Art & Language - Early Years

Early Years

The Art & Language group was founded in 1967/8 in the United Kingdom by artists Terry Atkinson (b. 1939), David Bainbridge (b. 1941), Michael Baldwin (b. 1945) and Harold Hurrell (b. 1940), four artists who began collaborating around 1966 while teaching art in Coventry. The name of the group was derived from their journal Art-Language, which existed as a work in conversation as early as 1966. Charles Harrison and Mel Ramsden joined the group in 1970, and between 1968 and 1982 up to 50 people were associated with the group. Others involved with the group from the early 1970s included Ian Burn, Michael Corris, Preston Heller, Graham Howard, Joseph Kosuth, Andrew Menard, Terry Smith and from Coventry Philip Pilkington and David Rushton.

The facts of who did what, how much they contributed and so on, are more or less well known. The (small) degree of anonymity which the name originally conferred continues, however, to be of historical significance.

The first issue of Art-Language (Volume 1 Number 1, May 1969) is subtitled ‘The Journal of Conceptual Art’. By the second issue (Volume 1 Number 2, February 1970) it had become clear that there was some Conceptual Art and more Conceptual artists for whom and to whom the journal did not speak. The inscription was accordingly abandoned. Art-Language had, however, laid claim to a purpose and to a constituency. It was the first imprint to identify a public entity called ‘Conceptual Art’ and the first to serve the theoretical and conversational interests of a community of artists and critics who were its producers and users. While that community was far from unanimous as to the nature of Conceptual Art, the views of the editors and most of the early contributors shared a powerful family resemblance: Conceptual Art was critical of Modernism for its bureaucracy and its historicism and of Minimalism for its philosophical conservatism; the practice of Conceptual Art was primarily theory and its form preponderantly textual.

As the distribution of the journal and the teaching practice of the editors and others developed, the conversation expanded and multiplied to include by 1971 (in England) Charles Harrison, Philip Pilkington, David Rushton, Lynn Lemaster, Sandra Harrison, Graham Howard, Paul Wood, and (in New York) Michael Corris, and later Paula Ramsden, Mayo Thompson, Christine Kozlov, Preston Heller, Andrew Menard and Kathryn Bigelow.

The name Art & Language sat precariously over all this. Its significance (or instrumentality) varied from person to person, alliance to alliance, (sub)discourse to (sub)discourse – from those in New York who produced The Fox (1974–76) to those engaged in music projects or to those who continued the original journal. There was confusion and by 1976 a dialectically fruitful confusion had become a chaos of competing individualities and concerns.

Throughout the 1970s, Art & Language dealt with questions surrounding art production, and attempted a shift from the conventional "non-Linguistic" forms of art like painting and sculpture to more theoretically based works. The group often took up argumentative positions against such prevailing views of critics like Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried.

The Art & Language group that exhibited in the international Documenta exhibitions of 1972 included Atkinson, Bainbridge, Baldwin, Hurrell, Pilkington and Rushton and the then America editor of Art-Language Joseph Kosuth. The work consisted of a filing system of material published and circulated by Art & Language members.