Popular Culture Review Vol. 24, No. 1, Winter 2013 | Page 11

The Concept of Conceptual Art: 7 itself is the idea of putting the urinal on the wall. Once you are familiär with the idea, you are in the presence of the art. There are art critics who argue that all art after Duchamp has been necessarily conceptual because he forced us to reconsider the nature of the aesthetic experience at an ontological level. Phenomenologically, at least we can say that it is certainly the case that a urinal on a museum wall is experienced differently than a urinal in a restroom. The latter seems to have little sense of the aesthetic to it. Perhaps. But one of the most important things we can leam from conceptual art is that it is likely the case that aesthetics is always a mode of appearing, not merely a category for understanding the being of traditional works of art displayed and presented in traditional spaces and manners. That is, when a urinal is placed in a museum one of the things we are forced to contemplate is the beauty that is in the urinal—the smooth flow and curve of the lines, the sheen of the porcelain, the careful choices that went into the design, etc. The fact that the artist himself did little to create this object—all he did, really, was sign it and ask us to consider it as a work of art—means that we are then retroactively forced to think about the way in which such qualities were already there in the everyday urinals we have been seeing all our lives and taking for granted. The aesthetic, that is, is always already operational in our lives, though we have, perhaps, been taking it for granted and not giving it our full attention. What constitutes art is, at least in part, a function of how we experience something. Context and setting can tum something into a full-blown aesthetic object even as it hints that all objects are aesthetic objects to some degree. When we take something as art rather than as some other sort of thing, it is not as if a new object appears in the world. Rather, an aesthetic object appears as one way in which an object can appear. Taken to the extreme, this becomes the claim that anything at all can be anything at all if we simply say it is and take it to be such. “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”? Well, it is and it isn’t. And this is not just a urinal? It is and it isn’t. In 1961, Robert Rauschenberg was asked to participate in an exhibition of portraits at “Galerie Iris Clert” and rather than painting something, he sent a telegram reading: “This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so.” And it was—and it wasn’t. What Rauschenberg was exhibiting was an idea. And the idea itself was the object of art, supposedly making the telegram into a portrait and the entire concept of doing so into the aesthetic experience for the audience. Nineteen-sixty-one was a good year for art. Apart from Rauschenberg’s telegram, there was M. C. Escher’s Waterfall, David Hockney’s We Two Boys Together CIinging, Jasper John’s Maps, and several performances of Rachel Rosenthal’s InstantTheater} It is also the year that Yves Klein Blue was given a patent. The synthetic ultramarine pigment had been developed by Klein and a team of chemists, and once the patent was given so that Klein essentially owned that particular hue of blue (and thus, in some sense, all works of art anyone eise might ever create using that pigment), the artist moved toward even further