The Digital Avant-garde - Digital Culture - page 89

34 Hans Haacke, Condensation Cube , 1963/65, mixed-media installation.

This became known as Conceptual Art, though, as so often, the use
of such a label suggests a simpler and more unified phenomenon
than is actually the case. As a term Conceptual Art is used to refer
to the disparate activities of numerous individuals and groups
from all over the world, many of which could as well be, and often
are, corralled under other labels, such as Minimalism, Land Art,
Arte Povera, and Performance Art etc. Nevertheless the period
around the end of the ' s did see many artists turning to language

for the basis of their practice and away from a concern with the
materiality of the artwork. The inspiration for this linguistic turn
came from a number of sources, including Marcel Duchamp's
Readymades , the later philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and some
of the post-war avant-garde artists and movements discussed above,
such as John Cage, Fluxus and the Situationists.
The pretensions of Cybernetics to enable an ordering and under-
standing of the world were specifically addressed by a number of

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