If you want to understand the stakes of the “dematerialization of the art object,” look no further than the late British artist John Latham’s “Art and Culture,” the entrance piece at “Materializing Six Years: Lucy Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art” at the Brooklyn Museum. The piece mockingly takes its title from mid-century formalist art critic Clement Greenberg’s influential text: An open briefcase reveals a copy of Greenberg’s book, an overdue notice from the library, and vials containing the masticated pulp of its pages. The byproduct of a party where Latham invited guests to chew the pages of Greenberg’s book, the work takes the radical propositions of dematerialization quite literally, turning the bible of formalist art criticism into formless cud.

Casting off the cloth of the detached, Greenbergian art critic, Lucy Lippard played a crucial role, not only as a writer, but as curator and collaborator within the diverse artistic activity that’s now catalogued under the rubric of Conceptual Art. As she writes in the forward to the exhibition, Lippard and her circle “invented ways for art to act as an invisible frame for seeing and thinking rather than as an object of delectation or connoisseurship.” In their critique of the art object, they sought to remake the art world as a network of ideas to be shared, rather than a marketplace of objects to be bought and sold.

Named after her book, “Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972” (its unabridged title is a long-winded conceptual art joke), the exhibition includes the artists Lippard championed, mapping her evolution from questioning minimalist orthodoxy in her 1966 “Eccentric Abstraction Show,” to her engagement with Conceptual Art, to her turn towards feminism. In keeping with the feminist program of the museum’s Sackler Center, the scope of the exhibition goes beyond the six-year period of Lippard’s book: A curatorial epilogue summarizes her activities in 1973, the year she organized her first all-woman show.

Over 170 curatorial notes, exhibition checklists, posters, and artworks, from land artist Nancy Holt’s “Eccentric Abstraction” themed crossword puzzle, to German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher’s typologies of vernacular architecture, to conceptual artist Doug Huebler’s written pledge to photograph every living person, form a densely packed, text-heavy, and mostly black-and-white husk around the Sackler Center’s permanent installation of Judy Chicago’s lush, vulvamorphic “Dinner Party.” Yet few works could be further from Chicago’s second-wave essentialist bonanza than Joseph Kosuth’s dry and logocentric “Titled (Art as Idea as Idea),” a blown-up dictionary definition of the word “word.” With his tautological dictum — “Art is the definition of art” — Kosuth’s meta-discursive brand of anti-formalism argued that art’s value lay in its capacity for self-referential commentary. In his words, “a work of art is a kind of proposition presented within the context of art as a comment on art.”

Other artists were invested in expanding art’s parameters, bringing “art” to an asymptotic tango with “life.” In his “Live Airborn System,” Hans Haacke — now known as an outspoken practitioner of institutional critique — threw breadcrumbs off a Coney Island pier, imagining the flight-patterns of the ensuing flock of seagulls as an ephemeral artwork. A poster from the British art collective Art & Language’s “Air-Conditioning Show” proposed an objectless exhibition where an air conditioner would match the temperature of the gallery to that of the world outside. Bruce Nauman documented his friend William Allan catching a fish in the deadpan three-minute video “Fishing for Asian Carp.”

Set against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, an awakening antiestablishment counterculture, and the waning of the world order of the WWII generation, the dematerialized, soft Marxist strategies of Conceptual art make a certain sense. A stoner-hippie ethos can be read in Nauman’s goofy “Thighing (Blue),” — a four-and-a-half minute video portrait of the artist massaging his thigh — and in Lee Lozano’s “No Title (Grass Piece)” (1969), in which the artist followed a directive to “stay high all day, every day, [to] see what happens.”

Nevertheless, the byzantine pedantry of so much Conceptual Art seems at odds with Lippard’s activist streak. The impenetrable erudition of Agnes Denes’s “Dialectic Triangulation” module and the maddening obscurantism of Bernar Venet’s “Relativity’s Track” — a recorded performance featuring three physicists lecturing simultaneously on different topics — seem to hold their viewers in contempt. When projects touch upon thorny political issues, they do so with the 10-foot pole of detached neutrality. Take, for example, Vito Acconci’s well-known “Following” piece — wherein the artist stalked random strangers around New York City. Speaking about the work, Acconci has said, “I am almost not an ‘I’ anymore; I put myself in the service of this scheme.” What might have been an experiment with surveillance and criminality becomes a textbook example of the decentered, antiauthorial subject of Conceptual Art. Of all the works made before 1972, only the Art Workers’ Coalition’s notorious “And babies” agitprop poster and Graciela Carnevale’s “Entrapment and Escape” wear their politics on their sleeve. Carnevale locked unsuspecting participants inside a storefront gallery until they smashed the storefront windows and escaped, orchestrating an allegory of political oppression and organized resistance.

The final chapter of the exhibition reflects Lippard’s critical shift from mandarin Conceptualism towards her engagement with a more explicitly political, subject-oriented feminism. Notes and ephemera from Lippard’s 1973 all-women show, “.c 7,500,” held at CalArts in Valencia, suggest a different, socially engaged Conceptualism. Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s Fluxus-like rehearsal of mundane household tasks critiqued the devaluation of women’s labor. Athena Tacha took a pseudoscientific inventory of facial expressions. What the Bechers did for blast furnaces, Martha Wilson did for breast shapes.