Historiographies of the Contemporary

Abstract

Since the landmark exhibition ‘Global Conceptualisms: points of origin 1950s-1980s’ held at the the Queens Museum in New York in 1999, the term ‘conceptualism’ has become consolidated as the principle means of describing ‘global art practices’ from the 1950s to date. While the term ‘global conceptualism’ may have consolidated itself, it appears to have shifted from the original intentions of that exhibition to now serve primarily as a shorthand for implying that global contemporary art is somehow derivative of procedural characteristics that stem from Conceptual Nort American Art. I believe that this historical relation to conceptual art is methodologically problematic, since it was a movement widely described as having arisen from the rejection of Greenbergian formalism and its belief in medium specificity. It is therefore a denomination that is culturally, geopolitically and art historically located. I intend to discuss other possible terminologies for these various practices, emphasising genealogies in which conceptual-like art emerged without direct relationship with canonical conceptual art.