Dan's Papers - August 17, 2007 - art commentary With Marion Wolberg Weiss

More and more people are asking this critic about conceptual art, namely what is it? Or what is it not? Experts more knowledgeable than your truly have tried to answer that question, with diverse results. It's time to try defining the term again, perhaps with a more relevant and local slant, using examples from works that are accessible and somewhat familiar.

It shouldn't surprise anyone living in the Hamptons that not much conceptual art exists here, although this critic occasionally runs across examples from artists who have not labeled their work as such, like Bill King's 2006 sculptural show at Pamela Williams' Gallery or Christa Maiwald's recent embroidery at the Surface Gallery.

Even so, conceptual art not only includes the visual arts. Anyone who has ever seen a theatrical performance by Water Mill's Robert Wilson would certainly realize his pieces are also conceptual art. Often, installations are identified with the genre as well.

While we acknowledge that conceptual art can take varied aesthetic forms, we are still left with the question, what is it? The flip answer is it's something we don't understand or have trouble identifying with or find disorienting and confusing. What's intriguing is that some art movements / styles of the past may have been conceptual art. Based on these determinants, therefore, perhaps Abstract Expressionism art could be labeled as such.

Obviously, there's more to it. Consider the following tenets. First, there's the unconventional structure relating to the story-telling (in theatre and the visual arts) or to the ways the aesthetic elements are put together. Non-narrative / non-linear may be the definitive terms to describe a work that doesn't follow a chronological beginning, middle and end order, although there may, in fact, be a beginning, middle and end. Time is, therefore, displaced and so is location. Wait. Doesn't Surrealism have these traits? Could Surrealism be conceptual art?

Another structural element serving conceptual art is the idea that if things don't necessarily follow a chronological arrangement of "what follows what," they surely follow a "what goes with what" (a vertical rather than horizontal pattern). Here's where the concept of "motifs," prevalent in conceptual art, makes an appearance.

The Collective: Unconscious' recent Under groundzero Festival in Manhattan pinpoints these structural points. If the plays presented are unconventional, so, too, is the theatrical space, a nearly 100-year old former burlesque club.

First, the displacement of time and place: episodes travel between the past, present and future in the life of a woman questioning her relationship with deteriorating parents and a dead brother. Subsequently, we don't know if the first episode is, in fact, the beginning or not.

There is often no point-of-reference in conceptual art, as demonstrated by this play, Broken Dog Legs, written and performed by Emily Conbere. And while motifs are plentiful here, they are ambiguous. For example, the Black Lab German Shepard that the woman meets in the park is not a character, according to this critic, but a metaphor for her alter ego. Is she, in fact, a dog herself? Did we mention that conceptual art is also ambiguous? You bet it is.