La Page

The name Art & Language was first adopted in 1968 to refer to a collaborative practice that had developed over the previous two years between Michael Baldwin and Terry Atkinson, in association with David Bainbridge and Harold Hurrell. Over the next several years it stood for a collaborative practice with a growing and changing membership associated with the journal Art-Language, first published in May 1969, and subsequently with a second journal, The Fox, which was published in New York in 1975-76. Joseph Kosuth was invited to act as American editor of Art-Language in 1969. In the following year Michael Ramsden and Ian Burn merged their separate collaboration with Art & Language. Charles Harrison became editor of Art-Language in 1971. By the mid-1970s some twenty people were asociated with the name, devided between England and New York. From 1976 on, however, the genealogical thread of Art & Language's artistic work was taken solely into the hands of Baldwin and Ramsden, with whom Harrison continues to collaborate on projects such as the present essay.

voices off: reflections on conceptual art / we write as the representatives of an artistic practice that has been counted a major contributor to the conceptual art movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s and that has persisted in continuous though varied operation to the present day. Our purpose in writing is to argue for an independent view of the stuff and character of that movement and of its legacy. This requires that we critically consider what has come to be accepted as the authoritative account of the art of our generation and of the crisis of modernism from which it is supposed to have emerged.

7. / ...

the narrative that has just been given supplies no positive account of distributive "democracy," of dematerialization, or of any of the other overwrought fantasies of the conceptual art entrepreneur. It offers an account that is not so much ignored by Buchloh, Krauss, and others as it is beyond their empirical, historical, and analytical means. it is an account of the production of an unstable object that eventually inaugurates a sense of a new genre, but a genre that embraces a degree of hybridity and that finally neither lay claim to material and medium specifity nor decisively rule it out.

if the concept of instituitonal critique is not to remain pickled in sentiment it will need to be retheorized in terms of works that have sufficient intellectual agility and internality to put up a critical resistance to the institution as it mutates and develops. it is in this resistance that we may find some vestige of the autonomy that was lost in the transfiguration of high modernism into expensively framed money, lost again in the trajectory from minimalist literalism to institutional critique, and last once more in the postmodern development of conceptual art into architectural adjumet. the apparent tokenization of the work of art is an institutional effect, not a prohibition against staying awake; nor, for that matter, is it a coercive cultural condition, however powerful it may be.

consider then, the idea of the work of art as an essay that gives form and voice - often a ventriloquist's voice - to a project. consider further that this form is a fragment lopped of from a conversation - a performance of sorts that is always under the pain of erasure, conceived as both form and social society. finally, consider the possibity that "this is the work" / "i don't think so" is the work. this is a genre that is readily spattered with material forms. an interrogative and the discussion to which it gives rise may naturally invoke an essay or a heuristic in the form of a picture. insofar as the outcome is exhibited it may be in the guise of a painting. but it is a painting that is in fact a form cut off from a usually larger whole - in the manner perhaps of a swatch or sample. and the picture may be more than a thousand words or of none. it will, if we are lucky or judicious, possess an internality or autonomy that it owes to its discoursive origin, even as it loses that autonomy to the institution that frames it. it will be, as we have suggested, a performance of sorts. it will indeed be "a strange quirk in the fate of conceptual art," but then the form of conceptual art whence it come was itself strange.

we might say even that the mode in which such things as paintings answer to the discourse is one that approaches performance. as much perhaps as the mode of answering that is made by the not quite rock'n'roll lyric. (we have produced three lps with the red crayola as well as a libretto for an opera.) in painting, we act the part, uo to limit of imposture. there are many possible positions to be occupied - one suspects a Xenoian infinty - between the painter and the actors of the jackson pollock bar, working to a script by art & language, who have pretended to be art & language engaged in painting - and who, in doing so, have produced a painting of their own. these are positions as capable of embodying a near absence of cultural guile as an iterative and recursive knowingness. once the genre is bound to its social use as discourse, there is little or no artistic identity to be lost - only the displaced tokens and impostures from which contemporary art fashions the episodes that keep capital interested.

two putative artists and a putative art historian sat in a studio writing this.

/ by art and language.

// Critical Inquiry, volume 33 (2006), pages 113–135; © 2006, The University of Chicago.