ArtH 492/509 Alternative Art Since 1960

Topic: Global Conceptual Art

Professor Adair Rounthwaite, vadair@uw.edu

Monday and Wednesday, 1:30-2:50pm in Art Building Room 003

Office hours Wednesday 10-11am in my office, Art 367. You can also contact me by email to make an appointment with me on Zoom outside of those times

Zoom room: https://washington.zoom.us/my/adairrounthwaite

Gordon Bennett, Untitled (dismay, displace, disperse, dispirit, display, dismiss), 1989

Course summary:

Depending on your perspective, you may think of conceptual art as the most innovative art movement of the 20^th century, or as the driest and least appealing unit from your Art Since 1945 survey. Conceptualism revolves around the notion that art is defined by its idea. That radical notion brought about a sweeping reconsideration from the 1960s onwards of existing understandings of the artwork, the role of the artist, and what it means to experience art. 

Though dominant understandings of conceptualism used to revolve around a group of American and British artists working from the mid-1960s onwards, the past two decades have seen an explosion of scholarship that has greatly broadened that history in two key ways. First, scholars and curators now see conceptualism fundamentally as a global movement, in which ideas circulated around the world but where certain kinds of art practice took shape in response to their local circumstances. In that process, conceptual approaches sometimes gave rise to much more overtly political kinds of art than we might associated with “classic” analytic conceptualism. Second, scholarship of recent years has increasingly stressed the importance of conceptualism as the condition of emergence of contemporary art as such, meaning that this history is still very much alive and well in the present.

This course covers a wide range of case studies from the 1960s to now, which come from many different parts of the world. We’ll get a chance to revel in the diversity and ingenuity of conceptualism, and also to discuss historical methodologies for understanding it. What does conceptualism in particular tell us about the condition of art making around the world in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries? How has it been particularly important in the articulation of contemporary art’s political nature? What have artists gained by engaging local histories via a conceptual vocabulary? It is still useful to think of conceptual art as a “movement,” once we take it beyond the narrow bounds of Anglo-American history?

Learning goals:

• Gain familiarity with conceptualism as a movement and with key artists and writers associated with it.
• Learn about case studies from around the world and reflect on how their diversity and similarity informs what we consider to be an “art movement.”
• Engage in discussion and reflection about the value of decentering Western histories, and about the extent to which learning about a history can help you to critique it.
• Increase your understanding of the connections between contemporary art post-1989, and innovations that took place in the 1960s and 1970s.
• Strengthen your analytical writing and speaking skills.
• Practice managing your workflow proactively and obtaining support when necessary throughout the quarter.

Evaluations:

Full syllabus download: Rounthwaite 492 WI2024 v2.docx

School of Art policies: Policies 2021-22.pdf