An Idea of One s Own: Postconceptual Women Artists

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Janis Hood
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1 Harriet Bart Requiem

2 Harriet Bart Requiem (detail)

3 An Idea of One s Own: Postconceptual Women Artists [P]ostconceptual art is not a traditional art-historical or art critical concept at the level of medium, aesthetic form, style or movement. It denotes an art premised on the legacy of conceptual art, broadly construed... Peter Osborne The Postconceptual Condition Beginning in the mid-1960s, when art critic Clement Greenberg s formalist theories of Modernism seemed to have played themselves out, artists, including prominent women artists, began to experiment with art that emphasized ideas over objects and materials. Greenberg s notion that art should be the irreducible essence of a particular medium had become a limitation on further development and artists began to fill the resulting void with art that was consciously not confined by the attributes of a particular medium. They used words, attitudes, instructions, and references, all embodied in a variety of media chosen because they were previously considered external to the category of art. The works were made to challenge the prevailing cultural understanding of art as an object to be bought, sold, and admired. The ideas were at first just as formalist as the Modernist theory that had been replaced. Hanne Darboven, for example, a German expatriate artist, created Konstrucktionen, works on paper featuring a neutral language of numbers in linear constructions. Sol LeWitt developed his Wall Drawings which were mathematically conceived geometric abstractions not even made by the artist but rather fabricated by the museum, or another licensee, following LeWitt s precise instructions. In each case, the art itself was in the idea not the execution. As Lawrence Weiner said in his 1968 Declaration of Intent, the art imagined by the artist need not be built. In this show is Yoko Ono s Grapefruit, a seminal early work in this formalist tradition. Presented under the headings of Music, Painting, Event, Poetry, and Object, each page of the book features a set of instructions proposing an artwork that readers can imagine or realize themselves. Cough Piece, for example, instructs readers to Keep coughing a year. Many of these instruction paintings from Grapefruit were used by the artist in subsequent gallery performances, including the group show at the Indica Gallery in London in 1966 where she met John Lennon. In contrast to the purely analytical formalism of this work, in the early 1970s some conceptual artists like feminist Mary Kelly viewed their art as moving beyond a self-referential critique of what formalists viewed to be an autonomous art world. They challenged the hierarchical, ideological, and commercial distinctions among artists, critics, curators, and viewers, and they produced a more synthetic art that was engaged with social or political phenomena. This turn in the tradition is reflected here in the work of Sarah Bryant, an American expatriate artist who has collaborated with a biology professor to create Figure Study, a multi-media ensemble of linoleum block prints, letterpress printing, and transparencies on drafting film. The work presents a visualization of important data from a detailed cross-sectional study of differences in populations across the world. Combining both the formalist and nonformalist traditions is the elegant and restrained work of Harriet Bart, a Minneapolis-based artist who often explores the themes of memory and commemoration of anonymous or unacknowledged people. Her work spans many media including installations, sculptural objects, books, prints, and textiles. In this show her work ranges from 13 14, a formalist graphic work based both on Wallace Stevens Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird and on the Loculus of Archimedes, to the evocative installation Requiem, a unique piece compiled over a period of nine years and bearing the handwritten names of American soldiers killed in the war in Iraq. In 2020, Bart s work will be the subject of a major retrospective held jointly at the Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota and at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. From the beginning of Conceptual Art as a recognizable movement, women have played a prominent if not equal role as artists, critics, and curators. We are pleased to present in this exhibition the work of one of the movement s founders, Yoko Ono, and also the work of six women artists who are continuing the legacy. Michael Thompson Boreas Fine Art

5 An Idea of One s Own: Postconceptual Women Artists September 25 - October 31, 2018 and at ExpoChicago September 27-30, 2018 Harriet Bart Inge Bruggeman Sarah Bryant Ann Hamilton Yoko Ono Veronika Schäpers Barb Tetenbaum 260 E. Chestnut Street, Suite 1714 Chicago, Illinois tel fax Like us on Facebook: facebook.com/boreasfinart Follow us on Follow us on

LESSON TWO: Language Arts

LESSON TWO: Language Arts 12 IMAGE SIX: Joseph Kosuth. American, born 1945. One and Three Chairs. 1965. Wood folding chair, photographic copy of a chair, and photographic enlargement of a dictionary definition