The Art & Architecture Library holds many primary sources--exhibition catalogs, documents, artist's books, etc.--pertaining to Conceptual art in both its Main and Locked Stacks. The list that follows contain a small number of key items. To view Art Locked Stack materials, please make a request by title and call number at the Art & Architecture Library Circulation Desk.
Every Building on the Sunset Strip.
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Edward Ruscha. [Los Angeles] 1966. TR654.R872 ARTLCKS Ruscha's iconic 1966 accordion book is a prime example of the documentary, typological turn that photography had taken in the 1960s. Presented without commentary, the images provide a snapshot of the built/commercial environment in a particular segment of a particular city (one increasingly relevant to the contemporary art world) at a particular time--no more, no less. |
Family.
Images © Victor Burgin. Used with permission.
[expanded book viewer]
Victor Burgin.
New York : Lapp Princess Press, c1977.
1 v. : chiefly ill. ; 16 cm.
N7433.35 .U6 L37 1977 ARTLCKS
Victor Burgin's Family is one of eleven volumes published in a series in the late 1970s by Amy Baker's Lapp Princess Press. Baker began the series with the aim of providing a conceptual space for artists to explore the possibilities and restraints of the book form. Meant to be affordable, portable, and easily reproducible, Baker set the dimensions of each work at six inches square and selected papers and inks that were widely available to printers.
Burgin's response to his commission was to embrace the sequentiality that a bound book demands, presenting a textual narrative, a series of images, and a progression of upper- and lowercase letters. The thick paper pages, bound with a plastic spiral, mimic the design and simplicity of children's alphabet books. Yet, as in many of his other works, Burgin appropriates this simplicity in order to draw attention to the complex, unwritten cultural messages that photographs and other cultural objects can bear. As he textually describes the submission of family structure to the dictates of capitalism, he also employs ordinary, black-and-white photos in order to illustrate his point, the neutral-seeming images "absorbing" meanings in their juxtaposition with his text. And hidden in the letters, photos, and caption words on the right side of each page are the elements of three overarching concepts: F-a-m-i-l-y (spelled by the letters at the top corners), F-a-t-h-e-r (spelled by the first letters of the objects in the photos), and M-o-t-h-e-r (spelled by the first letters of the words beneath the photos). These three roles are always highly dependent upon, and influenced by, the socio-economic forces that surround them.
Further reading on Lapp Princess Press:
Korner, A. "Interview: Amy Baker, Editor of Lapp Princess Press Ltd., Talks to Athony Korner." Drawing 1, no. 1 (May-June, 1979): 8-10.
[expanded book viewer]
Victor Burgin.
New York : Lapp Princess Press, c1977.
1 v. : chiefly ill. ; 16 cm.
N7433.35 .U6 L37 1977 ARTLCKS
Victor Burgin's Family is one of eleven volumes published in a series in the late 1970s by Amy Baker's Lapp Princess Press. Baker began the series with the aim of providing a conceptual space for artists to explore the possibilities and restraints of the book form. Meant to be affordable, portable, and easily reproducible, Baker set the dimensions of each work at six inches square and selected papers and inks that were widely available to printers.
Burgin's response to his commission was to embrace the sequentiality that a bound book demands, presenting a textual narrative, a series of images, and a progression of upper- and lowercase letters. The thick paper pages, bound with a plastic spiral, mimic the design and simplicity of children's alphabet books. Yet, as in many of his other works, Burgin appropriates this simplicity in order to draw attention to the complex, unwritten cultural messages that photographs and other cultural objects can bear. As he textually describes the submission of family structure to the dictates of capitalism, he also employs ordinary, black-and-white photos in order to illustrate his point, the neutral-seeming images "absorbing" meanings in their juxtaposition with his text. And hidden in the letters, photos, and caption words on the right side of each page are the elements of three overarching concepts: F-a-m-i-l-y (spelled by the letters at the top corners), F-a-t-h-e-r (spelled by the first letters of the objects in the photos), and M-o-t-h-e-r (spelled by the first letters of the words beneath the photos). These three roles are always highly dependent upon, and influenced by, the socio-economic forces that surround them.
Further reading on Lapp Princess Press:
Korner, A. "Interview: Amy Baker, Editor of Lapp Princess Press Ltd., Talks to Athony Korner." Drawing 1, no. 1 (May-June, 1979): 8-10.
Four Basic Kinds of Straight Lines: 1. Vertical. 2. Horizontal. 3. Diagonal l. to r. 4. Diagonal r. to l. and their Combinations.
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Sol Lewitt. [London, Studio International] c1969. N40.1 .L675 A1 ARTLCKS Lewitt's small book of cross-hatched lines is a key, relatively early example of his career-long interest in the production of art by systematic means--in this case, by mathematical permutations. |
Royal Road Test.
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[by] Mason Williams, Edward Ruscha [and] Patrick Blackwell. [New York, G. Wittenborn, 1967]. TR654 .W5 ARTLCKS |
The Post Testament : connoting today's standard version.
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| Xu Bing. Madison, WI. : Publication Center for Culturally Handicapped, Inc., 1993. N7433.4 .X8 P68 1993 ARTLCKM The Post Testament, an edition of 290 volumes (the Art & Architecture Library's copy is an artist's proof) printed in letterpress and bound in leather with gold accents, is an element of the installation Cultural Negotiation. The book, meant to look like a classic antiquarian volume, is in fact an unconventional text, a contemporary exploration of cross-cultural communication and societal values. Created by alternating words from the King James Version of the New Testament with those from a mass market novel, the English text is almost, but not quite, readable. Through its illegibility, the text highlights the complications that occur when discordant contexts within a society--the high and the low, for example--are brought together. In the Cultural Negotiation installation as it was realized at the Wexner Center for the Arts in 1993, The Post Testament was placed alongside volumes from the artist's project Book of Heaven (which is comprised of texts and characters that appear to be--but aren't--Chinese); this juxtaposition extended the concept of discordant contexts into the charged dichotomy of East and West. |
The red book.
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This is Not Here : A Show of Unfinished Paintings and Sculpture.
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by Yoko Ono ; guest artist, John Lennon. [Syracuse, N.Y.] : Everson Museum, [1971]. N6537 .O56 A4 1971 ARTLCKL |
[One month].
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Seth Siegelaub. New York : The Author, [1969] [33] leaves ; 22 cm. N7433.4 .S535 1969 ARTLCKS Seth Siegelaub was one of the key figures in the development of Conceptual art in the late 1960s, curating shows that often contained no tangible objects (and, in turn, finding a niche in the commercial art market for these same non-objects). The catalog for the exhibition "March 1969" (more frequently referred to as One Month) is a document of just such a show. Artists such as Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth, Richard Long, and Lawrence Weiner were each given a page on which to create an artwork--an assignment which resulted in diagrams, tables, simple statements, and photographs. The resulting calendar was itself the show: a conceptual event composed of conceptual elements. |
