Body of Evidence

Abstract

Materializing Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Brooklyn Museum Brooklyn, New York September 14, 2012-February 17, 2013 Published in 1973, Lucy Lippard's Six Years: The Dematerialization of Size Object became one of the earliest indispensable overviews of art now generally categorized as conceptual. Like the compact volume itself, this exhibition constituted a crash course on a period when manually produced art objects were disparaged and banished, leaving only residual evidence in the form of writings, photographs, printed matter of all kinds, film, nascent video, announcements, declarations, notebooks, schematics, ephemera, and a few actual things. Through her oft-mentioned mentorship with artist Sol LeWitt and marriage to proto-minimalist painter Robert Ryman, Lippard was an insider to the territorial world of post-pop downtown art. Following painter Frank Stella's blunt statements on how a painting gets made, LeWitt's comments on art were a game changer; his nearly biblical Sentences on Conceptual Art appeared in the Anglo-American publication & Lartguage (1969) and a great deal of what was presented at the Brooklyn Museum, stylistically and philosophically, evolved out of this set, of reductive declarations. Minimalist art stalled in the late 1960s, allowing openings for artists recast as information age linguists enthralled by language more common to Frankfurt School academics than to art bar raconteurs. Shown chronologically, much of the work exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum was unfamiliar and not illustrated in Lipparcfs book. Attention was required for the grainy videos and detailed inspection of vitrines among the occasional physical object. Engaging the 173 displayed pieces immersed the viewer in a delirium of names cross-refereneed like Russian nesting dolls within other period shows, publications, and group projects. Lippard's circle, while wide and international, was not inclusive or especially permissive; a puritanical design aesthetic dominated the typewritten text on white surfaces and black-and-white 35mm photographs or snapshots. Eminently transportable, words and instructions could travel in any form through the mail (Aspen Magazine or On Kawara's 1969 .1 Got up postcard series) or over the telephone. The minimalist grid, in the form of readymade graph paper, provided a clinical template for all manner of notations. Photography was frugally employed as proof an event occurred, as in John Baldessari's Cremation Project (1970), a set of color images witnessing the solemn incineration of the artisi's work previous to 1967. Those new to this art may appreciate a Monty Pythonesque absurdity in the documentation (the majority of which was recently reprinted) of actions like Robert Smithson's Glue Pour (1970), Bas Jan Ader's fall from a roof (1970), or Robert Kinmont's 1969 handstand series. …