Barcelona’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA) organizes a seminar to show viewers Philippe Méaille Collection of Art & Language documents, an important artistic group that was founded in the United Kingdom in 1968 and played a key role in the birth of conceptual art. The seminar suggests promoting critic research on a particularly important aspect of the collection: what is usually called “a first practice of conceptual art” and its subsequent mythologization. Throughout these two, the legacy of Art & Language, which is often described as radically incomplete and radically non categorical, will be target of debate and assessment by artists and art critics, such as Matthew Jesse Jackson (professor of art history at the University of Chicago), The Jackson Pollock Bar (performance group), Elena Crippa (curator and researcher), Manuel Asensi (professor at the Philology Faculty of Valencia University), Mel Ramsden and Michael Baldwin (members of Art & Language), as well as Carles Guerra, chief conservator of MACBA.
Philippe Méaille Collection of Art & Language works includes different categories of art: written notes, manuscripts, documents, essays, photocopies, newspapers, all kinds of publications, books, drawings and paintings, as well as fragments of a conversation. The heterogeneity of this collection is an essential characteristic of Art & Language’s history, which is frequently taken as a wrong history of conceptual art. Its theory, art objects and narrative suggest that the practice of Art & Language is kind of self-satisfied —in fact, it’s separated and different from conceptual art. Now all these material have to find their way through the museum.
This seminar is the first one of a series of public events organized by MACBA, to come to an end with an exhibition scheduled for autumn 2014.
A reading group on Art & Language is going to be organized on Wednesdays, May 22 – June 12. The registration can be done online, www.macba.cat, starting on April 29.
The name Art & Language was taken in 1968 to make reference to the practice in collaboration developed by Michael Baldwin and Terry Atkinson, in association with David Bainbridge and Harold Hurrell. Over the following years, it named a growing and changing group linked to Art-Language magazine, published in May 1969, and, afterwards, with a second magazine, The Fox, published in New York in 1975-1976.Joseph Kosuth assumed the American edition of Art-Language in 1969. In 1970 Mel Ramsden and Ian Burn merged their separated collaboration with Art & Language. In the 1970s, there were twenty people or so linked to the group, between England and New York. Nevertheless, since 1976 Baldwin and Ramsden took on Art & Language artistic project, with the theoretical and critic collaboration of Charles Harrison, who died in 2009.
Source: Press release
