In 1989 a special edition of Art in America announced the arrival of global art, its cover adorned with a nasa photograph of the Earth taken from lunar orbit. Yet inside, Martha Rosler warned that the new fetish of the global threatened to obfuscate the material shape of the art world—its circuits of communication, distribution and exchange—where a capitalist restructuring was in process.footnote¹ The term ‘global art’ took hold as the Cold War drew to a close, through years when broader discourses of globalization also came to flourish. While the meaning of this term continues to trouble artists and critics, a normative imperative to ‘think global’ has come to structure the practices of art institutions, framing the endless drive for recognition of new artists and regions, as biennales and art fairs proliferate.

Conceptualism has always had a special relationship to the question of the global. The issue of its geographical mapping is linked to that of the determinate bounds of artworks and practices—something often explicitly thematized in conceptual works themselves—and a conscious orientation to this question was evident within the movement by the late 1960s, when tensions emerged over whether it constituted an American or an international phenomenon, a reductive formalism or a radically inclusive ‘free-for-all’.footnote² Dominant figures in the United States, such as Lucy Lippard, Seth Siegelaub and Joseph Kosuth, presented it as fully international, as facilitating global connectivity and artistic reach. Yet for Luis Camnitzer, a Uruguayan artist working in New York at the time, such claims obscured the exportation of ‘contemporary colonial art’.footnote³ From the late 1970s, German art historian and critic Benjamin Buchloh effectively defined Conceptualism as proper to the European and American hegemonic centres, though Siegelaub disputed Buchloh’s emphasis on Manhattan.footnote⁴

Then in the early 1990s, as a lucrative Neo-Conceptual movement consolidated its position in an expanding global art market, Conceptualism was proclaimed the first global art form. In a series of articles and exhibitions—mostly on us soil—Mari Carmen Ramírez presented Latin America as the exemplar of Conceptualism’s global character. Ramírez became a core reference for inscriptions into an emerging narrative of global conceptualisms, cementing an image of Latin America as radical other to the us’s formalism.footnote⁵ The landmark 1999–2000 exhibition Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s was decisive in extending this story, inviting eleven international curator-essayists to formulate accounts of their respective regions.footnote⁶ The unifying idea was that Conceptualism had spontaneously proliferated worldwide in two waves—1950–73 (in the us, Japan, Western and Eastern Europe, Latin America, Canada, Australia), and 1973–89 (in the Soviet Union, South Korea, China, Africa)—as a set of strategic responses to the socio-political effects of the consolidating global economy.footnote⁷

In its drive for inclusivity, the exhibition stretched the definition of Conceptualism to the verge of indeterminacy, and the regional accounts in its own catalogue were sometimes in tension with the unifying idea. In relation to 1960s–70s India, Apinan Poshyananda explained that anti-American sentiment had brought resistance to Pop and Conceptual Art and, citing Siva Kuma, that experimentation had been inhibited by entrenched colonial pedagogy.footnote⁸ Okwui Enwezor denied the existence of anything like a Conceptual movement in 1970s Africa, citing a few ‘isolated’ and ‘scattered’ examples.footnote⁹ Regional studies of conceptual practices have since proliferated, with some attempts to return to more determinate analyses of the artistic landscape, seeking to qualify—rather than deny—the clear dominance of the hegemonic centres.footnote¹⁰

The indeterminacy of Conceptualism as a movement may be grounded in certain generic aspects of artistic modernity. As John Roberts has claimed, ‘the most fundamental shift of modernism was less the move to painterly abstraction than the subsumption of art under the logic of art’s conceptual and formal conjunction’.footnote¹¹ If modernist art practice is schematizable into two moments, or modes of response to the crisis of the art object—on the one hand, a ‘Greenbergian’ self-interrogation within existing terms; on the other, avant-garde experimentations in Peter Bürger’s sense, which throw into question the artwork as such, and thereby the status of art as social institution—much of the latter can be construed as ‘conceptual’ in some sense.footnote¹² Thus the globality of ‘conceptualism’ may partly be that of a generic aspect of modernist art, itself already quite geographically dispersed by the time a self-identifying Conceptualist movement emerged in the 1960s.

Those aspects were sufficiently prominent within the widespread neo-avant-garde tendencies of the postwar period, particularly amid Abstract Expressionism’s global capita mortua, that it is plausible to identify numerous practices that—with the prejudice of hindsight—can appear at least proto-conceptual. These were indeed globally ‘spontaneous’, in the sense that they lacked any single organizational pole or conscious referent, but it took the emergence of a hegemonic, New York-centred scene from this broader moment for these to be ranged under, and read through, a single term. What follows is an attempt to sketch the crystallization of ‘Conceptual Art’ in this ambiguous structure, whereby local neo-avant-gardes both provided preconditions for, and were mediated by, determinate transnational networks centred on the global metropoles. Since these structures were themselves often thematized in the artworks and exhibitions around which they were constructed, we should also be attentive to the peculiar function of ‘the global’ in the neo-avant-garde imaginary. If such structures are often obscured by what Pamela Lee has termed the art world’s ‘global state of mind’, looking at the question in this way we may hope to break out of the endless play of antinomies between abstractly boundless extension on the one hand, and reductive concretization on the other.footnote¹³ But since these structures pivoted upon the metropole, it is there that we should start.

The landscape in which us Conceptualism emerged was shaped by the particular ‘internationalism’ of postwar reconstruction and the Cold War. With the transfer of the cultural centre from Paris to New York, a self-conscious programme was developed of mobilizing us modernism—of which Abstract Expressionism was of course the emblem—as a tool of soft power.footnote¹⁴ New transnational networks for the circulation, distribution and exchange of artworks were established, parading American art throughout Western Europe, Latin America, Africa, India, Japan, Yugoslavia and Australia, while us institutions sometimes bought up art from around the world—especially where resonances with Abstract Expressionism were perceived. The terms of Clement Greenberg’s dispute with Harold Rosenberg over the nature of modernism supplied the dominant theoretical framing: a counter-Enlightenment programme of medium-specific self-interrogation vs. the free act of painting over and against the art object itself.footnote¹⁵