Collection: Art & Language

Art & Language is a British Conceptual art collective founded in Coventry in 1968 by Terry Atkinson, David Bainbridge, Michael Baldwin and Harold Hurrell. The group took language, theory and institutional critique as its primary materials, producing works through conversation, indexing, publication and collaborative writing rather than through a single recognisable visual style.

The collective’s journal, Art-Language, first published in 1969, became a central vehicle for the group’s theoretical output and established Art & Language as one of the most rigorous and self-critical practices within international Conceptual art. By the mid-1970s, following internal disputes and the departure of most founding members, the practice consolidated around Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden, with critic and art historian Charles Harrison as a central collaborator.

From the late 1970s onwards, Baldwin and Ramsden developed a body of painting, installation and text work that turned the collective’s earlier theoretical positions back upon the conventions of painting itself. Works such as the Hostage series, the Incidents in a Museum paintings and the Index works engaged directly with the history of modernism, the conditions of display and the politics of artistic authorship.

Major retrospectives at the Musée d’art moderne Lille Métropole (2002) and other European institutions have consolidated Art & Language’s position as one of the defining practices of post-war Conceptual art. Printed matter, exhibition guides and ephemera produced in connection with their exhibitions offer a compressed record of a practice built on the proposition that art could be made from ideas alone.