Sad ending
It’s possible to make fun of the limitations and absurdities of conceptual art, but one has to admit that the problems it deals with are real. They are about present-day life and how art can hope to process it. The art of the past is great. We want to stare. There’s nothing so powerful as a little Bonnard of a lady having a wash. Or a Matisse of some purple trees. Or a 1950s abstract painting of a void. Gorky, Still, Rothko, Picasso, Matisse, Bonnard — I loved the paintings in SF MoMA’s permanent collection. But what that stuff doesn’t have is contemporaneity. It can’t answer our need for a type of art that reflects our own everyday experience. We want art to be alert to change, tuned in to how we live now. The whole conceptual tradition, including Pierre Huyghe, offers exactly that. It’s not that Matisse and Gorky, etc., can tell us only about 1917 or 1939. They offer magnificent lookatability, not just beauty but beauty full of mind and feeling — emotion that transcends its own moment. But we are frankly baffled by the tradition of aestheticism that Matisse represents. At least, we can only appreciate it from a distance. We can’t join in. We can’t do it anymore. Society just isn’t set up in the same way. In terms of immediate everydayness, such heights of art have become meaningless. Conceptual art hits the spot instead. (There’s something sad about it. It’s about new freedom, but it’s also basically about giving credence to impotence.) We have this itch for the present that conceptual art answers. It doesn’t have anything worth looking at. Plus its "think-about-it" content isn’t worth thinking about for long. So there’s a loss along with the gain. But that’s the way it is.

Matthew Collings is Modern Painters’ London-based contributing editor.

"The Conceptual Art Father" originally appeared in the March 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' March 2009 Table of Contents.