Description
The chart is an interactive lineage map. Context 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 Context art (1990s – Present), it traces two movements that shaped it, a mix of well-established and looser, indirect links: Conceptual art and Institutional critique.
The term Context art (German: Kontextkunst) was introduced through the seminal exhibition and an accompanying publication Kontext Kunst. The Art of the 90s curated by Peter Weibel at the Neue Galerie im Künstlerhaus Graz (Austria) in 1993 (02.10.–07.11.1993).
Both exhibition and publication aimed to establish grounds for recognizing a new form of artistic practice emerging in the early 1990s. The presentation displayed different approaches though all shared an interest in the use of methods of contextualization to reveal connections between the art works and their conditions of production, whether these were formal, social, or ideologically defined. Institutional critique, feminist positions, later also critiques of precarious economic conditions and issues of globalization, all closely related to social and political changes, became relevant subjects of artistic production. Read more ↗