In the 1960-70s the established understanding of art was the singular, precious, expertly made and evaluated art object, which ruled art history, the art market, and museums. In the then cultural backwater of Australia art training took place primarily in the publicly funded art school. These were primarily vocational, focused on the transmission of practical, manual skills or art makings and were centred around studio practice.
The autonomy of the art school started disappearing when it became part of the College of Advanced Education in 1973. This reform sought to formalize and elevate the study of art and design nationally through the introduction of university-style academic requirements. The “Art Theory” course, which built upon the new climate and system of liberal education, further underscored the importance of general and specialist knowledge—from both within and outside of the discipline of art— and critical and logical thinking.
This was when the traditionalist notions of artmaking and the expressive theory of art were under siege from American minimalists, conceptualists, and critics who were pushing past the boundaries of painting and sculpture by delegating the production of their artworks to industrial fabricators and artisans, polemically downplaying the importance of execution and highlighting the primacy of the idea or concept. The minimalists (Robert Morris, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Tony Smith) in placing the subject's experience of the specific object (ie., its reception) over the formal qualities of an autonomous art work, highlighted that the spectator is crucial for completing the work of art.
With the Dawkins reforms in 1991, which incorporated the college advanced education into the university in order to modernise and massify higher education, the autonomy of the art school disappeared. It became a department within a school in the university.
(Greg Johns, Horizon Figure, 2009, Granite Island, Sculpture by the Sea)
The aim of Art theory in the early 1970s was to expand access and raise the level of art and art discourse as Australia began to move higher education away from an elite institution towards mass education by the early 1970s. Art theory in the form of Art + Language, New York (Mel Ramsden, Ian Burn, Terry Smith, Ian Brown) was a conceptual art that walked along the path that had been opened up by minimalism's demystification of the traditional artwork.
The members of Art + Language, New York had hoped to demystify and democratize modernist art and especially its discourse with the idea that the art world could be changed and could cause large change. The writings, with their antagonism to the market and capitalism that had defined the avant-garde tradition for 150 years, contained within them the promise of a new, egalitarian, enlightened public emerging from the universities.
(Stephen Harrison, ‘The Vague but Slightly Illuminated Eye of Perception’, Sculpture Encounters, Granite Island.
There were limits to the criticisim of the meanings and possibilities of art in modernism. Thus Joseph Kosuth's idea of conceptuality collapsed art into analytic philosophy's analytic propositions --- art as philosophy -- and claimed that continental philosophy need not be seriously considered. Art + Language New York, disintegrated and disbanded in the mid-1970s, and this form of critical thinking about modernist art was taken up by October, an academic art journal, that emerged in 1977 and became widely known for critiquing the Greenbergian model of formalist modernism that had dominated the terrain of art criticism, art theory, and art history.
The 1980s ushered in an unprecedented art-market boom, which most artists eagerly embraced, whilst the structuralist and poststructuralist paradigms held sway in the academy from the 1980s. Even though conceptual art was dismissed as “pretentious, self-indulgent. impenetrable and craftless and theory had fallen out of flavour in the 1990s the historical significance of conceptual art is that contemporary art (the first two decades of the 21st century) is post-conceptual art.
Post-conceptual not in the weak historical sense of being after’ conceptual art, but in the more substantive sense of internalizing and building upon the lessons of conceptual art. The “conceptuality” legacy raises questions about photography’s nature as a mode of digitally based picture-making in art, as it needs to be both more than painting with pixels, or the postmodern perception of photography as the anti-aesthetic medium par excellence, in virtue of its mechanical nature and causal basis. The paradox here is that photography only gained generalized institutional recognition as an artistic practice after the destruction of the ontological significance of medium in the 1960-70s – a destruction to which photography itself made a distinctive contribution, primarily via its roles in the documentation of performance and within conceptual art practice.
Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (MIT Press, (Cambridge, 1999).
Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, (Thames and Hudson, New York, 2004).
Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art, Peter Osborne, (Verso, London, 2013).