Relations Between Conceptual and Performance Art - SUMMARY

Vito Acconci
Step Piece, 1970
Photograph of a performance in his studio


 

In the reading Some Relations between Conceptual and Performance Art by Frazer Ward focuses on the overlap of the categories of conceptual and performance art during the late 1960s and early 1970s. 

Ward discusses the dematerialisation and minimalist approach to both conceptual and performance art. The material considerations became secondary in conceptual works and the temporal status of performance further evoked these same feelings. There was a loss of aestheticisim and not only did this dematerialisation of art have huge influence on how artists worked, but both conceptual and performance art became engaged in a continuing dialogue, particularly in performance where the artists used their bodies as a pathway to text and used "their bodies (to)…point to the contingent, social construction of subjectivity”. There was a critical reception of art in galleries. Art was now being made for artists and their movement from the gallery space to a studio space helped artists began to create works that no longer existed as a commodity.

Ward produces two artists, Ian Burn's conceptual driven Mirror Piece (1967 and Vito Acconci's performance Step Piece (1970). Burn’s work is described as unambiguous and “typically Conceptual in its abandonment of aesthetic authority”. Mirror Piece consists of thirteen typed pages of notes and diagrams, a mirror, both which have been framed and covered with glass. His notes are his ‘description’ of his work, explaining its ‘intentional’ function and importance of the gallery space in the identification of the mirrors function. Acconci’s Step Piece features an eighteen-inch stool set up in his aparment and used as a morning workout until he was unable to contiune. He would reguarly send out announcements informing the public of his progress. His work also serves as a rebellion against the gallery space, in allowing the public to watch his performances from his studio, completely abloishing the idea of an institution.

Rosalind Krauss and Greogory Battock, in Idea Art (1973) remark on the rationalisation of conceptual art and the uncertainty of the place of performance as performance was never made a “movement”.  Ward also examines how conceptual art took to remove the traditional elements of aestheticism in order to elimate the ‘elite’ factor, causing frustration from the audience as they did not fully comprehend the rationalisim of Conceptual art.