Art Institute photography department head Matthew Witkovsky leaves the conceptualizing to the 57 conceptual artists featured in “Light Years: Conceptual Art and the Photograph, 1964-1977.” In his catalog essay, he categorizes the show as simply a “historical survey,” using 140-plus works to document a tangent in photographic practice that interested certain self-conscious artists in the 1960s and ’70s.
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Conceptual art is little more—and maybe a little less—than the idea that art is really nothing but ideas. Pigments, emulsions, marble, and other materials don’t matter. Galleries and museums, however, are indispensable. A more radical curator than Witkovsky, truer to the reflexive tendency in conceptual art, might’ve focused on the scholars, collectors, and critics who institutionalized the genre and the anti-art agenda of pioneers like Henry Flynt, the Fluxus artist responsible for coining the term “concept art” in 1961. (He also picketed the Museum of Modern Art with signs reading “Destroy Art” and “Demolish Art Museums.”) Witkovsky notes but never underlines the elements of irony and parody in his survey.
Here’s where conceptual art and its apologists bring to mind that entertainment industry term of art, “high concept,” which originated in the 1970s when Barry Diller (then at ABC) pushed for made-for-television movies that could be pitched and promoted with a single sentence. “I like ideas, especially movie ideas, that you can hold in your hand,” Steven Spielberg said in ’78. “If a person can tell me the idea in 25 words or less, it’s going to make a pretty good movie.” Onetime Diller protege Michael Eisner wrote in 1982, “The demand for an interesting and imaginative idea should be the first, second, third, fourth and fifth criteria in deciding to commit to any project.” And in 1991 Jeffrey Katzenberg faxed colleagues at the Walt Disney Company to say that the “real meaning of high concept is that ingenuity is more important than production values.”
Maybe. In 1966 Bochner assembled “Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed as Art,” a show that was itself a work of conceptual art. All the “visible things” were collected in four big binders that were placed on pedestals in the otherwise empty gallery space. In 1969 Robert Barry created Closed Gallery, which involved closing galleries in three cities. You can learn more in the reading room at the exit of “Light Years.”
Through 3/11: Mon-Wed and Fri-Sun 10:30 AM-5 PM, Thu 10:30 AM-8 PM, Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan, 877-443-3933, artinstituteofchicago.org, $12-$18 general admission.
