Encountering: The Conceptual Body, or a Theory of When, Where, and How Art “Means”

The most complex and productive works from the 1960s and ‘70s crossed over conceptual and embodied concerns in ways that began to transform the basic question of art’s value, meaning, significance, and role in society. Attending to the tensions among concept, body, event, and “art” that surface around 1960 in the Western world is thus the most effective way to understand how art becomes “event” in the sense of potentially shifting larger ways of thinking and being.