Experience vs. Concept
- Diamond Zhou
- Jul 4
- 18 min read
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SATURDAY EVENING POST
July 5th, 2025
Experience in art can be understood as a form of embodied knowledge, an in-the-moment understanding gained through the senses and the body, rather than through analytical reasoning.
Many postwar artists strove to create works that communicate meaning through presence, immersing the viewer in a here-and-now encounter. In such works, interpretation is not divorced from the physical act of looking, standing, or moving; instead, meaning occurs in the moment of interaction between artwork and viewer. The aesthetic theorist Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht has described this as the “production of presence”, a phenomenon in which an artwork’s tangible, intense impact on our senses offers a temporary escape from constant intellectual interpretation. To truly experience such art often means to lose oneself in it, synchronizing with the work in a concentrated state of openness. This embodied state of reception, where one is fully present with the artwork, can yield a kind of understanding distinct from, and sometimes deeper than, discursive analysis. It is knowledge felt in the body and emotions.
Mark Rothko’s colour-field paintings are paradigmatic of art as embodied experience. Rothko’s canvases envelop viewers in floating fields of colour, often on a monumental scale that dominates one’s field of vision. Confronting a large Rothko is an almost visceral event: as one draws near, sharp colour boundaries dissolve into soft edges, and flat hues reveal subtle variations and luminosity. Viewers frequently report feeling engulfed or overwhelmed in front of Rothko’s paintings. Emotions swell up unbidden; it is not uncommon for people to stand in silence or even be moved to tears. Rothko intended this kind of response. In fact, he disavowed formal analysis of colour and shape in favour of a direct emotional communion. “I am not an abstractionist… I’m not interested in relationships of colour or form,” Rothko once told an interviewer; rather, “I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on”. He noted with satisfaction that “lots of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures,” taking this as evidence that he was indeed communicating those fundamental emotions. Rothko even likened these encounters to the spiritual: “The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them”. In other words, the act of painting for Rothko was an embodied, spiritual performance, and he aimed for the viewer’s experience to mirror that intensity.
His late masterpiece, the Rothko Chapel in Houston, is a deliberately contemplative environment: fourteen vast, dark canvases encircle the octagonal space, inviting solitary introspection and an almost physical sense of sublime stillness. Visitors often sit on benches in the dim light, absorbing the paintings’ quiet presence in what has been described as a “spiritual or sublime” atmosphere. The Chapel exemplifies how Rothko’s art functions as embodied knowledge – it is a place to feel and meditate, not to intellectually dissect. Rothko and his peers saw art, in their own words, as “an adventure into an unknown world” open only to those willing to engage risk and vulnerability, a journey of experience rather than a riddle to be solved.
Like Rothko, Barnett Newman sought to convey the ineffable through the viewer’s bodily encounter with the artwork. Newman’s signature paintings consist of expansive fields of a single colour interrupted by one or more vertical bands he called “zips.” At first glance, these works appear simple; yet their simplicity is strategic, “incorporating the simplest forms to emphasize” the viewer’s sense of place and presence before the canvas. Newman insisted that a painting “should give [a person] a sense of place: that he knows he’s there, so he’s aware of himself”. In front of a Newman canvas, which is often eight feet tall or more, viewers become intensely conscious of their own scale and physicality. Newman wanted the observer to feel “his own totality, his own separateness, his own individuality, and at the same time his connection to others” through the act of standing there. This almost existential impact, which Newman described as a “metaphysical fact” of the right viewing condition, arises only through direct experience. His Vir Heroicus Sublimis (1950–51), nearly 18 feet wide, famously came with the suggestion that viewers stand close to it, allowing the field of red and the pulsating zip lines to engulf their vision. The result can be a feeling of awe, even sublimity, a word Newman often invoked. Indeed, Newman wrote in 1948 of making new art for a secular age: “Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or ‘life,’ we are making [them] out of ourselves, out of our own feelings.” His huge canvases were his “cathedrals,” designed to elicit an internal, wordless encounter with the sublime. Viewers of Newman’s work frequently speak of a spiritual or transcendent sensation, a sudden awareness of self and something beyond self, which is a testament to how effectively the embodied aspects of scale, colour, and presence can impart meaning. As one commentary observes, Newman’s expansive colour fields “invite viewers to immerse themselves in the pure sensory experience of colour,” evoking a “direct, almost spiritual response”. In short, Newman’s art suggests that through our bodies and senses, we access a form of knowledge and feeling, about ourselves, and our relation to the world, that purely intellectual reasoning cannot reach.
The turn toward Minimalist sculpture in the 1960s further amplified the idea of art as embodied experience. Artists like Robert Morris, Donald Judd, and Richard Serra moved away from figurative representation and complex compositions in favour of simple geometric forms and literal materials, expressly to focus attention on the interaction between object, space, and viewer. Their works were often large-scale and placed directly in the viewer’s environment, so that perceiving them became an active, physical process. In a series of influential essays Notes on Sculpture (1966–67), Robert Morris argued that sculpture’s content lies in how the viewer experiences its form in space over time. “The awareness of scale,” Morris wrote, “is a function of the comparison made between that constant, one’s body size, and the object. Space between the subject and the object is implied in such a comparison” In other words, a minimalist sculpture engages the viewer’s body as a measuring instrument; one becomes keenly aware of distance, movement, and one’s own size relative to the piece. Because the viewer must move around these often simple but large forms, the sculpture never presents a single fixed image, “the shape does not remain constant,” as Morris noted, and indeed “it is the viewer who changes the shape constantly by his change in position” Such works demand a bodily participation that is fundamentally different from the static contemplation of a framed picture. A steel cube by Tony Smith or a series of fluorescent light tubes by Dan Flavin defines space in a way that the spectator only grasps by walking and sensing the object from multiple angles. The meaning of the work emerges through this process, as a phenomenological understanding rather than a textual one.
Few have explored embodied experience more dramatically than Richard Serra, the American sculptor known for his monumental installations of weathered steel. Serra’s curving walls of steel create pathways and enclosures that the viewer must navigate with their whole body and senses. Time and movement, Serra has said, are crucial components: he is interested in “how one walks through a piece and what one feels and registers in terms of one’s own body in relation to another body”. In standing before or inside a Serra sculpture, one might feel dwarfed by its height, disoriented by its tilted angle, or even a twinge of fear at the mass looming overhead. The steel’s cold texture, rusty smell, and echoing sound all contribute to a rich sensory encounter. Serra explicitly conceives of space itself as a material: “The articulation of space has come to take precedence... I use sculptural form to make space distinct,” he explains. His works thus highlight qualities like weight, balance, and gravity as felt realities. By placing his pieces in public or open sites, Serra also invites unscripted interactions – people walk around or lean against the towering plates, integrating the sculptures into their daily physical world. Art historian accounts note that Serra’s innovations restored “something of the human body’s stature” to sculpture, making it an art form that “might create spaces (or environments) in which a viewer can experience universal qualities of weight, gravity, agility, and even a kind of meditative repose”. The “knowledge” imparted by Serra’s art is not a proposition but a sensation: a heightened consciousness of one’s body and a contemplative state induced by the sheer presence of material and form. In such works, experience itself becomes a mode of understanding– an embodied knowledge that complements, and sometimes rivals, intellectual knowledge.
Contrasting with the immediacy of embodied experience is art’s existence as a conceptual or intellectual construction. Particularly from the late 1960s onward, many artists and critics argued that the true locus of art is in the idea or concept behind the work, rather than in the physical artifact or the sensory experience it provides. This view was codified by the movement known as Conceptual Art, which emerged in the mid-1960s as a radical departure from traditional aesthetics. Conceptual artists asserted that art should engage the mind above all else: challenging perceptions, questioning institutions, and conveying meaning through language or symbols. As a result, the material form of the artwork was often made secondary, reduced, or even eliminated entirely, in favour of an idea that could be communicated in various ways. “The actual works of art are ideas,” declared artist Joseph Kosuth, a key figure of Conceptual Art. In his landmark 1965 piece One and Three Chairs, Kosuth presents the viewer with a trifecta: an ordinary wooden chair, a life-size photograph of that same chair, and a blow-up of a dictionary definition of the word “chair.” The work is essentially an argument posed as an artwork: it asks, what is the real chair here, the tangible object, its image, or the concept of “chair” in language? By confronting the viewer with these options, Kosuth’s piece insists that art can be about the analysis of concepts (like here, the concept of representation itself) rather than any visual pleasure or emotional response one might have to a chair. Indeed, the appearance of the components is deliberately plain and “non-artistic”; the interest lies in the intellectual realization that each element represents a different mode of reality (physical, visual, linguistic). Such works illustrate the extent to which, in conceptual art, the idea is paramount, and the experience is largely one of cognitive insight.
By its very definition, Conceptual Art “proclaims itself to be an art of the mind rather than the senses” In a 1967 article, artist Sol LeWitt, another pioneer of conceptualism, famously wrote, “the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work”. Adopting this statement, conceptual artists often eschewed traditional mediums like painting and sculpture. They might produce works as texts, diagrams, photographs, or performances, or whatever form best served the concept, with little regard for craft or sensory appeal. The goal was not to create a beautiful or sublime object, but to set in motion a process of thought in the viewer. Art became, in effect, a kind of philosophy or inquiry. Joseph Kosuth argued that by focusing on ideas, conceptual art “annexes the functions of the critic”; the artist themselves becomes a thinker or theoretician, and the artwork a statement in a larger discourse about art and meaning. The physical realization of the work is seen as almost incidental. As one philosophical analysis notes, conceptual art “rejects traditional artistic media” and locates the true artwork at the level of the idea “rather than that of objects”. In extreme cases, the material object might not exist at all, consider Lawrence Weiner’s pieces consisting solely of phrases painted on walls, or Yoko Ono’s instruction pieces (written directives that the viewer may follow in their mind). Here the concept alone is offered; any “art experience” comes from contemplating the idea.
Importantly, conceptual art was often explicitly anti-aesthetic. Many of those who practiced conceptual art believed that if a work indulged too much in visual or sensual appeal, it risked distracting from the intellectual message. Thus, they deliberately minimised aesthetic stimulation. Thinking is the experience that conceptual art hopes to deliver. This marks a decisive shift from the embodied or emotional knowledge championed by artists like Rothko. For conceptualists, interpretation and meaning-production are the primary engagement with the work; the physical encounter can even be dispensed with. If a concept can be fully described or written down, one might argue that reading the description is equivalent to seeing the piece. Sol LeWitt acknowledged this when he stated that his goal was to make art in which “all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand, and the execution is a perfunctory affair.” The artwork, then, resides in the conception.
Because of this, conceptual art pushed the art world to reconsider what qualifies as an artwork at all. If “art is ‘de-materialized’”, as critic Lucy Lippard put it, and an artwork’s identity lies in an idea, the physical art object becomes almost a by-product. This idea can be unsettling: it “links art so intimately to ideas and concepts that even a principled distinction between the domain of art and the realm of thought seems difficult to preserve”. Indeed, conceptual art sometimes took the form of scholarly or legal documents, maps, or merely gestures. For example, Douglas Huebler would create works by stating, say, that he would photograph every person alive at a certain moment (an impossible task that remained as a concept and a few sample photos). Hans Haacke in the early 1970s presented investigative reports on museum politics as art installations, which are mainly text on panels, where the “art” was the critical concept unveiled. These works engaged viewers not as sensing bodies but as reading, reasoning minds. The necessary tools to appreciate them were not an educated eye for colour or form, but rather context, language, and critical thinking. Wall labels, catalogues, and theory became integral to the art experience.
In museum settings today, one often finds that understanding a contemporary installation sometimes difficult, it requires reading the accompanying text, a tacit admission that the artwork’s full significance is discursive. Thus, conceptual construction in art emphasizes that what we know about a work (its idea, context, or the artist’s intent) can be more significant than what we immediately see or feel. As one scholar summarized: many conceptual works opt for “articulation in a semantic space instead of an aesthetic one, so that artistic meaning is not embodied in a physical object or event”. The artwork might exist as a proposal or a set of instructions, underscoring that it is the thought that counts.
None of this is to say that concept-driven art is devoid of experience, but the nature of the experience is shifted. It becomes an intellectual experience, often requiring knowledge of art theory, social issues, or the context. For example, when conceptual artist Jenny Holzer’s large neon texts on a museum wall or in public spaces, the visual impact is stark and physical, but the primary engagement is with the content of the phrases, one reads and ponders their meaning or irony. Similarly, Barbara Kruger’s massive installations of bold text (“YOUR BODY IS A BATTLEGROUND,” etc.) certainly fill space and overwhelm the eyes, yet they function as critical concepts about media and identity that the viewer must intellectually process. In the arena of public art, this conceptual emphasis led to projects that are effectively social interventions: artists like Joseph Beuys proclaimed that “everyone is an artist” and staged public dialogues as art, treating the spread of ideas (about democracy, ecology, etc.) as the artwork itself. The material presence became secondary or symbolic.
By the turn of the 21st century, the legacy of conceptual art was such that virtually no major artwork could be seen as “just” a visual object; context and concept were always in play. Critical discourse and theory became woven into art’s very fabric. Even artists who still created large paintings or sculptures often provided elaborate explanations of their work’s conceptual background, or embedded references that needed decoding. The intellectual construction of art thus represents the pole where art is treated as a text to be read, a proposition to consider, or a commentary on ideas, as opposed to a wordless encounter. The philosophical tension this creates with the realm of pure experience is profound. It raises questions: can a purely intellectual artwork move us or teach us something that an embodied experience cannot? Conversely, is something lost when art distances itself from sensual experience?
While experience and concept can be discussed as opposites for clarity, the reality in much of postwar and contemporary art is a collapse of the binary, a rich relationship and developement where embodied presence and intellectual idea coalesce within single works or practices. Many influential artists realized that the most powerful art often engages both the body and the mind of the viewer, inviting a dialogue between sensation and thought. Rather than privileging one at the expense of the other, such works create a feedback loop: the immediate experience triggers conceptual reflections, and the conceptual framing deepens the physical or emotional impact.
A key strategy for collapsing the binary has been the development of large-scale immersive installations that come with conceptual underpinnings. Take, for example, the work of Danish Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson. His renowned installation The Weather Project (2003) filled the cavernous Turbine Hall of London’s Tate Modern with a colossal artificial sun glowing through mist. The experience for viewers was unforgettable: one entered a vast hall suffused with orange light and haze, seeing one’s own tiny silhouette reflected in a mirrored ceiling, as if under an otherworldly sun. This embodied encounter, warm light, communal gathering, the awe of a fake sun, was immediate. Yet Eliasson’s work was also framed conceptually: it prompted discussions about the collective experience of nature, the way museums can recreate natural phenomena, and even issues of climate and atmosphere in the urban environment. Critics noted that The Weather Project created a “communal atmosphere through a shared visual and sensory experience”, encouraging people to contemplate their relationship to nature and to each other. Visitors, who often lay on the floor basking in the glow, became part of the artwork’s concept of collective ritual. Here, the physical presence (fog, light, crowd) and the intellectual content (ideas about weather, environment, and community) enhanced each other seamlessly. The piece did not deliver a singular message; rather, it offered an open-ended platform where experience led to reflection. One could enjoy the spectacle on a purely sensory level, but one could equally read it as a commentary on how modern society constructs artificial suns, both interpretations coexisted.
Another example is the installation Sunflower Seeds (2010) by Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. Ai filled the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall with 100 million porcelain sunflower seeds, each handcrafted by artisans. Initially, visitors were invited to walk across this vast grey carpet of seeds, feeling them shift underfoot and hearing the crunch, which was a strangely soothing physical sensation that was itself an experience of immersion in an absurd “beach” of seeds. However, the work was deeply conceptual: the multitude of seeds symbolized the Chinese populace (sunflower seeds were a common street snack and metaphor under Mao Zedong, where Mao was the sun and the people sunflowers turning toward him). Each seed being handmade out of porcelain, an important Chinese export historically, invited thought about mass production versus individuality, and about the “Made in China” phenomenon. Thus, Sunflower Seeds operated on both registers. The tactile engagement of bending down to pick up a tiny porcelain seed (before this was later prohibited for conservation reasons) made the concept tangible: one literally held one unit among millions, pondering how something seemingly mass-made was crafted by hand over thousands of labour hours. The intellectual realisation (“these millions of identical objects are not industrially produced, what does that say about value and labour?”) came through a mix of experience (the surprise of heft and texture of a single seed) and contextual information (wall text explaining the background). Ai Weiwei’s piece demonstrated how contemporary art often requires the interweaving of concept and experience to fully resonate. The sheer scale gave a sense of awe, while the knowledge of its making and symbolism gave that awe a pointed social and political meaning.
Even artists who started on one side of the experience/concept divide eventually gravitated toward the middle. Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, for instance, were champions of pure experience, yet both framed their practices with conceptual and even spiritual rhetoric (Rothko spoke of tragedy and ecstasy; Newman wrote about the sublime and the “first man” making art). Conversely, the strict conceptualists discovered the inevitability of experience. The act of reading a concept or encountering a situation set up by the artist is itself an experience, but just a different kind.
Critical discourse in recent decades has embraced theories that break down the separation between body and mind, which has further encouraged artists to meld concept and experience. Ideas from phenomenology (the philosophy of lived experience) have shown that perception is always imbued with meaning: as Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued, the body is our primary site of knowing the world. On the other hand, conceptual metaphor theory and embodied cognition in cognitive science suggest our abstract thinking is often rooted in bodily experience. Such insights validate art that engages viewers wholly. In curatorial practice, exhibitions now often aim to provide an “immersive narrative,” combining wall texts and contextual videos with environments the viewer walks through. Even works of institutional critique (traditionally very concept-heavy) sometimes take on a sensory dimension to drive the point home.
After all the idea of experience versus concept really lies on the fact that there is an irreplaceable power in being physically present with an artwork, a power fundamentally distinct from merely knowing about it or seeing it in reproduction. No matter how much one studies an artwork’s concept or views high-resolution images, something essential remains out of reach until one stands before the piece itself, here and now. Walter Benjamin famously observed that even the most perfect copy of an artwork inevitably lacks “its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be”. The original’s material being-there confers an authenticity and authority that cannot be transferred; “the presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity” in art. In other words, the aura of an artwork, that subtle yet profound quality emanating from the genuine work, is inextricably tied to physical presence and “there can be no replica of it”. All representations and reproductions, no matter how faithful, are inherently limited; they omit the very element that makes an encounter with a powerful work of art so potent: the living presence of the object before us and our bodily presence before it.
Physical presence activates dimensions of an artwork that remain dormant in reproductions or conceptual summaries. Scale and space, for instance, are experienced first-hand only when our body confronts the work’s true size and environment. A towering canvas or an enveloping installation can dominate our field of vision and even our proprioception (sense of our body’s position), producing an immersive effect that a small digital image utterly fails to convey.
As we move through an art space, we also perceive the work dynamically. Sculptors and installation artists of the postwar era understood this well: the viewer’s movement and position are often integral to the art itself. Richard Serra, for example, noted how walking around his monumental steel sculptures transforms the experience: “step by step the perception not only of the sculpture but of the entire environment changes,” he observed, as the viewer’s motion causes the work to continually reframe itself against its surroundings. In such cases, the meaning of the artwork is not a fixed concept in one’s mind, but something that unfolds through presence and interaction. The artwork reveals itself through the viewer’s embodied journey, a temporal process of discovery that no static viewing or reading about the work can replicate.
Furthermore, there is an emotional and psychological intensity in direct presence that deepens art’s impact. To stand in silent witness before an original artwork is often to feel a kind of intimacy or communion with it. Viewers routinely describe being moved in ways that surprise them: maybe overwhelmed by the luminous colour of a Rothko painting in a quiet chapel, or struck with awe by the sheer detail and scale of a work when seen up close. At times, there is a silent vibration that seems to pulse through the walls and floor, as if the artwork were not merely occupying space but charging it. One might feel swallowed whole by the solemnity of a repressive palette, the weight of sorrow pressed into pigment. These encounters bypass language and expectation; they unsettle, absorb, and transform. Part of this reaction comes from the knowledge that one is engaging with the very substance of the artwork’s history. The object in front of us is not a flattened image or an abstract idea, but the actual thing that carries the traces of the artist’s hand and the passage of time. This primacy of presence suggests that certain truths of art are accessible only through direct encounter.
Susan Sontag, writing in the 1960s when conceptual analysis was on the rise, famously argued “in place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art”, a call to refocus on the sensual, immediate engagement with art rather than endless interpretation. Her words resonate even more today. In an age of digital proliferation, when artworks are disseminated in countless reproductions and our first contact with art is often virtual, it is easy to assume we know a work from afar. Yet the embodied meeting with an artwork can still startle us with revelations that no amount of conceptual familiarity prepares us for. Such moments of presence-as-revelation are academically elusive but experientially profound: they remind us that art is not merely an object of discourse, but a relationship between object and viewer, here and now.
CURRENT EXHIBITION
TONY ROBINS: FLOWERS OF RESISTANCE
Exhibition on through August 9th, 2025.
