Conceptual Art in Britain, 1964−1979, exhibition review: Here's a bright idea

Tate Britain’s triumphant show perfectly captures an era when artists rejected painting for ideals and fantasies, says Matthew Collings
Food for thought: Soul City (Pyramid of Oranges) first created in 1967 by Roelof Louw
Matthew Collings12 April 2016

If you are fed up with conceptual art, nothing in British Conceptual Art 1964-1979 at Tate Britain will change your mind. It’s a staging of the movement on the terms of its own notorious ideal: a combination of clarity, knowledge and contemptuous rejection of painting.

I like paintings and, in fact, I’m a painter myself as well as a critic. But I wasn’t offended by this show — I found it absolutely exhilarating. You hardly ever see anything here that isn’t a document or photo document. The curatorial vision is ruthless. A little pile of sand and a pyramid of real oranges are almost the only departure from black-and-white and grey. From one large, stark, white space to another, ideas are laid out almost always in a grid or a row.

What kind of ideas? You can’t get much out of an art event like this unless you’re willing to be flexible about what constitutes one. They don’t have to be scholarly but they certainly can be. The conceptual collective Art & Language asks you to look at a wall display of page after page of dense text about elements, frameworks and axes of interpretation, as if it were a new kind of word painting.

More pleasant or more whimsical but still challenging stuff includes documentation of a walk for 100 miles by Richard Long; the same artist making an event out of walking through grass to create a line; Bruce McLean’s experiments with plinths, where the languorously lounging poses are the artist’s own body instead of sculptures; Gilbert & George’s sculpture consisting of the artists singing; and Sue Arrowsmith’s set of photos of a white line around a black void, which tease the viewer with the question as to whether something white is being painted black or something black painted white.

Intelligent work: Keith Arnatt’s Art as an Act of Retraction (detail, 1971)
Keith Arnatt Estate/ DACS, London/Sam Drake

These thoughts ain’t deep, I agree. But isolating them and manifesting them as objects, even if the objects are as close as possible to non-objects — the buzzword at the time was “dematerialisation” — produces surprisingly engaging results.

I also like the decision about the time period. It reflects two reigns in the international art world of the art of painting, one before conceptual art and one after. “Before” was big, abstract canvases from the US emphasising pure colour, whose champion was the New York art critic, Clement Greenberg. “After” was messy pictures of fantasies from the US and continental Europe. These didn’t have a single critical leader, and the mood was not high-minded as with Greenberg. It was much more like the art world we know today. In fact, it was the beginning of it: a fascinating or exhausting circus of everything with multiple curatorial ringmasters.

Challenging: detail from Bruce McLean’s Pose Work for Plinths (1971)
Bruce McLean. Courtesy Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin

But first there was conceptual art and its priorities, dominating the scene for 15 years. Here the artists themselves were really their own curators. They wanted to control their own meanings: rigorous, daunting, intellectual enquiry on the one hand and an almost dreamlike, verging on absurd, acceptance of the outer reaches of insubstantial thought on the other.

Whatever occurred to you could be art. You might decide to go to the Tate next Tuesday. Or you might consider that your whole sense of being is nothing but a random fact. There are intelligent works in the show on each of these themes by, respectively, Keith Arnatt and Stephen Willats.

I was at art school during conceptual art’s final phase. As students we knew “documenting” things was Right On. We wondered how we could afford cameras and how to get a photo (of more or less anything) framed, so the result would possess the look we knew to be absolutely formidable. How could we get a caption printed next to it? Should we use Letraset?

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We were too inexperienced to know what abstract paintings were. But we were certain it was career suicide to be concerned with them. You shouldn’t make a line; you should document it. You shouldn’t create shapes with brushes; you should photograph them. If you ever painted anything it should be black. The already mentioned collective Art & Language (which remains active today but with only two members based in Banbury in Oxfordshire — in the late Sixties there were a few dozen all over the world) emerges as king because of its art journal, whose strict title, Art-Language, makes it absolutely clear what the deal is.

You won’t understand half of what you’re reading but it’s thrilling to be confronted by these texts, which are mocking, clever and brain-wrenchingly abstract but somehow at the same time frequently funny. Assembled by artists who were happy to blow their own minds with intellectual doubt, the journal’s aim seemed to be to acknowledge or even bring about art’s final and total loss of confidence. Who knows what was supposed to replace art if Art & Language had its way?

Challenging: detail from Bruce McLean’s Pose Work for Plinths (1971)
Bruce McLean. Courtesy Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin

The great triumph of the show (the genius behind it is the Tate’s curator of contemporary art, Andrew Wilson) is the approach taken to presentation. It always seems absolutely in line with the form and content of the art. The viewer, who might be amused, delighted, bored or bewildered, or joyously engaged — it’s up to you — is offered chunks of meaning laid out with the scientific dignity of a display of ancient Biblical textual fragments.

Slowly absorbing everything the show could throw at me, I often found myself hungrily devouring didactic texts about representation and politics, a sort of ABC of how to think if you were in the swim of art in those times.

This certainly goes for Victor Burgin’s Lei-Feng, 1974. A bland ad in Vogue is repeated with added captions relating perversely to the ideological training of a Chinese soldier under Mao. Burgin interrupts these image-caption paradoxes with lengthy self-authored texts explaining ideology.

He draws on examples from a range of linguists, semioticians and philosophers. The name of one is spelt wrongly (it should be Peirce not Pierce). But instead of the error undermining credibility it rather emphasises the artwork’s hot urgency and pioneer status.

Conceptual Art in Britain 1964-1979 is at Tate Britain, SW1 (020 7887 8888, tate.org.uk) until Aug 29

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