Description
The chart is an interactive lineage map. Conceptual art sits at the center, on a timeline that runs from older movements at the top to newer ones at the bottom. The movements that influenced it appear above it, any parallel movements it developed alongside sit on its own row, and the movements it later influenced appear below. Every line is a real, cited connection between two movements: a solid line is an influence historians broadly agree on, and a dashed line is an indirect, parallel, or contested link.
For Conceptual art (c. 1960s – Present), it traces one movement that shaped it, a well-established link: Dada; it runs alongside three parallel movements, all well-established links: Fluxus, Minimalism and Serial art; it fans out to 14 movements it went on to influence, a mix of well-established and looser, indirect links: Art & Language, Arte Povera, Computer art, Context art, Feminist art, Institutional critique, Land art, Mail art, Net art and Sots art, and four more.
Tony Godfrey, author of Conceptual Art (Art & Ideas) (1998), asserts that conceptual art questions the nature of art, a notion that Joseph Kosuth elevated to a definition of art itself in his seminal, early manifesto of conceptual art, Art after Philosophy (1969). The notion that art should examine its own nature was already a potent aspect of the influential art critic Clement Greenberg's vision of Modern art during the 1950s. With the emergence of an exclusively language-based art in the 1960s, however, conceptual artists such as Art & Language, Joseph Kosuth (who became the American editor of Art-Language), and Lawrence Weiner began a far more radical interrogation of art than was previously possible (see below). One of the first and most important things they questioned was the common assumption that the role of the artist was to create special kinds of material objects. Read more ↗
