… CONCEPT HAS NEVER MEANT HORSE

With works by
Fareed Armaly, Robert Barry, Pauline Boudry/Brigitta Kuster/Renate Lorenz, Gottfried Bechtold, Kaucyila Brooke, Alice Creischer/Andreas Siekmann, Maria Eichhorn, Andrea Fraser, Dan Graham, Hans Haacke, Mary Kelly, John Knight, Julius Koller, Jarosław Kozłowski, Richard Kriesche, Hans Küng/Dorit Margreiter/Florian Pumhösl/Mathias Poledna, David Lamelas, Dorit Margreiter, Sergey Maslov&Elena Vorobyeva/Viktor Vorobyev, Henrik Olesen, Adrian Piper, Martha Rosler, Allan Sekula, Goran Trbuljak, Tucumán Arde (Archiv Graciela Carnevale), Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Heimo Zobernig, and numerous other artists represented in the Reading Zone with international art journals, artist’s books and catalogues.

While the Generali Foundation’s collection toured abroad, this final edition of the thematic exhibition trilogy in Vienna[1] focused on a critical look at Conceptual art. The title reflected a passage from the French Conceptual art pioneer Daniel Buren in his text “Achtung!,” in which he refers to the contradictions in the discussion about Conceptual art since the 1960s. The works in the exhibition spanned from the first generation of Conceptual Art to younger artists who address their own involvement or counteract conceptual procedures in an informed but critical position.

Conceptual art, which at the time of the exhibition was still largely known in its Anglo-American and linguistic variety, developed transnationally in the context of the social and political changes of the 1960s. Beyond the now obsolete geopolitical identification, it represents a critical meditation on the medial, institutional and social conditions of art. Serial structures, schematic procedures, diagrams, text and theoretical reflection in conjunction with new forms of information dissemination led to a radical expansion of the artistic field of action. Conceptual art can also be considered as a highly emancipatory movement because artists used completely new ways of working to challenge traditional assignments and definitions of roles as well as the value-system of modernist art criticism and theory. The factors that constitute the system of meaning of art, and its institutions, were rendered problematic. The myth of Conceptual art developed as a dematerialized, market-critical art in which processes of planning and philosophical considerations were favored over the subject and its artisanal production. The economic implications of advanced marketing strategies in Conceptual art were often overlooked.

A reading zone set up in a display by Heimo Zobernig offered an in-depth insight into the new forms of artistic production by means of historical magazines and publications. The numerous historical art journals, artists’ books and other rare ephemera acquired over the years in connection with the art collection, otherwise only accessible on request in the study room, were made accessible to a wider public in the exhibition.

[1] COLLECTED VIEWS FROM EAST OR WEST (2004), and HOW SOCIETY AND POLITICS GET IN THE PICTURE (2005)