Conceptual art magazine projects and their precedents.
Published: 2004
Language: eng
Number of pages: 346
Description: Conceptual art magazine projects (like their earlier twentieth-century predecessors and later related tendencies) are designed to function as art or art-like occurrences in printed magazines. Magazine projects are not  reproductions of artworks that were constructed for other purposes but are, rather, artworks in reproduction. The projects that I deal with involve deliberate employment and/or disruptions of the conventions of magazine publications; they were designed to alter and reconfigure the readers' experience of the magazine as a form of communication as well as challenge their expectations of art and its possible manifestations. The publications studied include small-run, self-produced journals designed as complete clustered or interrelated artworks through to mass-market art magazines for which the artists were invited to contribute one or more pages, and where the pages were understood to function as either alternative exhibition spaces or as discussion forums for ideas about art.I examine the origins of magazine projects during the early years of the century in European Expressionist, Futurist, Dadaist, International Constructivist, and Surrealist periodicals of the teens to the late 1940s. I also discuss later precedents for Conceptual art in Fluxus and experimental writing of the 1960s. Subsequent chapters are studies of one of several distinguishable means that were employed for using the magazine format to produce and distribute artwork. Examples of the use of each generalized approach are then analysed in detail to support this typology. To conclude the dissertation, I examine the relation between Conceptual art and aesthetics because it is frequently proposed that it somehow managed to avoid aesthetics altogether. I consider the aesthetic role of obstacles to sensibility in Conceptual art and the encounter with art being a kind of learning-like activity that expands both understanding and general awareness. With Conceptual art, the pre-given knowledge and circumstantial evidence surrounding an artwork become part of the work in extension. Context, history, and interpretation are externally embedded as fluctuating components of the work. I reach this conclusion by the theorizing of a lateral extension of artwork and artist functions.
Notes: Adviser:  Elizabeth Legge.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Toronto, 2004.

Electronic version licensed for access by U. of T. users.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 65-10, Section: A, page: 3601.