Historiographies of the Contemporary: Modes of Translating in and from Conceptual Art

This chapter describes what I see as problematic shift in the use of the term 'conceptualism' that has taken place since the landmark exhibition ‘Global Conceptualisms: points of origin 1950s-1980s’ held at the the Queens Museum in New York in 1999. Here translation theory is applied in order to analyse how the term ‘global conceptualism’ appears to have shifted from the original intentions of that exhibition to now serve primarily as a shorthand for implying that global contemporary art is somehow derivative of procedural characteristics that stem from Conceptual North American Art. I believe that this historical relation to conceptual art is methodologically problematic, since it was a movement widely described as having arisen from the rejection of Greenbergian formalism and its belief in medium specificity. It is therefore a denomination that is culturally, geopolitically and art historically located.