"In & out of Amsterdam": Museum of Modern Art, New York

Meyer, James, Artforum International

GLOBALISM AND CONCEPTUALISM: It has become increasingly apparent that these two notions are indissolubly linked, but how? "In & Out of Amsterdam: Travels in Conceptual Art, 1960-1976" is only the most recent curatorial effort to examine this association, first proposed by the exhibition "Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s-1980s," overseen by Jane Farver at New York's Queens Museum of Art in 1999. The Queens show tracked seemingly independent eruptions of a Conceptual tendency in discrete locales across the globe, contesting the Western orientation of previous surveys. Galleries were devoted to Latin-American Conceptualism, Eastern European Conceptualism, Japanese Conceptualism, and so on. The recent exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York proposed a very different schema, conceiving of "Conceptualism" as a transnational tendency, a network. During the 1960s and '70s, it suggested, the art centers of North America and Western Europe were linked as never before. A democratization of air travel during this period, fostered by the jet engine, nurtured a new kind of practice. Artists abandoned the bohemian pleasures of the studio, shaping their activities in response to the new conditions of mobility. "The artists always traveled around with a bag that held everything," recalled Adriaan van Ravesteijn, one of the founders of the Amsterdam gallery Art & Project, whose recent donation to MOMA (with his life partner, Geert van Beijeren) of the gallery's extraordinary archive instigated the show. As Christophe Cherix, …

Questia, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning. www.questia.com
Publication information: Article title: "In & out of Amsterdam": Museum of Modern Art, New York. Contributors: Meyer, James - Author. Magazine title: Artforum International. Volume: 48. Issue: 6 Publication date: February 2010. Page number: 190+. © 1999 Artforum International Magazine, Inc. COPYRIGHT 2010 Gale Group.

This material is protected by copyright and, with the exception of fair use, may not be further copied, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means.