[Blake_Stimson,_Gregory_Sholette]_Collectivism_aft(z-lib

Art & Language and the Institutional Form 81
called “Art Theory” at the Coventry College of Art from 1969 to 1971 and
the founding of the journal Art-Language, the Wrst issue of which was published
in May 1969. Hence from the start Art & Language had its sights on
alternative means of education and alternative means of dissemination (both
of them key aspects of self-organization). Struggles against bureaucratic structures
that were seen as constraining and diminishing, these efforts exhibited
a key tendency that would inform the group’s practice over the next eight
years: a propensity to place collective structures and communication channels
above content. Throughout this period, the group’s self-understanding
was that their goal was not to create new physical objects but, principally, to
examine the conditions in which art could be made. “What perhaps united
the founder members of A & L more than anything else,” according to art
historian Charles Harrison, who began to work closely with the group in the
early 1970s, “was an intuition that, under the speciWc circumstances of art
at the time, the production of Wrst-order art was a virtual impossibility unless
assent were given to those fraudulent conceptualizations by means of which
normal art was supported and entrenched.” 10
TRANSATLANTIC COOPERATION:
JOURNAL AND INDEXES
The journal Art-Language, which proposed to embody this oppositional stance
and alternative means of communication, quickly transformed and fed into
other collaborative projects. The Wrst issue, which featured contributions by
U.S. artists Sol Lewitt, Dan Graham, and Lawrence Weiner, in addition to
essays by founding participants Bainbridge and Baldwin, came out in 1969.
Art-Language initially billed itself, according to its subtitle, as “The Journal
of conceptual art.” It quickly lost this appellation, however, and distanced
itself from any extant variety of art production. By the second issue, Art-
Language was dealing more explicitly with institutional power and resistance:
“It is an astonishing but inescapable conclusion that we have reached,” went
an introductory essay, “. . . that the seemingly erudite, scholastic, neutral,
logical, austere, even incestuous, movement of conceptual art is, in fact, a
naked bid for power at the highest level—the wresting from groups at present
at the top of our social structure of control over the symbols of society.” 11
The second issue also deepened the journal’s transatlantic character with
Joseph Kosuth listed as American editor. This mirrored the de facto internationalism
of the group, which by 1971 had found allies not only in Kosuth
but also in Ian Burn and Mel Ramsden working in New York where they
formed (with Roger Cutforth) the Society for Theoretical Art. 12 Most of the
writing in the early years of Art-Language, including the fragment quoted