ABSTRACT
The exhibition Global Conceptualism, held at the Queens Museum of Art in 1999, was one of its major milestones. Against a tradition that viewed conceptual art as an essentially Anglo-American movement, the exhibition suggested 'a multicentered map with various points of origin' in which 'poorly known histories presented as equal corollaries rather than as appendages to a central axis of activity'. The exhibition Global Conceptualism, by opening up the geographical scope of historical analysis to conceptual practices largely overlooked considerably marked the discipline. Its choice to negate the notion of an opposition between center and periphery in favor of a supposedly de-hierarchized panorama is problematic at three levels at least. This chapter opposes the discursive construction of a 'global conceptual art' in the 1960s, with the analysis of identifiable international circulations of artists, artworks, exhibitions, and exhibition catalogues. It suggests claims of 'internationalism' and 'decentering' in the late 1960s only hidor even justifiedpersisting geographical inequalities on the contrary.
