This article is about the art group. For the journal, see Art-Language.
Scratched photograph of the cover of Art-Language, Vol.3 No.1, 1974.
Art & Language is an Englishconceptual artists' collaboration that has undergone many changes since it was created around 1967. The group was founded by artists who shared a common desire to combine intellectual ideas and concerns with the creation of art, and included many Americans.
The Art & Language group was founded around 1967 in the United Kingdom by Terry Atkinson (b. 1939), David Bainbridge (b. 1941), Michael Baldwin (b. 1945) and Harold Hurrell (b. 1940).[1] The group was critical of what was considered mainstream modern art practices at the time. In their work conversations, they created gallery art and presented these ideas in a journal as part of their discussions.[2]
In 1972, the group created Index 01, consisting of 350 texts placed inside 8 filing cabinets. These texts were "indexed according to their logical and ideological (in)compatibility", to assert a "critical inquiry into art practice as an art activity in itself".[4] The Art & Language group that exhibited in the international Documenta 5 exhibitions of 1972 included Atkinson, Bainbridge, Baldwin, Hurrell, Pilkington, Rushton, and Joseph Kosuth, the American editor of Art-Language.[5] The work consisted of a filing system of material published and circulated by Art & Language members.[6]
Projects
Ian Burn and Mel Ramsden co-founded The Society for Theoretical Art and Analysis in New York in the late 1960s. They joined Art & Language in 1970–71.[7] During this time, Sarah Charlesworth and Christine Kozlov became affiliated with the group.[8][9] New York Art & Language became fragmented after 1975 because of disagreements concerning principles of collaboration.[10]
Art & Language, Untitled Painting 1965. The Tate Modern Collection.
In the early years of the 1970s, several artists joined the collective, including Ian Burn, Michael Corris, Charles Harrison, Preston Heller, Joseph Kosuth, Andrew Menard, Mel Ramsden and Terry Smith,[11] and David Rushton.[12] During this time the group produced numerous theoretical writings and art works.[11]
During the mid-1970s the group was in conflict during a time when conceptual art had lost some of its "critical bearing" and was being institutionalized. The conflicts among the collective existed within the context of global socio-political turmoil and economic crisis as well as the "revival of modernism."[13]
By the end of the decade, the only members who remained were Baldwin, Harrison and Ramsden, with the occasional participation of Mayo Thompson and the group Red Krayola with whom several recordings were made.[11][14] Ian Burn returned to Australia, joining Ian Milliss, a conceptual artist who had begun work with trade unions in the early 1970s, in becoming active in Union Media Services, a design studio for social and community initiatives and the development of trade unions.[15][16]
Art & Language and the Jackson Pollock Bar collaborated for the first time in January 1995,[18] during the "Art & Language & Luhmann" symposium, organized by the Contemporary Social Considerations Institute (Institut für soziale Gegenwartsfragen) of Freiburg.[19] The 3-day symposium included speakers such as Catherine David, who prepared the Documenta X, and Peter Weibel, artist and curator. There was also a theoretical installation of an Art & Language text produced in playback by the Jackson Pollock Bar. The installation was interpreted by five German actors playing the roles of Jack Tworkow, Philip Guston, Harold Rosenberg, Robert Motherwell and Ad Reinhardt.[20][21][22]
An archive of papers relating to "New York Art & Language" are held at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.[23]
Critical reception
In 1999, Art & Language exhibited at PS1 MoMA in New York, with a major installation entitled The Artist Out of Work. This was a recollection of Art & Language's dialogical and other practices, curated by Michael Corris and Neil Powell.[24] In a negative appraisal of the exhibition, art criticJerry Saltz wrote, "A quarter century ago, 'Art & Language' forged an important link in the genealogy of conceptual art, but next efforts have been so self-sufficient and obscure that their work is now virtually irrelevant."[25]
In 2002, Beatriz Herráez, writing for Flash Art, described the Art & Language retrospective exhibition, Too Dark to Read, as "declaration meant to ‘clarify’ the group’s practice" as a method that is located in "the discursive quality of its ideational system and never in isolated works."[26]
Adrian Searle wrote in 2014: "Art & Language is as much as anything a conversation from which work arises and goes off on its own tangent, referencing itself, dragging Art & Language’s compendious history with it as it goes. Their's is an art that makes and unmakes itself, eats and regurgitates itself."[27]
^"Jackson Pollock Bar". ZKM: Center for art and media Karlsruhe. Retrieved 3 March 2023.
^Institut für soziale Gegenwartsfragen, Freiburg i. Br., Kunstraum Wien (Hg.) , ed. (1997). Art & Language & Luhmann III. Wien: Passagen Verlag. Retrieved 3 March 2023.
^Nicolas Rapold, "Interview: Kathryn Bigelow Goes Where the Action Is," The Village Voice, 23 June 2009. [1]Archived 22 February 2010 at the Wayback Machine Access date: 27 June 2009.
Art & Language: Blurting in A & L online Hypertext version of a complete print work of 1973 by American members of Art & Language, with articles and a discussion forum.
Further reading
Bailey, Robert. Art & Language International, Duke University Press, ISBN9780822374121
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