A new kind of experiment
In the later 1960s some artists began to ask whether a work of art had to be a finished, lasting object at all. The question was being asked in several places at once, with different answers, and 1967 is a convenient year to look at because three separate things happened in it: a New York artist published an essay that gave the idea a name, an Italian critic grouped a set of young artists under a banner, and a few American artists started to work directly with the land. They are not one movement, and the artists themselves often disagreed about labels. Taken together they show art moving away from the polished object toward the idea, the material and the process.
This is a different story from the one usually told about Minimalist sculpture in the same years, which concerned the shape and presence of objects in a gallery. The two overlapped, and several artists belong to both, but the experiments here set out to loosen the object’s hold rather than to simplify it.
Sol LeWitt and the idea as the work
In the summer of 1967 the magazine Artforum published “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” by the American artist Sol LeWitt. It was short, plainly written and unusually influential. LeWitt argued that in this kind of art the idea or concept is the most important part of the work. Once the artist has decided what to do, the making is largely a matter of execution. His most quoted line puts it this way: the idea becomes a machine that makes the art.
The essay did not invent the phrase “concept art”, which had been used in earlier years by other artists and writers in New York, but it gave the approach a clear statement and a widely read home. LeWitt himself was making grids, modular structures and instructions that could be carried out by others. Later he turned to wall drawings that were executed by assistants from his written directions, which put his principle into practice.
It helps to be clear about the limits of the claim. The essay did not mean that the physical work did not matter, and LeWitt took care over his materials. What changed was where the artist located the value of the work.
Arte Povera in Italy
In Italy, the critic Germano Celant brought the name Arte Povera, usually translated as “poor art”, into use in 1967. He organised an exhibition in Genoa in the autumn of that year and published a manifesto-like text that same year, and the label was soon applied to a group of artists in Turin, Rome, Milan and elsewhere. The term referred to the humble materials the artists used and to a stance that rejected the polished, commercial side of the art market.
The artists associated with the name include Jannis Kounellis, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Mario Merz, Alighiero Boetti, Giovanni Anselmo and Pino Pascali, among others, and their work varied widely. Pistoletto’s Venus of the Rags, a classical statue set against a heap of cloth, is often dated to 1967 and is one of the best known examples. Others used earth, rope, fire, felt, branches or neon. The materials were not selected to be polished, and some were perishable or changing, which made the work harder to buy and sell.
Arte Povera was a more physical and more poetic affair than American conceptual art, and Celant drew on political language of the time. It is better understood as a sibling of the American developments than as part of them.
Process and early land art
A third strand was process art, in which the visible record of how something was made, or how it changed over time, became the subject. Artists such as Eva Hesse worked with latex, rope and other flexible materials that sag, stretch and age. Hesse is usually grouped with the post-Minimal generation and had already made major pieces before 1967, so she is best seen as part of this wider shift than as a product of that single year. The artist Robert Morris wrote about “anti-form” shortly afterwards, in 1968.
At the same time, some artists were thinking about work that could not be moved into a gallery at all. Robert Smithson, who had been making metal sculptures, wrote and photographed “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic”, published in Artforum in December 1967. It treated an ordinary industrial riverside in New Jersey as a strange set of monuments, and it is regarded as an important text in the history of land art. The first works generally described as earthworks followed in 1968 and 1969, notably by Smithson, Michael Heizer and Walter De Maria, so 1967 is better described as the preparation for them than as their moment.
Why the label problem matters
Historians still argue about the boundaries, and many artists rejected the labels. It is more useful to notice the shared direction: from the object toward the idea, from permanence toward process, and from the gallery toward the wider world. Earlier in the decade Pop had already blurred the boundary between art and commodity, and Andy Warhol’s studio was producing films and prints in volume. The experiments of 1967 pushed in another direction, away from images of consumer culture and toward questions about what counts as a work at all.
The wider climate of ideas
These developments took place alongside a general interest in media and perception. Marshall McLuhan was making the case that the form of communication shapes its content, and the underground film movement was testing what a film could be. The psychedelic light shows on the West Coast treated an art event as an environment rather than an object. In France, Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle attacked the way images stood in for lived experience. None of these thinkers was directly involved in the art world discussed here, but they shared a questioning of the object and the image.
The year settled little, but it supplied a vocabulary that outlasted the first debates.