Light Years: Conceptual Art and the Photograph 1964-1977
Sun. 12/11 - Sun. 03/11 @ The Art Institute of Chicago (map)
- Event Details
- December 11, 2011–March 11, 2012 Regenstein Hall Overview: There is a general consensus that new art of the 1960s and 1970s was heavily invested in photography. Not since the promotion in the 1920s of photomontage, photograms, and the New Vision had so many painters and sculptors turned to photography for a renewal of artistic practice. Light Years: Conceptual Art and the Photograph, 1964-1977 is the first major museum exhibition to examine that vanguard involvement in its full scope. From its inception, Conceptual Art covered a variety of competing, even antagonistic positions. Light Years reveals that, in important moments involving photography, Conceptual Art tended less towards the elimination of the art object than the elaboration of a new class of objects that functioned as multi-dimensional, multi-media hybrids. This work thoroughly displaced modernist traditions while renewing the possibilities for making art in ways that have proved fruitful ever since. The exhibition examines Conceptual Art in general through the lens of photography, providing in the process a rigorous analysis of the shared expressive and critical functions of photography across a broad range of artistic practices. Alighiero Boetti, AW:AB=LD:MD , 1967. Private collection. Organized as a thematic survey, Light Years presents over 130 works—including slide and film projections, sculptural and installations, photographic canvases, and artists’ books—from approximately fifty key figures of that era, among them Italian and Eastern European artists less often integrated into surveys of conceptual art today. Catalogue: The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, with a lead essay by Matthew S. Witkovsky, curator and chair of Photography at the Art Institute of Chicago, and further contributions by Anne Rorimer, Chicago; Mark Godfrey, Tate Modern; Robin Kelsey, Harvard University; Giuliano Sergio, Rome; Joshua Shannon, University of Maryland; and Walead Beshty, Los Angeles.
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TimeOutChicago on Light Years: Conceptual Art and the Photograph 1964-1977 @ The Art Institute of Chicago
4 months agoMore than 140 works by 57 artists trace photography's path through conceptual art to legitimacy as an art medium. more at timeoutchicago.com
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