174
HOME FROM HOME - Art & Language
A PUBLIC ART INTERVENTION
DECEMBER 2023
ROTHSCHILD, MENTMORE, DUNNING AVENUE, QUEEN STREET, HARCOURT PARADE, BOTANY AND GARDENERS ROAD, ROSEBERY
HOME FROM HOME is an event executed by SNO Contemporary Art Projects on behalf of Art & Language and the Château de Montsoreau Museum of Contemporary Art, Loire.
With Jesse Hogan, Anthea Duffy, George Squires, Annabelle McEwen, Tom Sandberg and Ruark Lewis.
HOME FROM HOME is the first part of a local COVID recovery public-art-initiative supported by Sydney City Council. In 2020, the pandemic situation worsened, and the local Rosebery abstract-art group SNO planned a series of modest public-art projects for the suburb. Our group wants to experiment with lightly-installed art interventions as temporary land-marks in the area. Around Rosebery, on the facades of obsolete factories, we will paste-up 7 posters from the HOME FROM HOME exhibition kit, devised by the Château de Montsoreau Museum of Contemporary Art as a gift to communities around the world. The origin of these posters are conceptual artworks by Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden of the Art & Language group. Some of these date back to the 1960s. The Rosebery inventions are dedicated to one of our SNO comrades Nigel Lendon (1944-2021), who was associated with the collective Art & Language in New York in the 1970s.
“A depressing, anaesthetising triviality seeps into everything when art becomes a question of proper institutional gambits clad in professional intellectual decoration. You feel sick. You feel superfluous. You begin to suspect that all of your actions are really the fruition of a second-rate ambition to fulfill an appropriately ‘critical’ or ‘provocative’ role in the distribution and analysis of culture. For nearly half a century, in varied guises and manifestations, Art & Language has been dedicated to resisting this process of trivialisation.”
— If You were Art & Language, Then You’d Be a Fucking Decent Contemporary Artist, Matthew Jesse Jackson Art and Language, Uncompleted
ARTWORK INFORMATION
3 Suprematist Squares
1965, dimensions variable
As temperatures approach absolute zero, particles begin to behave in paradoxical ways. One does not encounter nothing, so much as anomaly and apparently unlawful absurdity. The moment that saw the Suprematist black square and other discourses of abstraction as the cultural cognates of social revolution is now commemorated as a badge on the lapel of a spectre. The viewer is now invited to witness the sight of an artist crushed by history. His gesture in wearing the badge is also risky, liable itself to be punished by the very forces that destroyed what it commemorates. The angel of history eventually loses her power over the narrative, of course: Stalinism declined, the capitalism of the West made its triumphal entry into the city of culture, and black squares are counted among the glories of twentieth-century modernity. The ghost with the badge has had the last laugh. The other narrative that the spectre relates is one that involves greater cruelty and subtlety on the part of the angel of history. And it seems that a chaotic and ultimately annihilating power - perhaps not an angel - may, in due course, have the last laugh. This other story is the narrative of one-idea art, of bureaucratisation and institutionalisation.
Reference text from: Guerra, Carles. Art & Language Uncompleted: The Philippe Méaille Collection. Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2014.
100% Abstract
1968, 43 x 35.4 cm
Mel Ramsden, one year before the creation of Art & Language, quips on dear abstract painting to Clement Greenberg. This cycle of abstract painting (Abstract Painting), uses the bivalence of the word "abstract" in English. By painting on the monochrome canvas, the same components of paint, it returns the painting to his material status, but it also makes an "abstract"; in the sense that it can take in works of philosophy or literature reviews and could result in "extract" or "Summary".
Reference Text from: Château de Montsoreau Museum of Contemporary Art, ART & LANGUAGE, 100% ABSTRACT, 1967.
Poster for the Air-Conditioning Show
1971-1972, 47.6 x 42cm
Air-Conditioning Show began as a text and a drawing circulated in 1966-67. Among those to whom the text was circulated was Robert Smithson who offered it for inclusion in Arts Magazine. It was published in that journal in November 1967. The work was first realised as an exhibition arranged by Joseph Kosuth at the School of Visual Arts Gallery in New York in 1972. Temperature Show and Air Show were produced in the same year. Frameworks, a text that draws these works together, asks ‘Is it necessary actually to install Air-Conditioning as described in the text or will the text do just as well? (Is the text to be identified as the art- the meaning- we make, and is any concrete realisation of it merely a conservative- contemplative- distraction?)
The ‘non-exhibition’ [...] points to something that became distinctive of Art & Language practice later in the sixties. It goes to a development in our sense of the cultural and methodological implications of ‘appropriation’, the Conceptual Art practice of designating this or that item - ‘air’, ‘temperature’, etc. - as an object of artistic attention, and in doing so, neither laying hands upon it nor otherwise making it literally present. Air-Conditioning Show was not quite an appropriative work simpliciter, as the artist was required to have agency in setting up a physical system to which the name refers - to install a technical device. Indeed, the work was conceived at a time- certainly in Europe and even in the small quasi-domestic circumstances of the small avant-garde gallery in the USA- when air-conditioning was by no means commonplace; a certain gleam of technological modernity issued from it.
Reference text from: Guerra, Carles. Art & Language Uncompleted: The Philippe Méaille Collection. Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2014.
Paintings 1 (No. 7)
1971-1972, 77 x 150 cm
The texts that cover the surfaces of these works are pages, fragments and paragraphs cut out of the processes of conversation and learning. While what we see, prima facie, are texts intended to be read, the works are called ‘paintings’ and paintings are to be looked at. The viewer, who will almost certainly be a reader, may imagine herself to be no reader at all. As a non-reader she would still recover detail of sorts from the ‘painting’ and may ask how this ‘detail’ compares to - or indeed connects with - the ‘detail’ recovered by a reader.
Reference text from: Guerra, Carles. Art & Language Uncompleted: The Philippe Méaille Collection. Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2014.
Portrait of V.I. Lenin in the Style of Jackson Pollock I
1979, (Assembled) 36 pages 30 x 21cm
The proposal for a Portrait of V.I. Lenin in the Style of Jackson Pollock was first discussed in a spirit of irony as a possible topic for a (written) essay. A sense of the practical unpracticality of the proposal gave rise to a practical essay. The essay developed into an exhibition of colour xeroxes at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. At the time of production the conventionally aesthetic properties of the ‘original’ paintings were seen as the accidental and possibly avoidable residue of the project. In the event, the display of xeroxed images at Eindhoven was evidence of a paradox: the suppression of the aesthetic, and indeed any act of suppression, could itself be aestheticised insofar as it entered the circle of the Institutional Theory. The critique of the painted fetish was in fact to be driven more efficiently if the viewer could be lured into an experience of the paintings that would be a real match for the experience to be had before a (real) Pollock. In discovering a portrait of Lenin, the aesthetic ‘loss’ would be all the greater.
Reference text from: Guerra, Carles. Art & Language Uncompleted: The Philippe Méaille Collection. Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2014.
Study for Mother, Father, Monday: Map of the World
2000, 88 x 137 cm
The form of this map owes much both to the Mercator projection and to the ‘wealth and power’ cartograms of Kidron and Segal’s atlas of 1981. Of course, at first sight, Study for Mother, Father, Monday does not intentionally show the distribution of wealth and power- or of anything else. It merely simplifies the Mercator projection into a large number of rectangular canvases that range in size from medium-sized painting to cigarette-packet small. Each of these is big enough to bear an inscription that is a fragment cut from the tape of Art & Language’s written and unwritten conversation. The text that appears on a given panel serves to identify it. It is also identified more or less easily by its literal or its ‘geographical’ position. Is there here an allegory (or something) of the literal in the form of an index of conversational fragments on a representation of the world, a world that has become the undifferentiated resource of literal objects which are the harbingers of artistic meaning?
Reference text from: Guerra, Carles. Art & Language Uncompleted: The Philippe Méaille Collection. Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2014.
Ten Posters, Illustrations for Art-Language
1977, 108 x 84.2 cm
Some, if not all, of these posters have the aspect of vulgar agit-prop. They are political images apparently devoid of semiological or aesthetic sophistication. In respect of both modernist theory and that later theory which is submissive (or wise) to the semiotic and technical imperatives of the age, they are naïve and unenlightened. They are ironical figures - the dumb others - of that excrescence of Conceptual Art which sought to achieve its social effects directly by borrowing the techniques of advertising. Much of this political Conceptual Art was characterised by its untransformed journalism- going straight and sentimentally to an issue - sure of its own virtue and impertinently pessimistic as to the reflective powers of those whose interests it loftily purported to serve. Had it lacked direct political pretension and merely shadowed (and displaced) the semiotics of advertising, a distance would have been retained and, with that, political virtue.
Reference text from: Guerra, Carles. Art & Language Uncompleted: The Philippe Méaille Collection. Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2014.
Opera Victorine
1984
Art & Language: Interview with Victorine Meurend is a fictional conversation between Victorine Meurend, the model who posed most frequently for the painter Édouard Manet and the Art & Language collective.
This four-act detective opera was composed by British conceptual artists Art & Language. It was created in English in the summer of 1983 and published in the collective's journal, Art-Language, volume 5, n°2 of March 1984. The French translation of the opera was first published in 1993 by the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume on the occasion of the Art & Language exhibition.
Reference Text from: Château de Montsoreau Musée d’art Contemporain, Victorine (Opera).
The Red Krayola
in collaboration with Art & Language
The works in the series ‘Dialectical Materialism’ of 1974-76 were made out of stuttering fragments of speech and slogans. Corrected Slogans (funded in part by Robert Rauschenberg and produced by Art & Language and The Red Krayola between 1975 and 1976) transformed them into lyrics. The LP record consists of political anthems whose verbal content would normally alienate them from any ethos of rock ‘n’ roll. These were lyrics which it was barely possible to sing. To attempt to render them as rock ‘n’ roll is to go as far as - and beyond - the limits of the form and to strain the grammar and sense of the text to the point of oblivion.
LOCATION OF WORKS (INTERACTIVE)
DOCUMENT
PROCESS
DISTRESSED
Photos by Annabelle McEwen and Jesse Hogan
SEMINAR & EXHIBITION
100% Abstract, 1968. Felt-tip pen on paper, Nigel Lendon (1944 - 2021). Photo: Pam McGrath.
HOME FROM HOME is an event executed by SNO Contemporary Art Projects on behalf of Art & Language and the Château de Montsoreau-Museum of Contemporary Art.
The project is dedicated to one of our SNO comrades Nigel Lendon (1944-2021), who was associated with the collective Art & Language in New York in the 1970s.
Iconophiliac was Nigel’s instagram handle
Comments:
Iconophiliac, 14 July 2020
“Am I alone in thinking the most degraded mode of reproduction of a work of art are the jigsaw puzzles available in a museum gift shop? But now, in response to the era of the COVID-19 lockdown, there is a museum (in this case the #chateaudemontsoreau in the Loirep Valley) that is gifting a new fragmentary mode of reproduction of works of art drawn from the Philippe Meaille collection.
For those pilgrims who are frustrated by not being able to visit the largest collection of the British collective #artandlanguage the museum is making available online, with A&L's endorsement, for free, a new form of digitally reproduced art works for virtual visitors.
You can now print and assemble a range of key works held by the museum, to be appreciated in the privacy and isolation of this new era. It comes to you as a downloadable digitally modified reproduction, scanned and formatted in separate A4 sized panels (regular copy paper size) with guidelines to facilitate the recombination of the multiple printed panels to recreate the appearance of the original. In this case I have subscribed to the museum's offer, downloaded, printed, assembled and framed this new version of Mel Ramsden's drawing "100% Abstract 1968" Since the mid 1070s the collective Art and Language has been reduced from some 20 participants once spread globally to (now) the duo Mel Ramsden and Michael Baldwin based in Britain. The French collection also includes works by Baldwin and Ramsden made prior to the mid-1970s, from which date their works (and publications since The Fox) have been produced under the collective authorship of "Art and Language". If Ramsden's original drawing was intended to test the limits of the concept of a work of art, then it's arguable that this new version of "100% Abstract" is now a test of the nature of reproduction - and thus thanks to the evolution of reproductive technology, the relation of original to copy is projected into a new relation of сору to the original. Just as the work now appears as as a suite of pages, so the idea of the work's reproduction is itself a kind of echo, drawing attention to our understanding of the original.”