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Lucy R. Lippard's famous book, itself resembling an exhibition, is
now brought full circle in an exhibition (and catalog) resembling
her book. "Conceptual art, for me, means work in which the idea is
paramount and the material form is secondary, lightweight,
ephemeral, cheap, unpretentious and/or 'dematerialized.'" -Lucy R.
Lippard, Six Years In 1973 the critic and curator Lucy R. Lippard
published Six Years, a book with possibly the longest subtitle in
the bibliography of art: The dematerialization of the art object
from 1966 to 1972: a cross-reference book of information on some
esthetic boundaries: consisting of a bibliography into which are
inserted a fragmented text, art works, documents, interviews, and
symposia, arranged chronologically and focused on so-called
conceptual or information or idea art with mentions of such vaguely
designated areas as minimal, anti-form, systems, earth, or process
art, occurring now in the Americas, Europe, England, Australia, and
Asia (with occasional political overtones) edited and annotated by
Lucy R. Lippard. Six Years, sometimes referred to as a conceptual
art object itself, not only described and embodied the new type of
art-making that Lippard was intent on identifying and cataloging,
it also exemplified a new way of criticizing and curating art.
Nearly forty years later, the Brooklyn Museum takes Lippard's
celebrated experiment in curated concatenation as a template,
turning a book that resembled an exhibition into an exhibition
materializing the ideas in her book. The artworks and essays
featured in this publication recall the thrill that was tangible in
Lippard's original documentation, reminding us that during the late
sixties and early seventies all possible social and material
parameters of art (making) were played with, worked over, inverted,
reduced, expanded, and rejected. By tracing Lippard's own
activities in those years, the book also documents the early
blurring of boundaries among critical, curatorial, and artistic
practices. With more than 200 images of work by dozens of artists
(printed in color throughout), this book brings Lippard's
curatorial experiment full circle.
Shortly after graduating from Nova Scotia College of Art and
Design, Vikky Alexander made her 1983 entry into the international
art world while living in New York by participating in photo
historian Abigail Solomon Godeau’s exhibition The Stolen Image
and its Uses. For over a decade she was active in a circle of New
York artists that merged the critical ideas of Minimalism and
Conceptual Art with photography, and came to be known as the
Pictures Generation. Since then she has continued to explore the
appropriated image through her own photography, especially in
relation to iconic representations of nature as well as the spaces
of consumerism—two subjects that remain significant in today’s
cultural discourses. This book, which accompanies an exhibition at
the Vancouver Art Gallery, is a beautifully illustrated
retrospective of nearly four decades of Alexander’s work. Since
the 1980s, Alexander has made numerous series of photographs,
montages, sculptures, collages and installations, all working to
hone a vision that captures the spectacle and inherent falseness of
certain public and private spaces. From the exaggerated
architecture of Versailles, Disneyland and the West Edmonton Mall,
to the use of idyllic “natural” settings and the skin-deep
beauty of fashion models, she unravels the mechanisms of display
that shape meaning and desire in our culture.
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