Of why conceptual art is actually amazing.

by kit on October 27th, 2009

Ok, so short post here - I recently attended Tehching Hsieh’s pretty unbelievable artist talk at Concordia, and it was fairly life-altering on so many levels. His work is absolutely of-the-stuff you should check out and his perspective on it, even more so.

But what I wanted to point out here, now, was that during the final public one-year performance that found Tehching and Linda Montano tied together for the entirety of 1983, they documented all of their conversations by taping them. They then presented these tapes to the public, but not as audio recordings, as objects.

Some tapes show remnants of long conversations, others short. He mentioned that presenting them this way was a conceptual manner of being able to open up the possibilities of the audiences imagination, to be able to picture the dialogues and what they could have, might have, should have been saying.

It reminds me of when I first moved to Quebec and didn’t understand all the french that much. It was equal parts frustrating and amazing, because although I felt a little isolated, on the Metro I could make up what everyone was discussing. It somehow seemed that death, love, italian politics, ponies and the poetry of the universe seemed to come up a lot in those conversations at the time. Then slowly, over the years as my ears adjusted and I started dating a francophone, the talking around me morphed into concerns over getting winter tires and how many kids to have and doctors and boring stuff related to filing. everything. away.

All this to say that suddenly I think I’ve realized that conceptual art is actually about allowing for a space with which to play, unbridled imagination architecture and room to breath on top. Why did I think it was so clinical for so long? Conceptual art is only as sterile as my mind chooses to be when encountering it.

And I am far from sterile, in fact like most of us, I am a dirty, dirty farm-yard animal. Yeah. So there.