Conceptual art

As the artist Mel Bochner suggested as early as 1970, in explaining why he does not like the epithet "conceptual", it is not always entirely clear what "concept" refers to, and it runs the risk of being confused with "intention".

The French artist Marcel Duchamp paved the way for the conceptualists, providing them with examples of prototypically conceptual works — the readymades, for instance.

In 1956 the founder of Lettrism, Isidore Isou, developed the notion of a work of art which, by its very nature, could never be created in reality, but which could nevertheless provide aesthetic rewards by being contemplated intellectually.

This concept, also called Art esthapériste (or "infinite-aesthetics"), derived from the infinitesimals of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz – quantities which could not actually exist except conceptually.

In 1961, philosopher and artist Henry Flynt coined the term "concept art" in an article bearing the same name which appeared in the proto-Fluxus publication An Anthology of Chance Operations.

According to Greenberg Modern art followed a process of progressive reduction and refinement toward the goal of defining the essential, formal nature of each medium.

However, by the end of the 1960s it was certainly clear that Greenberg's stipulations for art to continue within the confines of each medium and to exclude external subject matter no longer held traction.

Many conceptual artists' work can therefore only be known about through documentation which is manifested by it, e.g., photographs, written texts or displayed objects, which some might argue are not in and of themselves the art.

"[18] The British philosopher and theorist of conceptual art Peter Osborne suggests that among the many factors that influenced the gravitation toward language-based art, a central role for conceptualism came from the turn to linguistic theories of meaning in both Anglo-American analytic philosophy, and structuralist and post structuralist Continental philosophy during the middle of the twentieth century.

[20] Osborne later made the observation that contemporary art is post-conceptual[21] in a public lecture delivered at the Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Villa Sucota in Como on July 9, 2010.

Another vital intersection was explored in Ascott's use of the thesaurus in 1963 telematic connections:: timeline, which drew an explicit parallel between the taxonomic qualities of verbal and visual languages – a concept that would be taken up in Joseph Kosuth's Second Investigation, Proposition 1 (1968) and Mel Ramsden's Elements of an Incomplete Map (1968).

Early "concept" artists like Henry Flynt (1940– ), Robert Morris (1931–2018), and Ray Johnson (1927–1995) influenced the later, widely accepted movement of conceptual art.