Light Years Review

1. The exhibition Light Years, currently on display at the Art Institute of Chicago, is a thorough and accurate illustration of the characteristics and discourses embraced by Conceptual art.

• Being one of the first movements to fully bask in McLuhan's global village, Conceptual art was an international practice and not merely an artistic movement localized by such constraints as national boundaries. Light Years does well to showcase artists from all over the world. Sol LeWitt and Mel Bochner hail from the eastern United States while the west coast gets equal attention via work from John Baldessari and Ed Ruscha. Our friends just north in Canada include Iian Baxter& and Ian Wallace. Crossing the Atlantic we have Giulio Paulini and and Alghiero Boetti from Italy, Sigmar Polke from Germany, Jan Dibbets from Holland, and Christian Boltanski from France. And we must not forget the transnational artists who worked across the globe: Bas Jan Ader, Douglas Huebler, and of course On Kawara.
• Joseph Kosuth noted in "Art After Philosophy" that to claim one's allegiance to a medium as a Conceptual artist was antithetical to the discourse of the movement. Although Light Years is marketed as a show of photography, the multimedia inclination of Conceptualism is well documented. Reference to other art media such as painting, sculpture, and performance is showcased in Light Years from artists including Marcel Broodthaers, Bruce Nauman, and Bas Jan Ader.
• While the vast amount of work shown in Light Years may seem initially overwhelming, this propensity for large quantity is reminiscent of Conceptualism's fondness for multiplicity. To create material monuments out of a small selection of art pieces would be contrary to the ideology in Conceptualism that the material form or substrate of a work is secondary to the immaterial ideas contained within.

• On the subject of ideals in Conceptual art, Light Years covers all the main bases of Conceptual art's discourse. We see the "let the system run its course" philosophy of Sol LeWitt in works such as Vito Acconci's Estimations. Hans Haacke's Shapolsky's et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971, a subtle jab perhaps at the movers and shakers of the Guggenheim, shows Conceptual art's fondness for institutional critique. Democratization of the artwork can also be seen in Ed Ruscha's expertly crafted but widely distributed Every Building on the Sunset Strip.

2. Tragically however, Light Years is laid out in five "distinct" sections that perhaps yearn a little too much to compartmentalize the characteristics of Conceptual art into specifically defined categories: Camera Work, Misunderstandings, Invisibility, Painting Photography Film, and Material Properties. Naturally a show of this magnitude needs consideration in its layout (as does any exhibition, really). But these overarching sets leave holes where certain artworks may fit into two or more of the exhibition's sections.

• The piece shown from Jan Dibbets' Perspective Corrections series is shown in the Camera Work section and rightfully so; the piece uses the camera's ability to manipulate perspective to portray an irregular quadrilateral as a square. But recall also that the artist is Dutch. This work can potentially also allude to the historical quest of the Dutch masters to perfect perspective in painting. The image is indeed printed on photo-sensitized canvas. This piece could also fit in the Painting Photography Film section.
• Giovanni Anselmo's Documentation of Human Interference in Universal Gravitation is in the Invisibility section and certainly incorporates that theme by ruminating on the unseen force of gravity. But the piece is also based on a generative performance documented by the camera, a device that was historically used as an instrument of science to "enhance the optical unconscious" as Benjamin puts it. This exploitation of one of the camera's historical uses can validate a place for Anselmo's piece in Camera Work.
• Bruce Nauman's holographic pieces are displayed in Invisibility as well. Certainly the questionable materiality of this work marks it as prime work for this section. But that it is that exact same dubious materiality that would place the work nicely in Material Properties, a section that boasts a somewhat defeated statement about Conceptualism's shortcomings in creating immaterial artworks.
• Finally, Robert Barry's Inert Gas Series: Neon is disputably placed in Invisibility while being a contender for Material Properties for much the same reasons as Bruce Nauman's holography; the perceived immateriality of a gas released in a barren landscape skates close to immateriality.

3. While mentioned before that Light Years does a magnificent job of showcasing Conceptual art's internationalism and multimedia, the habit of categorization in the curating of the exhibition presents another shortcoming. The 20/20 hindsight of art history is implemented perhaps a little too liberally in showing work from artists that sit very comfortably in the Conceptual tradition; what of artists that were in allegiance to Conceptual art' and photography's ideas that are not named as Conceptual by textbooks? Light Years also sticks to a rather confining period of Conceptual art (the 1960s and 1970s) and doesn't stray whatsoever out of that era to show what the combination of Conceptualism and photography might be doing now.

• No work stemming from George Maciunas' group Fluxus is shown in Light Years. Artists such as Robert Watts and Nam June Paik used photography frequently and certainly upheld the ideals of Conceptualism.
• While the figurehead of land art Robert Smithson is shown in Light Years, we see hardly anything from other artists such as Richard Long and Hamish Fulton who both maintained practices rooted in (no pun intended) performance based earth art and photographic documentation.
• The early New Media (no oxymoron intended) practice of algorithmic computer art often utilized photography as a method of documenting graphics that were difficult to digitally output. The American artist Ben Laposky for example made silver-gelatin prints of screen graphics generated on an oscilloscope. This New Media practice has even been noted by media theorist Frieder Nake as being extraordinarily similar to Conceptual methodologies: just as the generative system defines the material form in Conceptual art, the semiotics of code languages define the outputted graphic in early computer art.
• Most noticeably, there is no work more recent than the late 1970s in Light Years. Neither Conceptual art or photography fell off the map three quarters of the way through the 20th century.

4. Despite my grievances with Light Years, the show still stands as an excellent view of Conceptual art and that movement's use of photography. Perhaps no better do we see this than in the mini installation of work by Ed Ruscha including a maquette of Every Building on the Sunset Strip, the actual book Every Building on the Sunset Strip, and four black and white prints of Ruscha handling his another artist book Twentysix Gasoline Stations.

• Every Building on the Sunset Strip shows Ruscha's use of multimedia, a staple of Conceptual art; the colloquial form of a map or travel guide is combined with artistic photography.
• Ruscha's attention to process, a strong practice in Conceptual art, is detailed in the maquette as well as the very task of photographing every building on an entire Los Angeles street.
• The democratization of art and making art readily available to anyone is incorporated into Every Building on the Sunset Strip as well. These books were sold at a reasonable price and at forums other than the mainstream gallery.
• Multiplicity is abundant in both the concertina book and the black and white prints shown. We are confronted with numerous images of architecture in Every Building on the Sunset Strip. Likewise, the images of Twentysix Gasoline Stations further the idea of multiplicity inherent in that work's precise numbering of gas stations and the book's large edition size.