Post-conceptual art

The writer Eldritch Priest, specifically ties John Baldessari's piece Throwing four balls in the air to get a square (best of 36 tries) from 1973 (in which the artist attempted to do just that, photographing the results, and eventually selecting the best out of 36 tries, with 36 being the determining number as that is the standard number of shots on a roll of 35mm film) as an early example of post-conceptual art.

[4] It has been connected to the work of Robert Smithson,[5] Mel Bochner, Vera Molnár, Robert Barry, Peter Nagy, Rutherford Chang, François Morellet, Jennifer Bolande, Yves Klein,[6] Piero Manzoni,[7] Lygia Clark,[8] Roy Ascott, Joseph Nechvatal,[9] Allan McCollum, Harold Cohen, Mary Kelly, Annette Lemieux,[7] Matt Mullican, and the intermedia concept employed in the mid-sixties by Fluxus artist Dick Higgins.

Subsequently, those theories cast doubt upon the necessity of materiality itself as conceptual artists "de-materialized" the art object and began to produce time-based and ephemeral artworks.

[13] Thus the widespread use of the term “post-conceptual” as a prefix to painting such as that of Gerhard Richter[14] and photography such as that of Andreas Gursky.

[17] It was their exhibitions and writings[18][19] that originally fashioned the theoretical context for a new kind of neo (or post) conceptual art; one that argued simultaneously against Neo-Expressionism and The Pictures Generation.