, behind hanging a urinal on a museum wall and calling it a “Fountain” seems to be more important than the actual fountain itself. As an audience, we do not miss much by not getting to see the urinal. Hearing or reading about it seems almost sufficient in and of itself; in other words, the work itself is the idea of putting the urinal on the wall. Once you are familiar with the idea, you are in the presence of the art. There are art critics who argue that all art after Duchamp has been necessarily conceptual because he forced us to reconsider the nature of the aesthetic experience at an ontological level. Phenomenologically, at least we can say that it is certainly the case that a urinal on a museum wall is experienced differently than a urinal in a restroom. The latter seems to have little sense of the aesthetic to it. Perhaps. But one of the most important things we can learn from conceptual art is that it is likely the case that aesthetics is always a mode of appearing, not merely a category for understanding the being of traditional works of art displayed and presented in traditional spaces and manners. That is, when a urinal is placed in a museum one of the things we are forced to contemplate is the beauty that is in the urinal—the smooth flow and curve of the lines, the sheen of the porcelain, the careful choices that went into the design, etc. The fact that the artist himself did little to create this object—all he did, really, was sign it and ask us to consider it as a work of art—means that we are then retroactively forced to think about the way in which such qualities were already there in the everyday urinals we have been seeing all our lives and taking for granted. The aesthetic, that is, is always already operational in our lives, though we have, perhaps, been taking it for granted and not giving it our full attention. What constitutes art is, at least in part, a function of how we experience something. Context and setting can turn something into a full-blown aesthetic object even as it hints that all objects are aesthetic objects to some degree. When we take something as art rather than as some other sort of thing, it is not as if a new object appears in the world. Rather, an aesthetic object appears as one way in which an object can appear. Taken to the extreme, this becomes the claim that anything at all can be anything at all if we simply say it is and take it to be such. “Ceci n'est pas une pipe”? Well, it is and it isn't. And this is not just a urinal? It is and it isn't. 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