Sarah Abdeen
One of the most important features of contemporary art is that it does not pay attention to the subject as it was old, nor to the form as it happened recently, but the contemporary artist wants to feel that he made something that does not exist before, not just a simulation of reality, no matter how ingenious simulation, no decoration whatsoever The decoration is skilful, but something more durable, even more realistic than the reality itself.
If we want to understand what is going on inside the artist, we have to go back to the ideas of childhood, when the child introduces a new concept and a new existence to the real things, and deal with them through this concept, and completely separated from the concept of realism rolling.
What conceptual art?
Conceptualism was a way of challenging art in its traditional sense and tools, and pushing the boundaries of art to new heights, especially with the attempts of conceptual artists, to make it a path of political opposition and a free medium of expression, without a single frame of reference, be it cultural, aesthetic or ideological.
Conceptual art includes performing arts, synthesis, video art, and body expression, as if the principle that unites these arts and ideas is to reject traditional ways of judging works of art and oppose commodification, so conceptual art can be almost anything, because it is the opposite of painting and sculpture that thinks. The artist has the best way to express his idea using materials and techniques of painting or sculpture.
A conceptual artist uses any material or any appropriate material to convey his idea.Conceptual work may be accompanied by a written description to explain and communicate the essence of the work to the viewer, because conceptual art cannot be confined to a fixed or known pattern.Each work is a new exploration, a new surprise, and a new mystery between the artist and the recipient.
Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp is the first to introduce a conceptual work, entitled "The Fountain", a porcelain urinal ready with its signature with no more than a sign. In his work, Duchamp abandoned beauty, scarcity and skill as the basics of making artwork, first appeared in 1917, and often lost this fountain, and then carried out a new version of Duchamp in 1964.
The fountain is an example of the concept of conceptual art that reaches the utmost contradiction and interpretation, as an ordinary object transformed by the artist to a work of art only by giving a conceptual idea, to be interpreted and interpreted in more than one way.
Duchamp later stated that the idea of the fountain came from a discussion with his friends Walter Arnsberg and Joseph Stella in New York, who then bought a urinal from a sanitary ware store, signed it under the pseudonym r.mutt, and presented it to the Independent Artists Association, which helped Duchamp himself founded it, modeled after the Paris Independent Salon after moving from Paris to New York in 1915.
Although the Act of the Independent Society provides for the acceptance of all works of art in which the artist is obliged to pay the subscription fee, they exclude the work of Duchamp (not signed in his name) as a piece of sanitary ware, for bodily waste, which cannot be considered a work of art, with the observation of the Committee The inability to offer work to women.
Duchamp resigned from the association in protest against the censorship of the artist's work, and the association later issued a statement defending its view that the fountain is not an art work, beyond the definition of art, and not more than a container for human waste.
Both the statement and the work of Duchamp raised several important questions, among them, what is the artwork and what is it? Who decides what artwork, artist, critic or audience receive? Can artwork come from an idea only, without an artistic hand?
The artist Beatrice Wood issued a statement defending the work saying, "It doesn't matter whether Mr. Mott (the name on the painting) made the fountain with his hand or not? He picked it, and turned something ordinary from life into a work of art, by creating a new idea, denying First picture of the fountain. "
One of the most important aftermath of that event was that contemporary art galleries were held without a jury and New York became a dynamic art center beyond Paris.
Dematerialization
"Ideas alone can be works of art," says Sol Lewitt, a leading theorist of conceptual art. "They are a series of evolution that may eventually find some form. Not all ideas should be transformed into material form.
Conceptual art has continued its drive to strip artistic content by eliminating the need for things altogether, or using ephemeral everyday objects, so many conceptual works can only be identified through documents, photographs, or written texts. Some art critics even reduce conceptual artifacts. In a set of written instructions or text references describing the work, but the conceptual artists' response has always been that the idea is more important, eternal and influential, which is what the essence of conceptual art is based on.