Publishing – whether a book, pamphlet or card – was used by conceptual artists to challenge the status of the art object so that the space of the page equated to, and even took over from, the art gallery. How the resulting ambiguities of what you were looking at could be represented in an exhibition and its catalogue was a challenge we embraced in producing Conceptual Art in Britain: 1964-1979.
The presentation of archive and library items in the exhibition will be unprecedented in scale when compared with most shows at Tate Britain: 69 artworks will be accompanied by more than 250 items from Tate’s library and archive collections. The publication draws these distinctions out with texts that address particular artworks and installations as much as an exhibition would if it were taking place in an art magazine.
The picture research for the catalogue included commissioning new photography and mining picture archives to show how works had been originally installed, as well as finding ways to represent lost artworks and installation views of exhibitions from the period.
Preparing the images for publication highlighted the ephemeral aspects of many works through their self-reflexive nature and therefore the numerous ways that they could be documented and represented in retrospect.
Works from the Tate collection that needed to be photographed, such as Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (1975), a piece that consists of component parts requiring a detailed installation, meant that the curator had to make decisions about the finer points of the spacing and labelling involved in the book.
By contrast, historical installation slides of Victor Burgin’s Room (1970) at Camden Arts Centre offered a more interesting insight into how the work would originally have been encountered – a view through a nondescript doorway into an apparently empty room – than new photography could.
Bruce McLean’s King for a Day and Keith Arnatt’s Tate Gallery Staff Exhibition – both part of the Seven Exhibitions series at Tate Gallery in 1972 – only exist as archival material.
The shifting nature of Barry Flanagan’s Ringn ’66 from 1966 meant that an early image of the work, exhibited in a carpeted gallery space, was a more compelling depiction than more recent photography, partly because of the way the sand had settled and the angle of the shot, but also because of what it revealed about the environment in which it was first shown.
We also photographed original text material rather than typesetting it in the catalogue, as in the case of Stephen Willats’ Cognition 1961, where the significance of the paper being creased and being a carbon copy of the original – with resulting blurred type – was pertinent to the way in which the work was conceived as material to be duplicated and distributed.
The presentation of archive and library items in the exhibition will be unprecedented in scale when compared with most shows at Tate Britain: 69 artworks will be accompanied by more than 250 items from Tate’s library and archive collections. The publication draws these distinctions out with texts that address particular artworks and installations as much as an exhibition would if it were taking place in an art magazine.
The picture research for the catalogue included commissioning new photography and mining picture archives to show how works had been originally installed, as well as finding ways to represent lost artworks and installation views of exhibitions from the period.
Preparing the images for publication highlighted the ephemeral aspects of many works through their self-reflexive nature and therefore the numerous ways that they could be documented and represented in retrospect.
Works from the Tate collection that needed to be photographed, such as Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (1975), a piece that consists of component parts requiring a detailed installation, meant that the curator had to make decisions about the finer points of the spacing and labelling involved in the book.
By contrast, historical installation slides of Victor Burgin’s Room (1970) at Camden Arts Centre offered a more interesting insight into how the work would originally have been encountered – a view through a nondescript doorway into an apparently empty room – than new photography could.
Bruce McLean’s King for a Day and Keith Arnatt’s Tate Gallery Staff Exhibition – both part of the Seven Exhibitions series at Tate Gallery in 1972 – only exist as archival material.
The shifting nature of Barry Flanagan’s Ringn ’66 from 1966 meant that an early image of the work, exhibited in a carpeted gallery space, was a more compelling depiction than more recent photography, partly because of the way the sand had settled and the angle of the shot, but also because of what it revealed about the environment in which it was first shown.
We also photographed original text material rather than typesetting it in the catalogue, as in the case of Stephen Willats’ Cognition 1961, where the significance of the paper being creased and being a carbon copy of the original – with resulting blurred type – was pertinent to the way in which the work was conceived as material to be duplicated and distributed.
