Conceptual Art

Conceptual art

Every time the Turner Prize comes around, there is a debate about whether conceptual art is real art.

Reports lament that art students spend their time discussing ideas rather than learning how to paint. 2001's Turner Prize winner, The Lights Going On and Off by Martin Creed, was greeted with disdainful cries of 'anyone could do that!'. It is at this time of year that friends and family offer suggestions for Turner Prize entries (my brother's last one was too disgusting to bear thinking about).

But what is conceptual art - and what isn't 'proper' about it?

Conceptual art is concerned with ideas and meanings, rather than forms and materials. Early conceptual artists of the late 1960s began to stick word-plays on gallery walls and submit plans for events as pieces of art. The making of the art object was seen as a perfunctory affair, that could be assigned to assistants or abandoned entirely.

However, it is hard to see how art can ever be just an 'idea'; art only really works when it is a visual experience of some kind. Of course, this visual experience represents ideas, but not pure ideas as are found in speech or writing.

In some cases, the conceptual art brief became an excuse for laziness. Rather than develop a piece of art, some artists just seemed to stop at the level of their initial insight. One crossword-style piece by the American artist Bruce Nauman in Tate Modern, produced around the time of the Vietnam War, presents the interlocking words, 'War' and 'Raw'. The fact that 'war' read backwards is 'raw' is a somewhat interesting insight - but is it really a work of art? Compared to explorations into the rawness of war such as Picasso's Guernica, Nauman's work seems embryonic. He stopped where the work should have begun.

Another Nauman work is a piece of paper with 'Make me think me' written on it. According to Tate Modern's labelmeister, this 'raises a variety of provocative meanings' - which, I suppose,...