'Global Conceptualism': The Big Idea

In Vancouver, a man dressed as Mr. Peanut campaigns for mayor. In Hungary, throngs of student protesters are stopped by the police for carrying terracotta bricks on their shoulders. And in Japan, a photographer composes a score to be played to the changing phases of the moon. What would seem to be a random series of unrelated acts of political satire, social commentary and spiritual meditation-and by artists from across the world, no less-are all, astonishingly, put under one roof and under the general rubric of "conceptualism." Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s-1980s, at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, is divided into ten sections, each a complete exhibition unto itself, containing a dazzling collection of photographs, sculptures and prints from 135 artists around the globe, both famous and unknown. Ambitious? You bet.

The show is especially impressive considering what the curators are up against. First, there's the popular opinion that conceptual art, because of its emphasis on ideas over objects, on language over visuality on non-traditional over traditional forms of art, is therefore dry, academic and unintelligible. And then there's the art-historical notion that non-Western forms of conceptualism are merely borrowed from Western prototypes.

Global Conceptualism successfully squashes both of these notions. The layout of the exhibit manages to present these monochromatic, text-heavy, conceptualist pieces in their most appealing light. Due in part to a shortage in space (the exhibit was originally held at the somewhat larger Queens Museum of Art in New York), there isn't much white wall space to spare, and, for a show full of conceptual pieces, this is a boon: each room presents a rich, appealing, visually stimulating array of sculptures, treatises, photographs and pieces of music. And the organization of the show into regions, each curated separately, effectively presents conceptualism as a global phenomenon, emerging independently throughout the world in response to local social, political and economic issues. While North American conceptual artists, like Allan Kaprow, started sending small pieces of art through the mail as a critique of the gallery system, artists in the Communist bloc used similar techniques as a way to get past the oppressive censors.

However, with this emphasis on the local "points of origin" of conceptual art, the exhibit fails to exploit the perhaps larger benefits of a more thematic approach towards global conceptualism, one which would emphasize the common concerns of these artists, rather than their different local impetuses. Whether in South Korea or Argentina, these conceptual artists sought to broaden the scope of what art is and could be. Their work is characterized by intense political, social and economic engagement, by a running critique on the commodification of art objects and by the involvement of the audience. Whether in performance art, mail art, language art or manipulation of found objects, these artists saw their work as vehicles for dissent, stand-ins for forbidden speech and catalysts for thought. This is, in itself, another major problem with Global Conceptualism: the contradiction of a museum exhibition of works of art which were intended as protests against museums. Yoko Ono's "Painting in Three Stanzas," for instance, was meant as a set of instructions for the creation of a painting, not as an art object itself. Gerhard Richter and Konrad Lueg's "Life with Pop," in which the two artists sat in a Dsseldorf department store posing as "living sculpture," was meant to be experienced in person, not via photograph. And Tamas Szentjoby's "Czecho-Slovakian Radio Brick"-a brick which was used as an ironic substitute for hand-held radios after the latter were confiscated by Soviet authorities-was meant as a social protest, not a museum piece.

Nonetheless, the show does its best to acknowledge these inconsistencies, in both the pervasive wall texts and in the emphasis on the interactivity of art (in the Miami version of the show, for instance, the curators set up games in each room and encouraged the viewers to play with them). Ultimately, these inconsistencies are dwarfed by the beauty and power of many of the show's offerings. Pieces like Anna Lupas's "Humid Installation," in which she organized an entire Romanian village to hang its laundry to dry on the same day, are beautiful in their eloquent and simple blending of traditional local culture with a contemporary aesthetic.

In opposition to the popular notion that conceptualism is dry and hyper-intellectual, the curators are careful to pick pieces which display a range of emotions. Many of the pieces in the show, for instance, are disarmingly comical: like Vincent Trasov's campaign for mayor as Mr. Peanut, or Goran Trbuljak's photograph of a door with the inscription, "From time to time I stuck my finger through a hole in the door of the Modern Art Gallery without the management's knowledge." Others, like Nomura Hitoshi's "'Moon' Score" (a piece of music written to the phases of the moon) or Wei Guangqing's "Suicide Series" (a series of photographs demonstrating different ways of killing oneself) are at once emotionally haunting, spiritually probing and subtly ironic. It is this whimsical refusal to accept easy categorization which both characterizes conceptualism and makes this exhibit such a delight to see.