It dates to the conceptual projects of the 1960s and '70s by such artists as Hans Haacke and Michael Asher.
Play and eroticism figured in many conceptual projects of the period, but none exercised greater influence than Cedric Price's Fun Palace, a project of 1959-61.
Conceptual projects of the period were generated by a kind of pre-Internet O.C.D., such as Sol LeWitt's exhaustive photographic documentation of every object, nook, and cranny in his Manhattan loft, or Tehching Hsieh's yearlong practice of taking a photo of himself every hour, on the hour.
"The danger is being hit or being washed overboard," he says, bringing to mind the Dutch-born California artist Bas Jan Ader, who disappeared in 1975 after setting out to cross the Atlantic for one leg of a three-part conceptual project, "In Search of the Miraculous".
The notions of knowledge and cognitive value, whilst at the very heart of the conceptual project, raise a manifold of important questions that require solid and cogent philosophical answers.
The Lebanese Walid Raad, for instance, delivers a cryptic text and a subtle intervention in one of the display cases; both, he says, are part of a larger conceptual project about the impact of war on art in the Arab world.
So, does the conceptual project lead to the end of the category of art as such?
Jane Tsong presents dozens of drawings that look both vague and vaguely alike: as a conceptual project, she asked a succession of people to copy a single basic pattern and in each case using the last version done as the model for the next, so that the original template gradually changed in detail, like a story passed along.
It's the kind of trippy conceptual project that would be unbearable if it weren't so elegantly made.
