Understanding the Root Discourse I

Among the seminal ideas participants in Museum/Gallery Studies should be considering…..

Lucy Lippard and John Chandler write the essay The Dematerialization of the Art, published in

the February 1968 issue of Art International.

An excerpt: “During the 1960’s the anti-intellectual, emotional intuitive processes of art-making characteristic of the last two decades have begun to give way to an ultra-conceptual art that emphasizes the thinking process almost exclusively. As more and more work is designed in the studio, but executed elsewhere by professional craftsmen, as the object becomes merely the end product, a number of artists are losing interest in the physical evolution of the work of art. The studio is again becoming a study. Such a trend appears to be provoking a profound dematerialization of art, especially art as object, and if it continues to prevail, it may result in the object’s becoming wholly obsolete.

The visual arts at the moment seem to hover at a crossroad that may well turn out to be two roads to one place, though they appear to have come from two sources: art as idea and art as action. In the first case, matter is denied, as sensation has been converted into concept; in the second case, matter has been transformed into energy and time-motion.”