Template:Short description Template:About
Template:Use dmy dates Art & Language is an English conceptual 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.
From May 1969, the group published in England the magazine Art-Language: The Journal of Conceptual Art.
HistoryEdit
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).<ref>Neil Mulholland, The Cultural Devolution: art in Britain in the late twentieth century, Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2003, p165. Template:ISBN</ref> 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.<ref name="Tate-A&L">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
The first issue of Art-Language: The Journal of Conceptual Art (Volume 1, Number 1) was published in May 1969.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
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".<ref name="Frieze-2002">Template:Cite journal</ref> 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.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> The work consisted of a filing system of material published and circulated by Art & Language members.<ref>Anna Bentkowska-Kafel, Trish Cashen, Hazel Gardiner, Digital Visual Culture: Theory and Practice, Intellect Books, 2009, p104. Template:ISBN</ref> π
ProjectsEdit
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.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> During this time, Sarah Charlesworth and Christine Kozlov became affiliated with the group.<ref name="PM" /><ref name="AM" /> New York Art & Language became fragmented after 1975 because of disagreements concerning principles of collaboration.<ref>Charles Green, The Third Hand: Collaboration in Art from Conceptualism to Postmodernism, UNSW Press, 2001, p48. Template:ISBN</ref>
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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,<ref name="UBUWEB" /> and David Rushton.<ref name="UE" /> During this time the group produced numerous theoretical writings and art works.<ref name="UBUWEB" />
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."<ref name="CCCOD">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
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.<ref name="UBUWEB">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref name="Rough Trade">Template:Cite book</ref> 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.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
In 1986, Art & Language was nominated for the Turner Prize.<ref name="Tate-Turner">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
Art & Language and the Jackson Pollock Bar collaborated for the first time in January 1995,<ref name="ZKM, JPB">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> during the "Art & Language & Luhmann" symposium, organized by the Contemporary Social Considerations Institute (Institut für soziale Gegenwartsfragen) of Freiburg.<ref name="A&L&L">Template:Cite book</ref> 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.<ref name="Harrison">Template:Cite book</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
An archive of papers relating to "New York Art & Language" are held at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.<ref name="Getty">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
Critical receptionEdit
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.<ref name="MoMA-1999">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> In a negative appraisal of the exhibition, art critic Jerry 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."<ref>Jerry Saltz, Seeing out loud: the Voice art columns, fall 1998-winter 2003, Geoffrey Young, 2003, p293. Template:ISBN</ref>
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."<ref name="Flash">Template:Cite journal</ref>
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."<ref name="Guardian-Searle">Template:Cite news</ref>
Members and associatesEdit
Members and associates include Terry Atkinson,<ref name="Tate-A&L" /> David Bainbridge,<ref name="Tate-A&L" /> Michael Baldwin,<ref name="Tate-A&L" /><ref name="Frieze-2002" /> Kathryn Bigelow,<ref>Nicolas Rapold, "Interview: Kathryn Bigelow Goes Where the Action Is," The Village Voice, 23 June 2009. [1] Template:Webarchive Access date: 27 June 2009.</ref> Ian Burn,<ref name="UBUWEB" /> Sarah Charlesworth<ref name="PM">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>,Charles Harrison,<ref name="UBUWEB" /> Michael Corris<ref name="UBUWEB" />,Preston Heller,<ref name="UBUWEB" /> Graham Howard,<ref name="NGV-1971">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Harold Hurrell<ref name="Tate-A&L" />,Joseph Kosuth,<ref name="UBUWEB" /> Christine Kozlov,<ref name="AM">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Nigel Lendon,<ref name="AL">Template:Cite journal</ref> Andrew Menard,<ref name="UBUWEB" /> Philip Pilkington,<ref name="TM-PP">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Neil Powell,<ref name="MoMA-1999" /> Mel Ramsden,<ref name="Tate-A&L" /><ref name="Frieze-2002" /> David Rushton,<ref name="UE">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Terry Smith,<ref name="UBUWEB" /> and Mayo Thompson and Red Crayola.<ref name="Rough Trade" />
Public collectionsEdit
ReferencesEdit
External linksEdit
- Interview with Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden about Art & Language (2011) MP3
- 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 readingEdit
- Bailey, Robert. Art & Language International, Duke University Press, Template:ISBN
- Thomas Dreher: Intermedia Art: Konzeptuelle Kunst with four German articles on Art & Language and a chronology with illustrated works.
- Morton,Tom. Art & Language, Frieze, April 2002.
- El análisis crítico de la modernidad de Art & Language
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