Conceptual Art and Institutional Critique
Most critics point out the difficulty to define what conceptual art is. All art and most creative activities now are in one sense or another conceptual. According to Harrison the term ‘Conceptual Art’ first appeared in 1967 in special issue of the American magazine Art forum in the essay by Sol LeWitt ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art'. "When an artist uses a conceptual form of art,’ he wrote, ‘it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair... Conceptual art is only good when the idea is good."(Harrison, 2004)
Art is, according to Wood, about dematerialization of the object of art. The ‘work’ lay in idea. “It did not have to be physically realized in order to enjoy the status of ‘work of art".(Wood, 2002).
In chapter 1 of the book ‘Themes in contemporary art’ (2004) Paul Wood says that artists begin to see that they can free themselves from the tradition that there is the painting or sculpture and they have to fit into one or another of those clear categories. Artists start to ask questions about various relationships between the object and the institutional structure that presents this object to the world.
Conceptual artists started to look further then just physical, phenomenal, logical or special context. They looked at the political, institutional and mental context. They started to use photography, frequently in conjunction with texts of various kinds. Later on conceptualists began to use also video, performance and installations. These activities are positioned differently in the culture at large, united only by their difference from medium-specific modernist painting and sculpture, and a correspondingly greater emphasis on the ‘idea’.
„Benjamin Buchloh has characterized the trajectory of conceptual art during 1960 as a move from ‘an aesthetic of administration and legal organization and institutional validation’ to ‘the critique of institution"(Osborne, 2005).
“Institutional critique is an artistic practice that reflects critically on its own place within galleries and museums and on the concept and social function of art itself. Such concerns have always been a part of modern art but took on new urgency at the end of the 1960s, when - driven by the social upheaval of the time and enabled by the tools and techniques of conceptual art -institutional critique emerged as a genre."(Alberro, 2009)
Institutional critique is conceptualist art movement which does not eliminate the object.
The artists started to draw attention to institutions themselves which propagate certain values based on an art official.
Institutional critiques are interested in how representation itself is a political act. How the production of images is itself the encapsulation of value systems and invisible networks.