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Creative practice research has been a prolific and promising marriage of arts and academia, and it has produced a great number of quality work from across disciplines. Still, seen as a bit of an eccentric entity by more traditional research communities, which often leads to a slight confusion or misunderstanding of what it stands for and how it’s to be managed.Questions that keep coming back are: what exactly is creative practice research, where does the new contribution to knowledge happen, what is the relation between theory and practice, what if there is no tangible output to speak of at all, and how to demonstrate academic rigour are just some of many questions that keep coming back.This provocation proposes to consider creative practice research as a form of conceptual art. As such, it responds to the clear necessity to use creative practice (in any shape or form) as a response to the pursuit of knowledge and clearly defined ideas. This paper will explore the implications of this proposal and how it might lead to a slightly alternative consideration for creative practice research and its value in academia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout the 1970s, a drive towards the diversification of mediums available to artists led to artists working across numerous mediums not usually associated with visual art. While some came to work with sound as a central focus in their practice, most used sound as a medium to be employed in particular artworks for conceptual purposes. The paper is focused on five audio and sound exhibitions presented in New York City between 1978 and 1984. These large group exhibitions were held in alternative art spaces and not-for-profit art galleries and have received little critical attention beyond reviews published in local newspapers and art magazines. As such, these exhibitions have all but disappeared from the history of sound in art and from art history in general. I will argue that this cluster of group shows signal to an emergent practice that was moving past the post-medium condition and conceptual art towards the postmodernism of the 1980s. These exhibitions point to an understanding of sound as a medium of visual art that is at odds with contemporary scholarship in the sonic arts, which favours a music-based understanding of approaches to sound within the art gallery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research showed that art could improve organizations through a kind of importation of artistic skills related to creativity and uncertainty management. Three critics have emerged to contest such artistic interventions in organizations: technical criticism, highlighting practical difficulties of the process; representational criticism which relies on social representations of art; conceptual criticism, which shows unbridgeable differences between art and management. This article explores contemporary art as a potential answer to these critics. Contemporary art gives up esthetic matters and does not need any know-how: everyone can practice it (technical answer). This post-esthetic art appears rather as a professional method than transcendental inspiration (representational answer). The difficult transition between these representations contributes to a greater creativity (conceptual answer). Switching to the paradigm of contemporary art shows the importance of the translation process between art and management, which should be placed at the heart of arts-based methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of the recent involvement of contemporary art in the field of museology, my article aims to point out the revolutionary role that conceptual art played in the understanding of heritage. This article argues that conceptual art crucially advanced the critical redefinition of the nature, value, display, role, and agency of the heritage object. Due to the specific understanding of the “object” and the institutional critique discourse it established, conceptual art significantly furthered the development of new methodologies in museological practice since the beginning of the twentieth century. Although new museology gradually involved contemporary art, a theory of its specific modus operandi in this context and – as will be argued – the particular contribution of conceptual art have not been systematically pursued so far. This article will demonstrate how the involvement of conceptual, performative, and multi-disciplinary artistic practices as well as display strategies have contributed to the elaboration of innovatory, critical, de-colonial, and inclusive methods of heritage transmission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Decolonial scholars call for fashion definitions and perspectives from all cultures, and this article responds to these requests. Numerous theories and positions have inspired and shaped this conceptual model, including valuable insight from First Nations scholars who have explored fashion theories that integrate First Nations philosophies and ontologies. This First Nations fashion, art and style conceptual model explores the practice and outlines the themes of Culture, Expression, and Self-determination. First Nations fashion, art and style, as a term, acknowledges the holistic practice and industry, which includes fashion design, style, and the intersection of art via textiles and garments. The Cultural element within the model explores the continuation of cultural practice through design and dress and how it can contribute to cultural well-being. The Expression element describes contemporary cultural and intersectional identity forms through traditional and modern garments. The Self-determination component explores the autonomy of First Nations fashion practices and how First Nations people self-determine their fashion brands via cultural, financial, and environmental sustainability. This article concludes with recommendations for further theoretical and empirical research on First Nations fashion, art and style. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the conventional art historical genealogy, artists associated with the Pictures Generation would find their conceptual adversary in Neo-Expressionism. The twinned issues of authorship and individual expression were key to this antagonism. While artists such as Julian Schnabel purportedly embraced the idea that painterly marks were unmediated expressive registrations, Cindy Sherman and Sherrie Levine, according to critics associated with the journal October, aimed to deconstruct the very means of representation. As this discourse advanced in the 1980s, a remarkably similar debate began brewing in regard to AIDS imagery. While photographers including Nicholas Nixon produced harrowing depictions of AIDS patients designed to express the epidemic's deleterious effects, activist organizations virulently opposed this strategy, opting for a political rhetoric centered on text-based graphics that pointed to the epidemic's structural roots and representational distortions. Robert Blanchon, the subject of this article, created a curious synthesis of these otherwise opposed methodologies, matrixing sexuality, death, and their idiosyncratic expressions through the formal language of Conceptual art. His work approaches what Isabelle Graw calls "conceptual expression," using what Benjamin Buchloh famously called the "aesthetic of administration" to analyze AIDS and the sexual freedom it displaced. In addition to introducing the work of this underdiscussed artist, this article frames Blanchon's practice as a prompt to reconsider the prevailing divide within a certain art historical lineage between "critical" art and subjective expression to make room for a framework that accounts for artists' porous movement between analytic and more personalized approaches to activist artwork. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes Chinese video artist Zhang Peili's latex-glove-themed paintings and conceptual art from the 1980s. It argues that they are an important intervention into post-socialist China's politicized discussions on art's role in society. Building on Mel Chen's discussion of animacy hierarchies as sociopolitical constructs, the article reads Zhang's latex gloves as animate—transgressing boundaries of "aliveness" between humans and objects. It locates Zhang and his art collective, "Pond" Society, amid mid-1980s discourses on art's emotional contagiousness, highlighting that the Chinese art establishment's insistence on Realism and on the Maoist art methodology of "immersion into life" (shenru shenghuo) reflected anxieties about "healthy" art making that could promote national progress. Zhang's series of X? glove paintings from 1986 onward represent strategic promotions of his medical conceptualization of art. Zhang was infected during the 1988 Shanghai hepatitis A epidemic, and his subsequent glove-themed work called for an embrace of viral life. The figure of the glove was also central to Zhang's first two video works, including Document on Hygiene No. 3, which signals a shift away from the insistence that art should reinforce the artist's authority. Instead, Document uses the gloved hand to reflect on where, in a society obsessed with purity and in an art world obsessed with radicalism, we might fundamentally locate agency. This article shows that the history of contemporary Chinese art cannot be understood without considering artists' responses to, and contributions in shaping, the deeply politicized notion of hygiene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artistic and educational possibilities abound when institutions open their doors to local artists and allow them to work within their confines. The following case study articulates how the often unrecorded and unseen discourse between cultural workers leads to a deeper understanding and application of strategies that encourage effective collaboration. Made possible through my year-long appointment as an artist-in-residence at a contemporary art museum in Salt Lake City, UT, each example demonstrates how the relational exchange of knowledge between museum practitioners, artists, and the public results in new possibilities for community-engaged art education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considering writing and performance in its broadest sense, this article questions the role of text in art works where the presence of the textual element does not seek to make an immediate visual impact, but rather hides behind conventions of administration (Art & Language); exhibition information (Teresa Margolles) or contracts (Adrian Piper; Gina Pane; Marina Abramović; Margolles). Through a comparison of two installation pieces linked to conceptual art and exhibited at Invisible: art about the unseen 1957–2012 (Hayward Gallery, London), the ways in which this 'quiet' text questions the conventions of language as a static form is discussed with reference to ideas of the figural put forward by Jean-François Lyotard in Discourse, Figure. Lyotard's concern for the 'thickness' of language is exemplified in the writings of Marguerite Duras as pictured in an article by Sanford. S. Ames, printed in the journal Visible Language in 1978. Such references help us to recognise the role that textual practice has played in the development of contemporary art practice as both discursive and unsettled: an art history of revisiting, re-performance and restlessness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to reveal the distinctive features of calligraphic art developing under the influence of Chinese minimalism and Ze art, using the example of the artworks of four Chinese artists (Zhang Huan, Li Zuo, Gu Yingzhi, Zhang Baohuang) and one Japanese artist (Yamada Reirin). The study found that the art of calligraphy follows several basic rules, including a strict stroke order and sequence, with each character fitting into a square shape. The influence of Zen Buddhism manifests in the creation of distinctive images (cyclical circle, trance state of monks) in combination with traditional writing styles. The geometricity of Chinese characters is also widely used in electronic fonts and graphic symbols that encode characters. The data obtained can supplement the research dedicated to the investigation of the key features of Chinese Zen calligraphy and their influence on the modern fonts containing the elements of minimalism and conceptual art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the development of Conceptual Art in Bratislava during the communist period, with specific emphasis on the practices produced throughout the so-called 'Normalisation' (1968–1989). The text starts by introducing the functioning mechanisms of the Czechoslovakian artistic scene of the time. It then moves on to analyse the work of Július Koller, Rudolf Sikora and Ĺubomír Ďurček. It is argued that, despite the difficult conditions for art production present in Bratislava during Normalisation years, Conceptual Art served its precursors as an escape valve for their political convictions, which they manifested through the use of puns, parody, irony, metaphors and the design of elaborate cosmological fictions through utopian and dystopian projections of their own political and cultural reality. In doing so, the unique properties of photography, such as its reduced size, low cost and indexical qualities, turned the medium into the most suitable form to materialise their conceptual practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This exploration will examine the presence of algebraic and topological structures in the conceptual artist Sol LeWitt's large-scale panel called Wall Drawing 413. The algebraic structures will focus on group theory found in the permutations of the four colors used and a topological investigation that will classify some of the compact 2-dimensional surfaces that can be constructed from gluing edges of matching colors of one 4 × 4 square in the artwork. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article charts an alternative history of Conceptual art via the work of three artists who imported aspects of the administrative "paperwork" they employed in their day jobs into their artistic practices. Despite Conceptual art's much-discussed "aesthetic of administration," the movement has not been extensively analyzed in relation to the changing conditions of clerical work in the United States during the postwar period. By the 1960s, administrative work had shifted from a white-collar to a "pink-collar" profession, confounding previous categorizations of labor and social class. This restructuring meant that women artists, and increasingly women of color, were far more likely to have firsthand experience of low-level administrative work than their male counterparts. The work of Rosemarie Castoro, Howardena Pindell, and Adrian Piper foregrounds issues of labor, materiality, and embodiment often overlooked in Conceptual art and its critical reception. This article argues for the particularity of the Conceptual strategies adopted by these women artists—not on the basis of gender essentialism but owing to the social conditions produced by the dramatic restructuring of administrative labor in which they participated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Active in the 1970s and 1980s, KwieKulik was a Polish artistic duo comprised of Zofia Kulik and Przemysław Kwiek. Despite the duo's dissolution in 1987 and Kulik – the female artist – having departed from her previous practice, KwieKulik's art is framed by the so-called political and regional context of Poland's state socialism. This article argues that the still on-going struggle of Kulik for self-definition opens up the possibility of rereading KwieKulik's art through the lens of feminism. It analyses the visible and invisible gendered roles and identities reflected in two of KwieKulik's most characteristic performances: Monument without a Passport and Activity for the Head: Three Acts. The visible refers to how, in their performances, Kulik had to actively allow herself to be restricted and humiliated in order to be viewed as a subject. The invisible, meanwhile, refers to the maintenance work that Kulik did for KwieKulik, which was once rendered secondary to Kwiek's ambition for the appearance of spontaneity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agamben argues that, in the art of the twentieth century, two forms of art thematize a fracturing of the regime of production: in the case of conceptual ready-mades, the reproducible cannot take on the status of originality; in the case of pop art, that which "ought" to be unreproducible becomes just that. In these cases, Agamben contends, the "bringing forth" of art continues to take place, but what is brought forth is στέρησης [sterēsis], privation, an art which is necessarily alienated. This privation, in Agamben's terms, must be understood through the dyad of ϵνϵργϵια [energeia] and δυναμις [dynamis] to insist that potentiality, unactualized δυναμις is the "existence of a non-Being, a presence of an absence", which is to say that δυναμις is only what it is because of its relationship to the potential not to take place, to αδυναμία. I argue, following Katschthaler, that a similar case must be made for Cage's 4′33″ (1952), in that it represents the possibility of inaction: the performer could always have not played. I contend that, however, the bringing forth of absence is necessarily, a sort of dead end since, in an important sense, nothing has already taken place: the performer of 4′33″ does not have the option not to play, without the performance ceasing to be a performance of 4′33″. It is my claim here, if only provisionally, that Cage's turn to indeterminacy, and in particular his use of transparencies in his Variations piece from Variations I (1958) onwards, may be seen as a way out of, or a solution to, the impasse of a privative abyss, be that as found in conceptual art or as formulated in 4′33″. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wallen Mapondera's Pahukama is an artwork carrying memories of Zimbabwe's November 2017 bloodless coup d'etat. The artist employs it as a gateway to documenting the everyday transactions taking place on the country's streets. The article examines this readymade artwork's unique qualities in the context of Zimbabwe where a generation of young artists is making art out of found objects. The article interrogates Pahukama, a concept capturing the marriage of convenience struck between the feared army militias and the masses on November 18. On a normal day, commuters crisscross the road, the homeless live on it, street vendors and the illicit forex traders strike deals on it. The article explores the multiple meanings hidden in the artwork as a visual text. While the work is conceptual, some would be tempted to read it literally because of Robert Mugabe's stature. In conclusion, a suggestion is made for the artwork to be exhibited within Zimbabwe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Writing about art is a complex task that differs considerably from other forms of writing because it requires detailed understanding and application of certain theoretical frameworks for visual analysis. This has proven to be a major challenge amongst university and college students in Nigeria who grapple with interpreting visuals into text. The objective of this research is to identify the factors that impede students' writing abilities in art departments through literature review, then develop a conceptual guide to art appreciation and criticism for undergraduates and budding art critics. The research demonstrates that emphasis on the aesthetic philosophy of art and the predominant creative pedagogy used for art tutelage in Nigeria is responsible for the poor approach to art writing amongst students. To address this problem, a combination of three theoretical frameworks: Ekphrasis, Formal Analysis and Iconographic Analysis are used to develop a new five-step-system for art appreciation. Results show that the juxtaposition of analytical elements from Ekphrasis, Formal and Iconographic Analysis leads to the development of a simple but effective theoretical framework for writing about art which covers five key areas of description, analysis, context, meaning and judgement. Having tested this new framework with tremendous success, this research concludes that the application of this five-step-system will improve writing about art in tertiary institutions by acquainting students with the theoretical tools/lexicons to effectively analyse their own works and those of established artists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A selectively cleaned oil painting, Cupid asleep in a garland of flowers, circle of Mario di Fiori (1603–73, GV43) was installed alongside a series of photographic works by artist Sophy Rickett. Cupid and the Curious Moaning of Kenfig Burrows was an exhibition at Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea, UK, that featured this partial restoration undertaken as a conservation-intervention following discussions between the artist and painting conservator Jenny Williamson. Rickett and Williamson wish to explore this conservation-intervention as a methodologically oriented dialogue that mirrors, reflects and represents the similarities as well as some of the tensions, between the distinct, but related, fields of fine art practice and conservation. In conceptualising and then carrying out this conservation-intervention, a new artwork has been created. They envisage this methodological approach as a strategy encompassing principles and ethics that is replicable in other contexts and at other institutions. Through this conservation-intervention, the authors consider the role of the artist's original intention, truth, meaning, aesthetics and ethics in the field of conservation, and explore how subjective, affective processes are a part of more objective, finite, scientific ones. This version of Cupid, in his fragile, temporary, incomplete state highlights the subjectivity, contingency and to an extent, arbitrariness that is a feature of much conservation practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A strong kinship links Raymond Roussel's work to that of Édouard Levé. Both are based on the exploration of the duplication of forms and the questioning of the gaps that appear when one form reveals two, or when the forms do not adhere to the objects to which they are supposed to be applied. Both Roussel's procedural writing and Édouard Levé's series of photographs exploit the potential of homonymy, but they proceed in different ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines selected minimalist compositions by Vladimir Tošić and Miroslav Miša Savić, two members of the neo-avant-garde composers group, Opus 4, whose activities created a unique artistic paradigm on the Serbian art music scene. While the group's work clearly referred to experimental trends in the United States (minimalism, Fluxus, multimedia, and conceptual art), it also retained a significant 'trace' of European post-war modernism, embodied in the group's commitment to serialist modes of organising musical material. Thus, the 'integral minimalism' of Savić and Tošić (within the unique aesthetics of Opus 4) unites both European and American post-war neo-avant-garde concepts. This study situates Tošić's and Savić's minimalist works within the Serbian late twentieth-century 'new music' context and is dedicated to the neo-avant-garde minimalist oeuvres of the two composers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mathematical aspects of the work of the German conceptual artist, Hanne Darboven, are discussed, including the role of permutation, number representation and symmetry in her early works, and the use of a checksum calculation to record calendar dates in her later works. We analyse the multiple ways she represents the checksum calculations and explore the similarities and differences of her work with mathematics. We also suggest several mathematical questions arising from her work that would be interesting to explore in a discrete mathematics, number theory or liberal arts math classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ambiguous relations and subjectivities associated with the banality of evil are peripheral to a dominant human rights discourse oriented around the binary logics of perpetrators and victims and dictatorship and democracy. The absence of non-binary subjectivities reflects a conceptual gap relating to questions of shared responsibility posed by Hannah Arendt more than half a century ago. Despite its ongoing relevance for reflecting on the production of systematic suffering, the banality of evil remains an incomplete theoretical project. Here, I bring recent elaborations on Arendt's notion of the banality of evil, particularly Michael Rothberg's Implicated Subjects, to bear on Argentine memory politics. I highlight the potential for the notion of the implicated subject to expand Argentine memory studies beyond the perpetrator-victim binary of the Nunca Más human rights discourse. Conceptual art and artistic approaches to memory may provide fruitful avenues for future exploration of implicated subjectivities and horizons of responsibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article approaches the conceptual-material bind in artistic process through the early work of Meg Stuart. It has been well-documented that the conceptual work in the recent dance avant-garde turns anew to the materiality of the form as a means to unhinge what we think we know about dance and choreography (Lepecki 2004, Cvejić 2015). 'Choreography as Concept, Dancing as Material' takes a new approach, considering the historical context including the mid-century emergence of conceptual art in artists' writing and practice, and Stuart as a pioneer of the most recent activity in this aesthetic lineage (Flynt 1963, Laermans and Stuart 2001). As a term, 'conceptual' dance is as contentious as 'contemporary' dance. While the term 'conceptual' emerged in visual art, according to Peter Osborne, "as both a critical-curatorial category and a form of practical artistic self-understanding," it has never been taken up so broadly or confidently in dance studies, dance as creative practice, or programming (Osborne 2002, p.18). Debates around the conceptual as it relates to dance, and the associated art historical and trans-disciplinary binary that sets concepts against materials, throws light on a much broader field of experimental practices. This article unpacks what conceptual meant when it emerged from the intermedial historical period in art between the early 1960s and early 1970s, how it has been used in relation to recent experimental dance, and the usefulness of these discourses in understanding current choreographic practices that interface with the visual arts, turning to Stuart's contribution to This Is the Show and the Show Is Many Things / Extra Muros (1994). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contextualises Xing Danwen's role in creating the posed photography of Ma Liuming from 1993 to 1995, the canon of East Village performance art in China, and how this experience prompted her to reflect on gender issues in later works. I compare similar shots of performance work by Rong Rong and Xing Danwen and discuss the role of a gendered power structure in the making of a performance art canon. These images have been received as documentations, yet it was through dialogue with the camera and two genders that Ma and Xing developed their unique paths to performance art and conceptual photography in the 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we discuss contemporary art practices as avenues for disrupting settler colonial narratives; we explore how the practices developed and adopted by contemporary Native American and First Nations artists can challenge settler colonial feelings. Employing the concept of settler common sense, we attend to the affective experience of encountering these artists' works and consider how their works can enable the viewers to feel, sense, and think outside of/in opposition to/against settler colonial logics. We first explain the concept of settler colonialism and illustrate how settler colonial narratives operate; we illuminate the affective dimension of settler colonialism and how settler colonial narratives and feelings are bound up in art. To demonstrate possible pathways through this process, we discuss the work of Indigenous artists Rebecca Belmore and Tanya Lukin Linklater, considering how their practices can disrupt. We argue for a move away from settler futurity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I examine the interplay of artist identity, creative agency, and the urgency of action through research with a teen arts internship at a contemporary arts center in post-Katrina New Orleans. The central research questions for the study focused on investigation of the contexts, narratives, activities, and consequences of artist identity formation. First, I offer a brief literature review of art education for social justice, activism, and creative agency. Then, I describe the use of social practice theory of identity and agency to interpret activist artist identity development within the research. Next, I delineate the use of portraiture as methodology to construct narrative portraits of the young artists of the study. Finally, I present data and analysis of the findings of the study of the contexts, narratives, activities, and consequences of activist artist identity work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Germany's state elites and general public have consistently preferred deepening integration of defence procurement at the European Union (EU) level. However, the German government has repeatedly acted against this well-established preference. First, it wanted the European Defence Agency to become a full-fledged armaments agency but tolerated its marginalization into a symbolic entity. Second, it preferred to ban protectionist defence procurement policies, such as offsets, but voted for a Code of Conduct that legitimized them. Despite Germany's powerful position, conflict avoidance was its predominant strategy in the EU's intergovernmental bargains. The government was unwilling to risk confronting other member states but passed the buck to the European Commission, satisficed on second-best outcomes, and thus acted as a power without a cause. By expanding the core state power (CSP) research program beyond its focus on domestic politics, we suggest re-considering CSP-integration as the art of the possible in iterative, mixed-motive situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is not easy to define where, for Kemang Wa Lehulere, the making of art begins and ends. Wa Lehulere's artworks suggest an attitude toward looking focused on less developed aspects in contemporary art criticism and art history. The artworks perform this task by insisting on the attention and involvement of the viewer in ways that make artistic production and viewer reception a potently intertwined and productive place of attention. This article argues that Wa Lehulere's creative practice reflects contested and changing ideas of visual cultural knowledge in South Africa. My personal encounters with Wa Lehulere's artwork over the years, through direct engagements at exhibitions, in talking about reference images, sketches, and unfinished object assemblages in the artist's studio, and in moments of reflection on the artist's own way of describing their practice, have informed my ideas about creative practices loosely described as 'conceptual art' in the space of South Africa. The contestations and changes that I see through these visual gestures are seen to organically expand into the vicissitudes of cultural, social, and political dynamics. Wa Lehulere's artwork as an analytic device changes the viewer's long-term perception (of learning) and, in this context, delivers a form of perceptual learning oriented toward decolonial education. It permits a choreography of and for future narratives. As such, Wa Lehulere's performances, drawings, photographs, and texts function as forms of sense-making for other sights. Such visual and theoretical activities of critical conceptual art are produced by and effectively inform changing definitions of art, care ethics, and freedom in periods of transformation wherein such cultural phenomena become crucial to liberatory practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arthur Danto is one of the best Anglophone philosophers of art of the second half of the 20th century. His unique methodology of indiscernibility and provocative claim about the end of art have been and continue to be influential across various cultures. In this sense, it interesting to note that Danto's philosophy of art seems to be initially inspired by Zen. This influence has been somehow ignored in contemporary discussion of Danto's art theory. However, there are different interpretations of Zen, and their relevance to contemporary art is correspondingly different. According to Danto's interpretation, the art after the end of art is contemporary conceptual art. It threatens to end the history of art based on narratives about the work of art. If we were to take an East Asian understanding of Zen, the art after the end of art would not be any kind of work of art, but instead the artist or the art of living, which may lead us to begin new narratives of art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the significant contributions of conceptual artists Rasheed Araeen and David Medalla to the performance and participatory art in the 1970s. Topics discussed include the way the methodological approach of both artists to performance and conceptual art, the art exhibition "The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Britain," curated by Araeen, and the recognition earned by the participation project "Down with the Slave Trade!," presented by Medalla in England.

Art-based interventions have shown promise in improving quality of life and emotional wellbeing among older adults, but few have focused on improving cognition and reducing dementia risk. The current mixed methods pilot study investigated whether healthy older adults, who participated in a 12-week art-based cognitive health intervention, driven by a Conceptualist art approach, demonstrated improvements in their cognitive functioning and psychosocial wellbeing. Participants were cognitively normal, community-dwelling older adults who completed pre and post cognitive and psychosocial assessments, and qualitative interviews post-intervention. Results revealed statistically significant improvements in executive function, cognitive flexibility (set-switching), and life satisfaction. Qualitative exploration of older adults' perceived outcomes from the intervention revealed that they experienced 'Personal Growth and Learning' from the skills and knowledge gained. Specifically, they reported becoming more open minded and critically engaged, being challenged in positive ways, and gaining a better understanding of cognitive health. Participants also reported that the course material was intellectually stimulating and personally relevant. Connections between quantitative and qualitative findings, and how they should guide future interventions, are discussed. This study supports the need to further explore conceptual art for its associations to dementia risk and wellbeing for older individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The impersonal legal language of contracts, termed the "aesthetic of administration" by Benjamin Buchloh, has had a strong impact on postwar conceptualist art. In the U.S., however, a two-tiered legal system explicitly existed from before the founding of the republic up through the end of Jim Crow, and, implicit in so-called "colorblind" legal discourse, continue to exist. Without claiming an exclusive status for Black conceptualist art, Black artists often employ a critical approach to the universalism assumed by the analytical ethos of conceptualism. Making use of text and performance, the works of artists Adrian Piper, Charles Gaines, William Pope.L, Glenn Ligon, and Cameron Rowland offer an archive of nuanced operationalised language. The hybrid practices of artists like Rick Lowe and Martine Syms spill over into curation, signalling an emphasis on administration as an avenue for accruing cultural capital. Black conceptual artists and Black curators can be framed within a history linked not to identity per se, but to a skepticism that expands and enriches the conceptualist tradition, while suggesting a need to transform systems by which cultural recognition is allocated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ethnographic conceptualism takes its cue from conceptual art and uses artistic interventions as an anthropological research tool. The term 'ethnographic conceptualism' was coined to sum up the method of the exhibition project Gifts to Soviet Leaders (Kremlin Museum, Moscow 2006) as simultaneously a reflection on the vast and complex economy of public gifts to heads of Soviet state, a distinctly post-Soviet political and cultural artefact, and as a tool for ethnography of post-socialism. This article explores ethnographic conceptualism's contribution to performativity theory. I look at how it makes visible the tension between what such projects perform and describe. In doing so, I use ethnographic conceptualism as a vantage point to revisit the foundational distinction of performativity theory between the constative and performative statements (Austin). Drawing in this artistic and research method, I redefine the performative, not as a domain or a type of utterance that is distinct from the constative, but as an act of drawing this distinction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comics provide a promising platform for technical communication, but there are limits to their affordances. This article demonstrates some of the limits using Robert Sikoryak's Terms and Conditions, a graphic adaptation of Apple's iTunes Terms and Conditions. Using discourse analysis, it argues that Sikoryak's adaptation, while an impressive piece of art, is not an example of accessible user agreement as media reports claim. The article concludes with practical implications on producing comics-style technical communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article will examine how the practice of critique is made vivid in the early performances of Andrea Fraser, the artist associated most conspicuously with Institutional Critique (IC), an umbrella term for a variety of critical artistic practices that developed out of the conceptual art movement of the 1960s. It traces the convoluted position of critique in contemporary art history, as distinct from literary studies, before discussing how academic art criticism privileges psychoanalytic models that articulate strong forms of negative critique at the expense of more affectively attuned and relational readings. Anderson's (Bleak Liberalism, Chicago and London, 2016) discussion of the relationship between psychology and ideological analysis in literary criticism, in particular her elucidation of the characterological nature of the terms that recur in academic discourse, is used to introduce the ideas of British object relations into the sphere of contemporary art criticism: D. W. Winnicott's theory of creative play is used to make a 'playful' interpretation of Fraser's performance as the putative docent Jane Castleton in work like Museum Highlights: A Gallery Tour (1989). In comparison to critical accounts of this early work that stress the postmodernist 'character' of Jane as the ventriloquist of various ideological texts, this article explicitly acknowledges Fraser's presence as a charismatic performer in order to discuss how Jane's 'normotic personality', typified by 'the numbing and eventual erasure of subjectivity' (Bollas, The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known, London, 1987), is an evocative enactment of the existential dimensions of critique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The visual art of the last decades privileges, explicitly or implicitly, social rather than art historical or aesthetic issues. In sites ranging from university classrooms and journals to museums and biennials, the emphasis is usually put on how effectively art handles the social issues of the day while questions of aesthetic value are often treated as suspicious and ideological. Given this anti-art character in these contexts of mediation, the insistence to perceive the objects as artistic objects constitutes a paradox that has been rarely discussed in sociological terms. This article draws on ethnographic research in order to explore "biennial art" that is to say the art that displayed in contemporary art and international platforms of showcasing. These platforms struggle to maintain a concept of art as social practice while at the same time nurture an exclusive and highbrow environment in which "artfulness" is key. I call this quality artfulness so as to both underline its artificiality as well as the inventiveness and skills required for its production. Artfulness in these sites is enabled through various formal or informal rituals of valorization, including guided tours, curatorial statements, media promoting activities and artist talks. These rituals, positioning certain objects within the sphere of art and producing them as objects meriting aesthetic interpretation, resemble the politics of publicity found in aesthetic capitalism at large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By taking contemporary art as a starting-point to define translation, we set off on a fascinating journey through disciplines which do not contradict each other but improve each other. Thus we can see, with this transversality among disciplines, that "each of us is a bundle of fragments of other people's souls, simply put together in a new way" (Hofstadter 2007, 252), that we are strange loops where everything is interrelated and this gives us "a deeper and subtler vision of what it is to be human" (ibid., 361). On this journey, our aim is to find out what translation does: and what it does is, or should be, reveal those invisible worlds lying behind texts; see what texts say without saying; show the walls others have built, walls which are sometimes obvious, but at other times show the most dangerous walls, those that are not visible. Translation should be able to resist essentialisms, binary oppositions and the stagnation of the universal. Translation as a way of giving the other back the right to look. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores how the ideological discourses and practical actions that aim to increase well-being by means of art are possible to understand from the point of view of different kinds of mobilities and immobilities. An empirical case of a concert series live streamed to seniors and prison inmates by a concert hall is examined. The concerts aimed to enhance cultural inclusion, but in practice, live streaming highlighted the complexity of the network, where social spaces, places and bodily resources of the individuals were negotiated through movement and non-movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The representation of landscape has changed considerably in the arts since the nineteenth century. From the grand and sometimes fantastical paintings of the apocalyptic sublime, to the more topographically correct contemplative sublime; from the concern for light over form in impressionism, to the intensity of colour saturation in post-impressionism; from emotive expressionism to the fractured abstraction of cubism; from its evaporation in abstract expressionism and dematerialisation in conceptual art to its reclamation in walking art; from photographs taken on journeys, to objects found along the way; from words that capture a sense of place, to films that immerse us in those places; from room sized panoramas to virtual reality CAVEs. This paper aims to map out a contemporary typology of landscape representation. Specifically, it attempts to locate self-tracking data art as a new form of landscape representation, one that traverses a spectrum of imagery, from isomorphic representations of real places, through objective mapping of experience and on into the realm of abstracted subjectivity. In doing so it positions the author's own work within this wider context along side other artists that are engaged is similar practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an interview with the independent art curator, Đỗ Tường Linh. Topics discussed include information on the Linh focuses on conceptual art, postcolonial studies, and the relationship between art and politics; discusses Linh actively engaged in the art, cultural, and civil society scenes in Vietnam and Southeast Asia; and the how epistemic violence manifested in cultural and aesthetic standards.

The article discusses the conceptual art practice of Argentine artist Eduardo Costa between 1966 and 1970. Topics explored include his use of an audio tape recorder in the production and presentation of sound art, the 1966 sound art project "Poema ilustrado" created by Costa with artist Roberto Jacoby under their art collective Arte de los medios, and observations on the substance of Costa's aural literature projects.

The article discusses the use of salt in the Postconceptual art practice of artist Deborah Jack. Topics explored include the way she acknowledges the relationship between salt and the ocean in addition to its significance in the history of the Caribbean island where she grew up, the afrotropic effect associated with the use of salt by Jack in her photography and installation pieces, and the 2004 art installation "Shore," presented by Jack at the Big Orbit Gallery in New York.

Julian Dodd [2018] persuasively argues that John Cage's 4′33″ should be characterised as (1) a silent piece, as opposed to a sonically replete piece, containing the environmental sounds that occur as it is performed; (2) a piece of performance art, but not a piece of music; (3) a work of conceptual art. While I agree with Dodd's claims, I contend that he fails to account for two features of 4′33″. I argue that a qualified description of Cage's work as belonging to a subgenre of conceptual art could address these shortcomings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses the work of Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco and its reception. She mentions the commission by the Mexican government of Orozco's "Mobile Matrix," how he and critics consider his identity as a Mexican, and the conceptual use of circles in his art.

Why do we feel compelled to recount our experiences of mountains through narratives of majestic views and personal epiphanies? Why does so much get left out of conventional representations? Searching for the Welsh Landscape was a solo exhibition at Aberystwyth Arts Centre exploring the problematic notion that national identity subsists within the landscape. Focussing on the artworks' "tactically absurd" means of engaging with a given context of mountain culture, this article sketches out a position defined in opposition to a "seriousness" understood to be the normative mode of engagement with mountains and landscape. Central to the project was a knowingly futile, two-year search for a "perfect Welsh mountain", which is positioned here within a lineage of irrational instruction-based conceptual art. Unfolding through a performative process of walking, the search simultaneously inhabits and violates conventional forms of engagement with mountains. The influence of existing cultural representations of the Welsh landscape leads to a conflicted experience, manifested in the artworks' absurd juxtapositions of the serious and the non-serious. Although the absurd is encountered as "insufficient" (due to a lack of established structures of understanding necessary to account for its sense), it is in fact doubly productive: firstly, as a form of critique that draws attention to the codes and conventions underpinning clichéd forms of representation; and secondly, liberated from narratives of meaning and coherence, as able to account for a broader spectrum of experience, bearing closer witness to actual lived encounters with mountains. Absurdity reveals mountain culture to be unnecessarily one-dimensional, its relentlessly weighty seriousness all-too-often clinging to a romantic mystique, with little regard for the trivial, the incidental or the funny. Mountains, it is argued, sometimes display their own sense of the ridiculous. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on original archival research, as well as discourses in post-WWII art history, performance studies, and black studies, this article maps the use of rumor closely associated with David Hammons, with regard to two performative actions enacted in downtown Manhattan in 1981, now known as Pissed Off and Shoe Tree. These two performances occurred on and around the public sculpture T.W.U. (1980-81) by Richard Serra. Taking up how these works consider the specificity of social life pertaining to historically marginalized bodies and neighborhoods, this article argues that Hammons's work in this period employs obscurity as a resistance to knowledge as it is codified and legitimized in institutional discourses within and beyond art institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Avalanche Magazine, an artist magazine published in the 1970s, is a unique primary source document of the conceptual art scene. Replete with photographs, advertisements, artist interviews, and gossipy personal notices, it is a trove of insight into artistic practice in a highly experimental period. Nevertheless, it was never included in any visual art or humanities database index, leaving its content largely undiscoverable by traditional means. In an effort to remedy this situation, the authors built an open access website, Avalanche Magazine Index (), which indexes the entire contents of Avalanche. Like a traditional periodical index, Avalanche Magazine Index describes the content of the magazine rather than reproducing it in full text. However, unlike traditional indices, the website encompasses every component of the magazine—from interviews to advertisements—and attempts to identify each named artist, venue, exhibition, curator, and photographer. The exhaustive indexing works in concert with the relational database that underlies the site to reveal a network of relationships between and within the artistic communities of the era. This case study presents the rationale for indexing Avalanche Magazine, provides an overview of workflow, outlines the ways the project diverges from traditional indexes, reflects on the impact of open access on the project's success, and proposes that the website is capable of generating new knowledge in and of itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Museum visitors engage in silent contemplation establishing a connection with artistic objects. I argue that visual art that reduces linguistic impositions and discusses silence can trigger empathic critique. Focusing on the philosophy of silence, feminist approaches to visual arts and the study of collective memory in this form, I believe that female artists that work on silence overcome the paradox of talking about the absence of words by embracing the communicative power of these instances of quiescence. In order to access visibility in cultural memory, women have had to turn silence from imposed muteness into a discursive rebellion. Silence materialises in their work because the observer can perceive it. Through their senses, the museum visitor will recognise representations of silence and understand that, in these cases, these silences contain messages. Consequently, silence will break the modern tendency of indiscriminate chatter, in a space where aesthetics of contemplation allow empathy to be activated. To illustrate this, my article analyses the following visual artworks, giving an international dimension to the discussion, which emphasizes the universality of silence: Shirin Neshat’s short film Turbulent, Jennie C. Jones’s artwork Shhh #8, Caroline Halley’s photograph ‘The 5 Women’ and Doris Salcedo’s installation Plegaria Muda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is John Cage's 4′33″? This paper disambiguates this question into three sub-questions concerning, respectively, the work's ontological nature, the art form to which it belongs, and the genre it is in. We shall see that the work's performances consist of silence (rather than containing environmental sounds), that it is a work of performance art (rather than music), and that it belongs to the genre of conceptual art. Seeing the work in these ways helps us to understand it better, and promises to assuage somewhat the puzzlement and irritation of those who are at first resistant to its charms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]