Are Remarks History? Gertrude Stein as Conceptual Artist

Abstract

Although critics typically characterize Gertrude Stein as a modernist, it is at least as useful to approach her as an antecedent for language-based conceptual art emerging during the late twentieth century. Conceptual artists pose questions rather than make assertions. With her penchant for estranging familiar words from their association with common ideas, Stein challenges readers to think in more abstract terms, to challenge conventions of statement, to contest the constraints of artistic and literary formulas, and to question traditional assumptions about what is good, usual, natural, beautiful, true, or memorable. Stein's work, with its distinctive properties—brazen self-referentiality, preoccupation with mass culture and ready-mades, deformation of narrative strategy and voice, and bold explorations of the edges and interstices of both the body's senses and the mind's symbolic systems (such as images and words), anticipates many of the themes that would later fascinate conceptual artists, including claims to monumental or immutable truths.