Transatlantic Conceptualism

British conceptualists Simon Morris, the editor of Information as Material, and Nick Thurston collectively answer some questions about conceptual writing for ArtInfo. Their answers are clear and create transparent historical linkages between the past and present, which makes this interview a nice intro to the topic. As far as definition goes:

Conceptual writing is a fusion of art and literature. This process-based practice involves works where the idea is the writing and the writing is the idea. It is a non-expressive poetry, a poetry of intellect rather than emotion. Non-conceptual writing involves old-fashioned 'creative' prose and there's more than enough of that material in the world already. Conceptual writing appreciates the wealth of text in the world — from the highfalutin to the everyday — understanding that new meaning can be generated through re-framing extant material. Conceptual writing produces a critical relation to non-conceptual writing, and in so doing opens a space of possibility for new forms of readership.

And they go on to make the argument that there's nothing particularly new in their techniques, which are in fact a logical extension of the first wave of modernism and 60's experimentalism:

We would agree with William Burroughs and Brion Gysin that "cut-ups establish new connections between images, and one's range of vision consequently expands."[1] They allow one to find new poetic connections in an existing text. But, it's not a particularly current technique, you could trace it all the way back to Tristan Tzara and his infamous cut-up poem in 1927 and Ivan Ward, director of education at the Freud Museum came up with a statement by Sigmund Freud from 1897 that suggestively prefigures Tzara's methodology and leaves open the possibility that it was indeed Freud himself who anticipated the cut-up as a process natural to human thought.