What are the chances! Several years ago I received an email from a curator in Ireland. He stated that he could give my a ride to an artist’s lecture in Dublin. I mentioned I lived in Detroit. He confused my email address with that of another Colin Darke — who is also an artist.

Ireland’s Colin Darke focuses on conceptual art – one of his most well-known pieces is where he copied the three volumes of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital in its English translation onto 480 two-dimensional objects, which showed at the 2003 Venice Biennale. The more I find out about Ireland’s Colin Darke, the more I am fascinated by his artistic practice and his intellectual investigations. So what better person to talk to as I explore my understanding of conceptual art practices?

Colin TheDetroiter: How would you define conceptual art?

The term conceptual art for me brings to mind the period from the late sixties to the early seventies, which saw the appearance of people like Bruce Nauman, Ed Ruscha, Hans Haacke, Daniel Buren, and so on. This was very important for my early years – when I first went to art college in my late teens, in the mid seventies, I was introduced to conceptualism and at the age of eighteen/nineteen I spent more time at a typewriter and making graphs than I did at an easel.

Conceptual art isn’t really a term I use now, but I suppose its fundamental definition is work which is the result of the development of ideas, with the making of objects as a secondary, sometimes incidental, activity. Hence Lucy Lippard’s 1973 description of the genre as “the dematerialisation of the art object”.

TheDetroiter: Why is conceptual art important?

Colin: The most important role of art is critique. The potential targets of art’s critical function are numerous – whether socio-political, philosophical or aesthetic – but without critique in some form or other, art becomes shallow and simplistic. This is not to deny all those technical aesthetic considerations – colour, composition, the brushmark and so on – the age-old content/form relationships continue.

The driving force for me is not simply the laying-down of ideas, but the question of where those ideas come from. Concepts about the origins of concepts have been the basis of my work for twenty years now and particularly Karl Marx’s theory of base and superstructure. He famously said (in his adoption and overturning of Engels), “It is not our consciousness that determines our existence, but our social existence that determines our consciousness.”

TheDetroiter: What are the biggest hurdles for conceptual artists?

Colin: Artistically, there are no more hurdles than for anyone else. For the dyed-in-the-wool conceptualists of the sixties and seventies, the biggest hurdle was financial. The movement came about in part from the politics of the time. If we consider the development of art at this time from the perspective of the demonstrations against the Vietnam demonstrations, the Prague Spring, the Paris strikes and student activism, then it’s easy to understand why artists made work that tried to undermine the art market and gallery system. This approach can, paradoxically, make it difficult to have one’s work shown and sold, so can have a negative impact on one’s career and finances.

In my case, for example, concept-driven work has resulted in temporary installation works that have been destroyed at the end of their exhibition and large-scale work which takes long periods to produce and which are generally too big to sell. The nature of my work, then, has ensured that my career has not been a lucrative one!

TheDetroiter: How has conceptual art progressed since Marcel Duchamp? Since Young British Artists?

Colin: Well, the readymade preceded conceptualism by fifty years but I guess Duchamp and the dadaists were “proto-conceptualists”.  The term has often been used to describe the YBAs, and work made since that time but, like I say, it’s not a word I generally use. Many artists in recent years have been particularly theory-driven, in different ways and not in all cases progressive. Some artists tie themselves so closely to the philosophy à la mode that their work acts as little more than an illustration of prevailing academic discourses, rather than raising its own questions. I should add that this is a criticism often made of my practice – though I like to think they’re wrong.

TheDetroiter: What are you trying to accomplish with your art?

Colin: Firstly, of course, I’m trying to make good art. In terms of what I’ve been talking about so far, I try to make work that responds critically to society and to art’s role within it. In the past this has led to questioning the influence that the art market and the gallery system has on the production of ideas and the commodification of art. More recently I’ve been looking at the influence of historical events on artists, with particular interest in the nineteenth-century painter Gustave Courbet.

TheDetroiter: How has your art changed over the past five years?

Colin: In 2007 I finished a piece called The Capital Paintings, consisting of 480 oil paintings. This was based on a previous text piece called Capital, for which I transcribed Marx’s Das Kapital onto 480 two-dimensional objects. The Capital Paintings were my first paintings and I continued to paint for a while, but, while this was important for the project, this isn’t a medium with which I’m particularly concerned. In order to give my work a much-needed reappraisal, I went back to school to do a PhD. For my thesis, I wrote a history from the theoretical positions which interest me. I looked at art over a long period, from pre-Renaissance to Impressionism, considering movements’ relationships to important historical events. The analysis was based mostly on two theoretical positions – Marx’s base and superstructure theory and Bertolt Brecht’s theory of Epic Theatre.

Doing this allowed me both to strengthen my understanding of existing influences and to open myself up to new ideas. The first piece I made was an animated installation of paintings, but I’ve now moved away from painting and I’m making digital montages, made up of photographs, text and downloaded images. The work responds to the still-life paintings made by Gustave Courbet during his imprisonment following his involvement in the Paris Commune of 1871.

I’m about to give myself another fillip, of a very different kind. I’ll be spending the first half of 2012 in Rome, undertaking a residency. I’m going into it with few preconceptions, so allowing the research and experience to give me new questions to ask of myself.