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Chapter 5 is a ficto-critical piece on Conceptualism dedicated to the anthropologist Michael Taussig. It provides an overview of the critical literature on allegory after 1950. It is part collage, part fantasy, part critique, part appropriated and overwritten text, and itself includes several short allegories of the Conceptual poetry scene. It focuses critically on pieces from Craig Dworkin’s Strand, which it reads as classic postmodern allegorical transcodings between poetry and other discourses.

This chapter focuses on conceptual artist Adrian Piper’s dense explorations of objecthood and her bold experiments with disorientation, self-estrangement, and becoming a confrontational art object. Utilizing Daphne Brooks’s concept of “afro-alienation,” it argues that Piper’s complex praxis of self-observation and an aggressive non-identification with her audience is suggestive of a strategic self-alienation employed by black historical actors, albeit in the halcyon days of 1970s performance art. Building on conceptual art’s emphasis on ideas and process, and minimalism’s antipathy towards formal art objects, Piper deftly manipulates her body as artwork and as a catalytic agent for audiences. This chapter maps Piper’s unique traversal from Minimalism to Conceptualism to performance art, to reveal her agile attempts at aesthetic mobility. Following this, the chapter briefly ponders Piper’s relationship to incipient notions of “feminist art” and “black art.” It, then, focus on two sets of Piper’s lesser-known performances—the Aretha Franklin Catalysis (1972) and The Spectator Series (1973). Both lead to The Mythic Being performances (1973-75), in which Piper dressed as a third-world male avatar in blaxplotation-esque attire, before ceasing street performances and shifting to a strictly visual icon. The chapter dissects the various artistic strategies and ideological aims of The Mythic Being performances, posters, and advertisements. Finally, the chapter concludes with a discussion of Piper’s very public withdrawal of her work from the 2013 exhibition “Radical Presence,” arguing that the tactical removal of her work is in closer dialogue with her larger corpus, than we may initially think.

The introduction addresses two intersecting trajectories in American art between the late 1960s and the early twenty-first-century century. On the one hand, it traces the ways in which disciplinary Conceptual Art, with a capital “C”, expanded into the diverse set of practices that have been characterised generally as conceptualism. On the other hand, it shows how the expansion of a critical conceptualism has been strongly informed by the turbulent rights-based politics of the 1960s. Initially, first generation Conceptual artists responded to preceding art movements within disciplinary boundaries, examining the definition of art itself and engaging abstract concerns. Artists then applied the basic principles of Conceptual Art to address a range of social and political issues. This development reflects the influence of Civil Rights, Black Power, the student movement, the anti-war movement, second wave feminism, and the gay liberation movement. Central in the American context, the multiple identity-based mobilisations that came to be known as “identity politics” were further articulated in the 1970s. The artists addressed in this book: Adrian Piper, Joseph Kosuth, David Hammons, Renée Green, Mary Kelly, Martha Rosler, Silvia Kolbowski, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Lorna Simpson, Andrea Fraser, Hans Haacke, and Charles Gaines expanded the propositions of Conceptual Art.

This chapter asks how a precisely articulated set of practices, defined by artists in the 1960s as Conceptual Art, evolve into a broad notion of conceptualism, and how the latter had expanded into its present forms. It shows how, in the United States context, some of the most important strategies of conceptualism developed through the influence of contemporaneous politics, more specifically the transition from Civil Rights into Black Power, the New Left, the anti-war movement, feminism, and gay liberation, as well as what later came to be collectively named “identity politics” in the 1970s. A range of artists who have self-defined as conceptualists synthesised Conceptual analytic approaches with an outlook on identity formation as a means of political agency, and not as a representation of the self, a strategy that significantly expanded in the 1970s. Two major aspects of identity politics have impacted the field. The first, activist and administrative, consisted of protests against existing institutions, the developments of action groups and collectives, and the subsequent formulation of alternative spaces. The second was the bearing that it had on artistic strategy, form, and subject matter. This chapter focuses on practices that took a critical outlook on identity formation.

This chapter takes a close look at Adrian Piper’s transition from Conceptual Art to conceptualism, in the context of Conceptual Art’s canonical interpretations. I observe that her contribution was focused specifically on questions of mediation—the mediation of content by materials, forms, and language—later considering the mediating power of race, gender and other forms of apparent difference. From the application of analytic thinking to the work of art, she extended her enquiries to the dynamic relationship between the various elements of the artwork, such as object, author, body, self, circulation, and audience reception. Piper’s use of the autobiographical tone and the body arrived chronologically after an extended period of preoccupation with the context of the art object, its circulation and reception, and general inquiries into the nature of time and space through a focus on media and mediation. In accordance with this sequence of development, I propose to read her later work in the same way, always first as Conceptual, onto which we can then apply the political question. To enter the work through its analytic base is to read it on the terms of its making, not the subject position of its maker.

This chapter takes a comparative look at several models of interdisciplinary conceptualist practices that responded critically to Conceptual Art’s original claims. Artists responded to a limitation they identified in the narrow focus of early Conceptual Art, and turned to the social, the political, and the “life-world,” external to the hermeneutic definition of art. When this second wind of conceptualism integrated external subject matter, it was no longer in the modernist sense of art and politics. Synthetic conceptualism incorporated the basic investigations of Conceptual Art to form a complex method of artmaking that was deconstructive just as it was referential. Artists integrated a meta-critique to reveal frameworks that endowed artistic language and strategies with pre-conceived meaning. Three artists exemplify this shift. Adrian Piper transitioned from an analysis of the art object as a factor of time and space to the role of cultural forms in formulating gendered and racialised social meaning; Mary Kelly from labour and gender issues to the discourse of the subject; and Martha Rosler from the documentary mode to the critique of representation in mass media.

The thesis of Non-Conceptualism about mental content says that not all mental contents in the intentional or representational acts or states of minded animals are necessarily or constitutively determined by their conceptual capacities, and that at least some mental contents are necessarily or constitutively determined by their non-conceptual capacities. Non-Conceptualism is sometimes, but not always, combined with the further thesis that non-conceptual capacities and contents can be shared by rational human animals, non-rational human minded animals, and non-human minded animals alike. Chapter 2 analyzes the general theory of non-conceptual content and conceptual content. Highlights of the account include, first, a defense of Non-Conceptualism by means of an extended, step-by-step argument for the existence, concept-autonomy, and concept-independence of essentially non-conceptual content; second, a corresponding refutation of Conceptualism; and third, an application of the doctrine that necessarily whatever is mental is conscious—The Deep Consciousness Thesis—to essentially non-conceptual content.

In their 2004 film 4, the contemporary Russian novelist and screenwriter Vladimir Sorokin and the filmmaker Ilya Khrzhanovsky create a nightmare fantasy about the intersection of two seemingly unrelated processes of production. In Moscow, a new corrupt industry of processing chemically injected and possibly cloned pig meat and, in the countryside, a community of elderly women who create a series of eerie life-size dolls out of masticated bread dough. Both processes address anxieties about body boundaries being breached or invaded, with the national body becoming tainted or jammed up by what it ingests. The symbolic palette of 4 paints a picture of queer intimacy that knowingly embraces sterility, while also encoding gay male sex as emasculating and unclean. Within the film, the fear of death through feminisation is projected onto the portrayal of the economic changes that wreak havoc with individual autonomy.

This chapter focuses on the Conceptualism Thesis, which is based on the view that the content of perceptual experience is fully determined by concepts possessed by the subject. Related to this thesis is the nature of concept possession and the distinction between personal and subpersonal level content, which is discussed after providing an overview of conceptualism. The HOT theory and conceptualism shed light on each other through a special kinship and via an examination of the phenomena of ambiguous figures and visual agnosia. Conceptualism faces two phenomenological objections, namely, the richness of experience argument and the fineness of grain argument, both of which are addressed here. Finally, this chapter presents arguments supporting the notion that conceptualism is far more plausible than the alternative.

Brief accounts of the motivation and form of some pre-Kantian conceptualist theories and of Kant’s transcendental idealism lead into discussion of the source of the conceptualist assumptions of much twentieth-century analytic philosophy. The arguments of a currently leading exponent, John McDowell, are critically examined, and his emphatic endorsement of two main conclusions of Chapter II are noted—that perception is direct cognitive contact with the world, and that perceptual knowledge is perspicuously so to the subject. But according to the phenomenological analysis in Chapter II these features are intrinsic to the content of preconceptual perceptual awareness, whereas McDowell sees concepts, coming only with language, as a necessary means to the former, and assigns the latter, in effect, to reason and the capacity for second-order reflection. Epistemological and logico–linguistic considerations relating to the identity, individuation and classification of material things present a further, arguably decisive challenge to conceptualist theory.