Global Conceptualism examines key moments when artists in various locales around the world began to create conceptual art as a means to question the hegemony of the object over ideas in art, critique the way art is institutionalized both in museums and in modern economies, and find a new role for art and the artist in society by involving art in social and political protest.
Containing over 240 works by more than 135 artists, Global Conceptualism features photographs, documentation, films, videos, postcards, posters, drawings, as well as paintings, mixed media objects, and installations.
The Exhibition is marked by the regional perspectives and careful discrimination of its team of eleven international curators. The exhibition is organized in two chronological sections (1950s through approximately 1973 and 1973 through the ’80s) and then arranged by geographical region (Japan, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Latin America, North America, Australia and New Zealand, Soviet Union, Africa, South Korea, and Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong) with the pace and progress of local historical events respected, when addressing ideas generated by the art.
Headed by project leaders Jane Farver, QMA’s Director of Exhibitions, Luis Camnitzer, artist and professor at SUNY Old Westbury, and Rachel Weiss, curator and professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, exhibition planning has been made in concert with a team of eleven international curators. A 280-page exhibition catalogue includes essays by cultural historian Stephen Bann, art critic Apinan Poshynanda and regional curators:Chiba Shigeo and Reiko Tomii (Japan), Claude Gintz (Western Europe), László Beke (Eastern Europe), Mari Carmen Ramírez (Latin America), Peter Wollen (North America), Terry Smith (Australia and New Zealand), Okwui Enwezor (Africa), Margarita Tupitsyn (Russia), Sung Wan-kyung (South Korea), and Gao Minglu (Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong). Global Conceptualism provides snapshots of key moments of conceptualist practice over the course of several generations.
The exhibition as a whole offers glimpses, through conceptualist art pieces created in conjunction with them of watershed events of social and political protest-Budapest (1956), Paris and Prague (1968), the June resistance in Seoul (1987), the events of Tiananmen Square (1989), and the chaos leading up to the first elections in South Africa (1994). During these and other events conceptual artists brought art and life closer together: Global Conceptualism shows artists cleaning the streets (Hi Red Center, Japan), staging an impromptu exhibition in a courtroom (Akasegawa Genpei, Japan), reporting on life from a phone booth (Nomura Hitoshi, Japan), declaring Bratislava and all its inhabitants a work of art (Happsoc, Slovenia), placing money boxes to collect funds for political martyrs on the streets of Budapest (Miklós Erdély, Hungary), wandering Europe’s parks carrying art on a stick (André Cadere), asking street directions from strangers (Stanley Brouwn, Netherlands), opening an empty gallery space to the public (Yves Klein, France), placing fictional news reports in newspapers (Eduardo Costa, Argentina), writing chalk circles around people on public sidewalks and declaring them works of art (Alberto Greco, Argentina), joining every political party in South Africa at once (Kendell Geers), creating detailed blueprints to organize mass demonstrations and funeral marches (Choi Byung-soo, South Korea), and even firing two gunshots at an exhibition in Beijing (Xiao Lu and Tang Song). The fascinating work of artist collectives is a secondary theme of Global Conceptualism: BikyÇtÇ (Japan), Grup de Treball (Spain), Happsoc (Hungary), Gorgona Group (Yugoslavia), Rosario Group/Tucumán Arde collective (Argentina), Trans Art (Australia), Collective Actions Group (Russia), Laboratoire Agit-Art (Dakar), Min Joong collectives, Labor Newsreel group, Space Time Group and Reality & Utterance (all South Korea), and Xiamen Dada group (Mainland China) are all represented. Finally, conceptualist art often focuses on art itself, and Global Conceptualism finds itself revisiting several famous exhibitions, often protests, or catalysts to protest, among them the Tone Prize Exhibition (Japan, 1964), Seth Siegelaub’s Xeroxbook show (New York, 1968), the Salon de Mai (Paris, 1968), and Art in China/Avant-Garde (Beijing, 1989).