Conceptual Artists

It takes only a little imagination to realise that these artists are as serious as the Earth Artists we've just been looking at. Nonetheless, their deliberate challenges to our mental comfort and their more than occasional stance of childish puerility is something of a rude awakening after the cerebral spirituality of the Earth Artists.

Eva Hesse

Influenced by the Pop artists and happeners Oldenburg and Beuys, and presumably therefore also Rauschenberg, Hesse's work has visibly female aspects in its softness, openings, and breast images but these are presented as inscrutably as any Suprematist, Minimal, or Abstract Expressionist work. She rejected classification as representatively female and commented that her art should speak only through what it was itself.

Untitled, 1964, Bowdoin College Mus of Art

Tomorrow's Apples, 1965, Tate, London

More than One, 1967, Rose Art Mus, Brandeis Uni

Addendum, 1967, Tate, London

Untitled, 1967, Tate, London, drawing on graph paper

Sequel, 1967-8, Rose Art Mus, Brandeis Uni

Accession II, 1969, Detroit Institute of Arts (box w wire hairs furring up the inside)

Robert Hughes notes that the audience response "oscillates betw fear & desire, irony & alarm" - is this a male response to it?

Hang Up, 1965-66, Art Inst of Chicago

Empty frame and wire bound w duct tape; title puns on hanging on wall, hang-up as neurosis, and hang-up as abrupt end of communication

Martin Puryear

This artist spent some formative years in Sweden and in Sierra Leone, in which places he became increasingly committed to craftliness, and perhaps also familiar with their folklore. Although rejecting the artistic absence of the Minimalists, he nonetheless felt (like them) that he wanted to "make things rather than representations of them", i.e. that his art should be the thing in itself. His work is reminiscent of Brancusi and/or Arp.

Gbows Gard, 1967,

aquatint, engraving & etching, Uni Maryland

Self, 1978, Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska,

wood veneers over armature

Old Mole, 1985

red cedar basket-work mole silhouette

Ampersand, 1987-8, Walker Inst, Minneapolis

granite columns, one with slice off base, one w slice off top

That Profile, 1999, Ghetty Center

45' tall, wire/rods profiled head over water; near side curved, far side flat; the fiend Grendel, whom Bearwulf killed, was a huge ape/man-like creature who lived in the waters of a fjord

Bruce Nauman

Self Portrait as a Fountain, 1966

Photo of him spitting water; and a whole lot of other works too.

The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths, 1967

(neon light spiral with words)

Henry Moore, Bound to Fail, 1967

(fabric/paper headlike silhouette on white ground)

Holograms, 1969

(old greenish type, sticking out tongue - cf "lip" 1970 in Fine Arts Mus of SF, below), video still, Leo Castelli Gallery, New York.

Lip, 1970; War, 1971, Fine Arts Mus of SF

Untitled (model for trench, shaft & tunnel), 1978, Museo Nacional Reina Sofia, Spain

Ah Ha, 1978

painting in reflecting b/w halfs, palendromes & colours (and despite attached commentary, please note the difference in popular parlance between uh-uh ("no") and ah-huh ("yes"). Only one of these could be confused with ah-ha ("now I understand!")

Vices and Virtues, 1983-8, UCSD

neon virtue/vice words superimposed & circulating in opposite directions. The pairs don't seem to be the canonical ones (they would not be displayed systematically, anyway); and note that the normal order of the concept has been inverted to emphasise vice rather than virtue.

None Sing, Neon Sign, 1985

neon words reflecting each other anagramatically

Double Poke in the Eye II, 1985, Kemper Mus of Contemp Art

neon faces poke each other's eyes - this clip is animated

Punch and Judy, Birth, Life, Sex and Death, 1985

(sketch for neon work), MOMA

Shaking Hands, 1985

(neon two men shake hands & get erections), Staatsgalerie Stuttgart

Having Fun/Good Life/Symptoms, 1985, Carnegie Museum or Art

(doubled neon spiral with words, 5'9" tall)

Carousel, 1988

taxidermist's dummies scraping floor, although in this version they don't

Carousel, 1988, in this version, they do.

Shit in your hat - head on a chair, 1990 (still from video)

This was a video in which a mime (mute) clown was directed and humiliated by a disembodied external voice apparently belonging to a green wax head (reminiscent of his 1969 hologram?), which commanded it to: "shit in your hat, show me your hat, put your hat on your head".

Nancy Graves

Variability of Similar Forms, 1970

(skeletons of legs), Rose Art Mus, Brandeis Uni

Theme, 1977, Gihon Foundation

Sequi, 1984-5, Crocker Center

Wheelabout, 1985, Mus of Mod Art, Fort Worth, TX

Immovable Iconography, 1990, aluminum, bronze, brass, with polychrome patina and paint

Lawrence Weiner

Many things brought from one climate … 1981, Art Gallery of Ontario