This Is Not Conceptual Art: Charles Gaines and the Aesthetics of Evasion Paperback â May 27, 2025
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| Management number | 220484708 | Release Date | 2026/05/03 | List Price | $10.19 | Model Number | 220484708 | ||
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Charles Gaines is not a conceptual artist. He is a conceptual mimic. This essay delivers a sustained indictment of Gainesâs practice, revealing an artist whose vaunted systems are little more than superficial performancesârepetitions of nullity calibrated to flatter institutional power. Though Gaines claims allegiance to Conceptualism, his work hollows out its critical core. What he calls objectivity is a rhetorical shield; what he calls rigor is unverifiable theater. His grids and color codes et al do not interrogate meaningâthey dissolve it. What remains is a politics of plausible deniability: critique without consequence, structure without substance. Across five formal charges, this essay dismantles Gainesâs claims to innovation, autonomy, and political engagement, while contrasting his evasions with the genuine risks taken by artists like Sol LeWitt and John Cage. The pattern Gaines actually pioneeredâsimulation over insight, ambiguity over argumentânow thrives in the work of his most prominent inheritor, Mark Bradford, whose derivative art recycles abstraction already recycled, dressed in run-of-the-mill socio-political PR, pomp, and posturing. In both, art is not advanced but embalmed. This is institutional decorum masquerading as significanceâcounterfeit systems engineered to evade accountability and insult credulity.LG Williams is a Los Angeles-based artist and recently the Endowed University Instructor at The Academy of Art University; Robert Hughes Distinguished Visual Artist-In-Residence at The Lodge in Hollywood, CA; and the Emmy Hennings Distinguished Professor at D(D).DDDD University. LG has exhibited in various national and international venues, including The Internet Pavilion of La Biennale Di Venezia, and has appeared in Artforum, The New York Times, Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, Japan Times, Los Angeles Times, La Stampa, Bookforum, Purple Diary, Mousse Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail among others.PCP Press is an independent publisher of avant-garde books and insurgent authors. Founded in 1990 in San Francisco at a time when transgressive and sometimes esoteric international art books had a difficult time making their way into the wider American marketplace, over the past three decades PCP has grown into a consistent publisher of books, special editions and rare publications from an array of the worldâs most respected authors and cultural institutions â including Raymond Pettibon, Dave Hickey, Wayne Thiebaud, Bryan Reynolds, David Hawkes, Shepard Fairey, LG Williams, di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, and Luscerne Kunstpanorama.# # # # # Read more
| ISBN13 | 979-8285544135 |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Independently published |
| Dimensions | 5 x 0.15 x 8 inches |
| Item Weight | 4.2 ounces |
| Print length | 61 pages |
| Publication date | May 27, 2025 |
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