Interview with Warren Neidich About Wet Conceptualism
Interview with Warren Neidich About Wet Conceptualism
November 19, 2023 interview by Gary Ryan
“In 1999, Neidich curated the exhibition Conceptual Art as a Neurobiological Praxis, at the Thread Waxing Space in New York City. Then as now, many of the works in the show did not fit within the scheme originally described in the mid-1960s as conceptual art with its non-representational, text-based character, anti-formalist, unemotional aesthetics, and reliance on immateriality. Wet Conceptualism served as a response to his own frustrations concerning his own work which he always had felt was conceptual, but which was not appreciated as such. With the expansion of the age-old term, Neidich’s work, and many other deserving artists can be understood in a larger but more precise sense of the term.” — Gary Ryan
We don’t want to live in a Universe, We want to live in a Pluriverse!
We don’t want to live in a Universe, We want to live in a Pluriverse!
September 3, 2023 by Joseph Nechvatal
“But the star of the show is Warren Neidich’s neon speculative philosophical wall piece A Proposition for an Alt-Parthenon Marbles Recoded: The Phantom as Other # 2 (2023). It schematically proposes that the illusory sensations of imaginary phantom limbs might operate metaphorically as a means of empowerment to the future despotism of what the political philosopher Antoinette Rouvroy calls algorithmic governmentality or what Bonaventura de Sousa Santaos calls epistemicide.” – Joseph Nechvatal
ART / THEORY: Warren Neidich
ART / THEORY: Warren Neidich
Summer 2023 by Sanford Kwinter
“Neidich’s project of connecting our somatic, noetic, and nervous system machinery to our social and economic ones, as so many ways of arranging material and sensible worlds, has created a new framework. It is a framework developed across a dozen books, global conferences, an art practice, and a school. And more importantly still, Neidich assembled an international community of theorists, artists, scientists, and philosophers who continue to generate work as part of an expanding program to rethink human ecology and imagination in an increasingly imperiled world.” – Sanford Kwinter
Wet Conceptualism
“The notion of wet conceptualism is posited against mainstream conceptual work, in this context “dry:” what comes to mind in this context are works such as An Oak Tree (1973) of Michael Craig Martin, or the oeuvre of Joseph Kossuth. There are borderline cases presented in this novel and convincing survey of sweeter, more rosy conceptual art: ironically, co-curator (with Sozita Goudouna) Warren Neidich’s piece Art Before Philosophy After Art (2015) sits firmly on this middle ground. Text based, it demands reading, presenting a title-as-text-as-list. But the text dissolves in a murky green form, a modernist assemblage, the Braque-like form underlines Neidich’s point that wet involves seductive color and significant form, formalist signifiers, on top of an insistence on the didactic-as-form.” – William Corwin