BERLIN.- Spring 2019 ushers in another season for Galerie Michael Janssen, who presents Devinera qui Pourra (Figure it out who can), an exhibition of works both new and newly conceived by Art & Language and curated by Jill Silverman van Coenegrachts.

Collaborators at heart, Art & Language has been described as “not quite an art movement, not quite a research institute, not quite an activist group, and not quite a rock-and-roll band,” but understood to be all of these things and more1. Operating for over fifty years in a variety of configurations and manifestations—from an artistic duo to a fully-fledged international network and back again, Art & Language were and remain leaders in the sphere of a critical artistic practice reacting to, as art historian Robert Bailey explains, “the legacy of modernism, specifically as it was formulated in the United States after WWII...”2

Shortly after coming together in the mid-1960s, UK artists Terry Atkinson, Michael Baldwin, Harold Hurrell, and David Bainbridge launched the publication Art-Language a “journal of conceptual art” in 1968, and with it created, according to the artists, “the first imprint to identify a public entity called ‘Conceptual Art’ and the first to serve the theoretical and conversational interests of a community of artists and critics who were its producers and users.” Over the years, Art & Language developed along several tracks, expanding into other countries, onto other continents, and from there diversifying its activities (music, film, politics, et al.) according to the interests of its extensive cohort. By 1976, Art & Language evolved into a more concentrated form to pursue its ongoing critical agenda. Today, Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden (who joined in 1969) spearhead and represent its efforts working in a studio outside Oxford with sheep grazing outside their windows.

A trademark quality of Art & Language’s critical artistic output is an unflagging challenge of art’s definitions, parameters, assumptions, and genres—a dedication to questioning, “what art might become when it becomes conceptual.”3 Devinera qui Pourra continues their investigation. Named in reference to a comment Gustav Courbet made about his painting L‘Atelier du peintre (The Artist‘s Studio) (1854-1855), which depicts the collision of the painter’s discrete social circles in single scene, the exhibition invites attendees to “figure it out who can.” It challenges viewers to unravel the intellectual knots that Art & Language tie within each artwork. It is also an assessment, in the spirit of Courbet’s painting, of global politics in the present—a complicated world incommensurate with, yet inextricable from, itself.

Picasso’s Guernica in the Style of Jackson Pollock, (Essay II) (1980-2018) exemplifies this seemingly paradoxical, disjunctive condition. Executed in Indian ink on 114 pages of text taken from published articles by Art & Language, the drawing is a return to an earlier project of the same name. The first versions, of which there were two (although only one remains extant), were made as paintings about paintings that simultaneously collapsed “genetically connected” eras of modern art, represented by Picasso and Pollock, and their respective historical contexts in “a monstrous clash of two culturally and artistically asymptomatic things.”4

Contesting the undue reach of modern global politics, especially as they are reinforced by portraits of public figures, is the main thrust behind (Made) Active by One Lie (2018). Within a collection of clear Plexiglas boxes lie a series of what the artists call “broken signifiers,” which include abstract images on wooden panels and paintings of world leaders such as Angela Merkel, Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and Kim Jong-un. Representational or not, the images are afforded the same status, and the portraits are “lost or hidden by presences that demand a mode of attention which empties them of significance.” The result: they are “redescribe[d]...as literal objects on which a portrait is inscribed” and severed from their ties to power.

The earliest works from 1987, the acrylic on paper paintings Unit Cure, Unit Ground X and Unit Cure, Unit Ground XV, illustrate Art & Language’s particular brand of institutional critique. Both works depict an interior “refer[ing] to the contemporary art museum, a place of circulation and display.” Superimposed over the image is an arrangement of lines resembling an architectural floor plan; its placement disrupts the illusionistic space of the image. The viewer is forced to reconcile with the contradictory and oscillating perceptual phenomena that is effected, and by extension question the integrity of information provided—information commonly accepted as truth simply for being issued by an official voice.

Flags for Organisations (II) (2018) interrogates the fallibility of sign, symbol, and political rhetoric by providing a series of emblems and texts basic enough to be co-opted for an ideological cause but absurd enough to expose the generic, and therefore insidious, nature of ideological catchphrases and their attendant iconography. Like Picasso’s Guernica in the Style of Jackson Pollock, (Essay II), this work revisits a past project that tackled similar concerns and infuses it with updated connotations specific to the Trumpian/Brexit morass of 2019.

With this in mind, it comes as little surprise that the artists would create a new work entitled A Bad Place (2018). Comprised of 144 separate sheets of Art & Language’s published writings (a material choice turned formal motif), the drawing is a banner that boldy reads “A BAD PLACE.” Again, Art & Language diagnose the spirit of the times for the production and consumption of art (the pages are scrambled, indicating a breakdown of order and communication) and its situatedness within the culture at large (an age of insecurity for all). It follows that, in Studies and Conversations, Qui Pourra (2007-2018), the subject is the artists’ studio and the themes are, in the artists’ words, “various studies of impairment, intrusion or loss.” As Art & Language present it, the studio is a place of labor, analysis, articulation, memory, and resonance, but also a site of collision and occlusion, “an ideological space, a place of fictions, tropes and lies.” It is, in short, a place where worlds collide and genres dissolve. Figure it out who can.


1 Robert Bailey, Art & Language International: Conceptual Art Between Art Worlds (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016), 1. 2 Ibid., 4. 3 Ibid. 4 Michael Baldwin, Charles Harrison, Mel Ramsden, Art & Language in Practice, Volume 1, Illustrated Handbook (Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, 1999), 33.
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