Idea a obraz. Ikonoklastyczny aspekt konceptualizmu

Conceptualism, as the art of an idea, placed itself beyond aesthetic and sensual experience. As a rule, it did not produce art objects which could be pleasing or that would represent reality. This rejection of an image places conceptualism in a broadly understood iconoclastic movement. When we examine various historical iconoclastic movements (religious and political) we may reconstruct the most important features of iconoclastic awareness and compare them with the essential postulates of conceptualism. The result of this comparison is a striking similarity of both phenomena. To mention just a few linking features of conceptualism and iconoclasm, we may enumerate: a doubt in the adequacy of the relationship between an idea and image, a fear of an idolatrous belief in a material art object, a drive to demystify art and artists, a concentration on a word instead of an image. Iconoclastic mentality can also be characterised by analytic thinking, progressive attitude and irony. However, the question arises if iconoclasm can exist without idolatry; or if conceptualism could have developed without a material object? Even if it rejected it, then the art world (museum, critics, audiences) that shows a progressively stronger tendency to contextualise, flung conceptualism out of “art’s orbit into the ‘infinite space’ of the human condition” (to use the words of J. Kosuth).