Conceptual art and painting: Further essays on Art & Language

By Charles Harrison
Cambridge MA: MIT Press 2001
234 pages, illus. b/w, cloth, $34.95
ISBN 0-262-08302-7

Reviewed by Robert Pepperell
Polar (Posthuman Laboratory for Arts Research)

pepperell@ntlworld.com

The philosopher and critic Arthur Danto famously claimed that art history ends when the art object becomes indistinguishable from the non-art object. One might equally make the case that art ceases to develop when it becomes its own subject matter. The work of the Art & Language project — a collective artistic and theoretical enterprise based mainly in Britain since the 1970s — seems to perpetually court this unproductive regress, while largely resisting its seductions. The essays collected here, written by Charles Harrison (editor since 1971 of the Art & Language journal), are eloquent, sharp, and deeply considered. He mainly describes the work the group has produced in the last decade, much of which, along with the writing that accompanies it, directly addresses the inherent problems of the artistic process, particularly in the act of painting. The work taken as a whole becomes a larger treatise on the nature of art.

What prevents Harrison’s writing, and the art-works it addresses, from being consumed in an entirely self-referential debate about art about art is, in part, the intense consideration given to the operation of language and (as is reflected in the group’s name) it’s relation to art. Hence writing, and writing in painting, are given sophisticated consideration throughout the book. Given that the output of Art & Language consists to a great extent in theoretical texts and paintings with writing, we are asked to consider what the difference might be between writing about art and writing as art. The debate is sustained at a delicately high pitch, only occasionally lapsing into writing about art as art, or even writing as art about art. We are also rescued from terminal regression by the intelligent attention given to art history and the traditional genres of painting — landscape and figure — and the quality of Harrison’s revaluation (albeit in essay form) of the representative function of art in general, and painting in particular.

But despite the recentness of much of the text, one gets the sense from this book (and certainly from the index) of theoreticians and artists still coming to terms with the formalism of high modernism and its conceptualist aftermath. Which is to say that the most numerous indexical references are to figures like Clement Greenberg, Jackson Pollock, and Michael Fried. And even with the relatively high profile accorded Art & Language on the international stage (with three international retrospectives in the last ten years) it is hard not to see this work as somewhat backward and inward facing in the context of wider contemporary concerns.