Envisioning reality in conceptual and installation art: the space of others
 
Presented in conjunction with the conference ART IN THE REAL: DOCUMENTARY—ETHNOGRAPHY—ENACTMENT, this talk will examine certain key works by selected artists whose careers were formed in the late 1960s. It will set forth and analyse some of the varied ways in which artists of the Conceptual generation laid the groundwork for an ensuing generation of artists on a number of tactical and material fronts. Reference to specific works by artists including Dan Graham, Hans Haacke, Marcel Broodthaers, Lothar Baumgarten, and Daniel Buren will allow for consideration of the precise nature of the Conceptual generation’s approach to—and redefinition of—the art object in so far as documentary, ethnography, and enactment are, respectively, concerned. Methods and mediums, anathema in the heyday of Modernism, are now taken for granted as the reigning available means for art production. In this regard, the talk will re-view how artists emerging in the 1960s came to focus with a wider lens than before on aspects of social, as well as physical, reality.
 
 
Anne Rorimer is an independent scholar specialising in Conceptual art. Formerly she was a curator at The Art Institute of Chicago. She has published widely in art journals and museum exhibition catalogues and was co-curator of Reconsidering the object of art: 1965-1975 organised in 1995 by The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. She is the author of New art in the 60s and 70s: redefining reality published by Thames and Hudson, Ltd., London in 2001 (hardback); 2004 (paperback). Most recently she was a visiting professor at the University of Chicago (2006) and at the University of Illinois, Chicago (2007).