In a series of articles and exhibitions-mostly on us soil-Mari Carmen Ramírez presented Latin America as the exemplar of Conceptualism’s global character. Then in the early 1990s, as a lucrative Neo-Conceptual movement consolidated its position in an expanding global art market, Conceptualism was proclaimed the first global art form. footnote 3 From the late 1970s, German art historian and critic Benjamin Buchloh effectively defined Conceptualism as proper to the European and American hegemonic centres, though Siegelaub disputed Buchloh’s emphasis on Manhattan.
Yet for Luis Camnitzer, a Uruguayan artist working in New York at the time, such claims obscured the exportation of ‘contemporary colonial art’.
footnote 2 Dominant figures in the United States, such as Lucy Lippard, Seth Siegelaub and Joseph Kosuth, presented it as fully international, as facilitating global connectivity and artistic reach. The issue of its geographical mapping is linked to that of the determinate bounds of artworks and practices-something often explicitly thematized in conceptual works themselves-and a conscious orientation to this question was evident within the movement by the late 1960s, when tensions emerged over whether it constituted an American or an international phenomenon, a reductive formalism or a radically inclusive ‘free-for-all’. While the meaning of this term continues to trouble artists and critics, a normative imperative to ‘think global’ has come to structure the practices of art institutions, framing the endless drive for recognition of new artists and regions, as biennales and art fairs proliferate.Ĭonceptualism has always had a special relationship to the question of the global. footnote 1 The term ‘global art’ took hold as the Cold War drew to a close, through years when broader discourses of globalization also came to flourish. Yet inside, Martha Rosler warned that the new fetish of the global threatened to obfuscate the material shape of the art world-its circuits of communication, distribution and exchange-where a capitalist restructuring was in process. I n 1989 a special edition of Art in America announced the arrival of global art, its cover adorned with a nasa photograph of the Earth taken from lunar orbit.
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