Another Look at Social Dimension ( 5 of 8 )

In 1974, Burn and Ramsden were invited to participate in an exhibition titled "Homage to Salvador Allende" to be mounted in September of that year by the Center for Art and Culture (CAYC) in Buenos Aires, Argentina. A poster was produced in response to this invitation. It suggested that artists ought to examine "what kinds of cultural relations [modernist art] forces onto other artists; what sorts of responses it elicits from them [and] what kinds of cultural-organizational production is presupposed." The text sketched out a number of issues, all of which would be explored over the next two years in the context of dialogical encounters staged between Art & Language and artists and other members of the public living and working in Sydney, Victoria NSW, Auckland, NZ, Belgrade and Zagreb. Among these is the notion that artists "must assist people in freeing themselves from the overwhelming yoke of bureacracy - both Capitalist and Communist, bourgeois and proletariat - in order for them to free their own subjectivity and hence to better determine the material world for themselves." I would like to discuss in some detail the Art & Language project developed in Australia in 1975. There was a sense that these contradictions did not demand resolution as much as an intensification. Since 1971, Art & Language in Great Britain (and later, the group in New York) had been working on how to index and therefore make explicit to themselves the sum total of the group's output, which at the time consisted largely of transcripts of conversations, notes and essays. This body of texts was thought of as a collection of highly-inflected dialects, thus stressing their indexical nature in another sense: as evidence of culturally situated utterances. The Documenta Index of 1972 aimed to construct something like a user-interface, where the cultural situatedness of Art & Language could be mapped onto the cultural position of the spectator, and vice-versa. This was the first of several projects designed to function both as an information retrieval system as well as an interface to facilitate public participation in the group's discourse. Another project - the Annotations - was quite clearly modelled after a dictionary or thesaurus. Here, key words or indexing terms and "blurts" - a reference to the fragments of text extracted from papers circulated at weekly meetings which took place over the course of about 6 months - were compiled to construct a handbook that would enable a reader, presumably guided by their own idiosyncratic interests, to develop their own pathway through the group's material. In all these projects there was an implicit acknowledgement of the fact that the status of the spectator as a disinterested observer was under revision. Art & Language idealized this new spectator relationship as one of collaboration; there was no WORK to speak of, outside the frame of discursive interaction between individuals in and around the group. In 1974, Art & Language (New York) was invited by three Australian museums - the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the National Gallery of Victoria, and the South Australian Art Gallery - to mount an exhibition of work. More or less at the same time, a request was made by the Australian members of the Museum of Modern Art's International Council for an exhibition of Impressionist paintings. Under the direction of William S. Lieberman, Curator of Prints and Drawings at MOMA, a travelling exhibition titled "Modern Masters: From Manet to Matisse" was assembled. It contained 114 works by 58 artists, including Matisse (10 works), Picasso (7 works), Braque (6 works), Cézanne (5 works), Vuillard and Derain (4 works each), as well as Renior, Balla, Modigliani, Miró, Klee, Dali, etc. As Terry Smith noted at the time, " 'Modern Masters' epitomizes, enshrines and celebrates that very nearly 'official' version of the history of the art of the past century which takes painting to be the highest art, and avantgardism - especially the School of Paris period - as its essential expression." ("Review: Fighting Modern Masters," The Fox 2 (1975))

back | more