Art & Language

Art & Language is a conceptual artists collaboration which has undergone many changes since its creation at the end of the 1960s. It is said that, their first works, included the Art-Language Magazine published in November 1969, had got an important influence on Conceptual Art as much in The United States as in Great Britain.

The Art & Language group has been founded in 1967/68 in the United Kingdom by Terry Atkinson (b. 1939), David Bainbridge (b. 1941), Michael Baldwin (b. 1945) and Harold Hurrell (b. 1940),. Four artists who began to collaborate around 1966 while they were art teachers in Coventry. The name of the group was derived from their journal Art-Language, which existed as a work conversation since 1966. Charles Harrison and Mel Ramsden joined the group in 1970. Between 1968 and 1982 up to 50 people were associated at the group. Among them, starting at the beginning of the 70’s, Ian Burn, Michael Corris, Preston Heller, Graham Howard, Joseph Kosuth, Andrew Menard, Terry Smith and from Coventry Philip Pilkington and David Rushton. In the facts, to know who did what, in which way and in which quantity is more or less well known. The (relative) degree of anonymity that the name conferred since the beginning, continues to have, however, an historical significance.

The first issue of Art-Language (Volume 1 Number 1, May 1969) is named 'The Journal of Conceptual Art'. By the second issue (Volume 1 Number 2, February 1970) it became clear that there was some Conceptual Art and more Conceptual artists for whom and to whom the journal did not speak. The title has been then abandoned. Art-Language had, however, put in relief the idea of the group. It was the first imprint to identify a public entity called 'Conceptual Art' and also 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 on the nature of Conceptual Art, the editors and most of its historic contributors shared strangely similar opinions: 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.

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