ART & LANGUAGE

Art & Language is a group of conceptual artists formed in the 1960s aimed to challenge artistic purpose and intent. The group uses language as a tool to alter the way the viewer perceives a work of art. The mere visual aspect of the art serves only partial to the complete experience; only with language can the viewer understand the piece. Art & Language is "determined by a sense of the need, critically and contingently, to address the culture of Modernism, and the agency which that culture is, and reflects, and misrepresents ... "

In other words, Art & Language served originally to prove (or disprove) the legitimacy of conceptual artists and their work. They encourage dissent and criticism of popular work, promoting that "Modern" art must first prove itself noteworthy and should not just be blindly accepted. Often labeled as "radical," this group really pushes concept to its furthest reaches.

I was not able to find a great database of information on this group, so much of the biographical content is sourced from the Tate. But to summarize, the group started off in 1968 as four British artists: Terry Atkinson, David Bainbridge, Harold Hurrell, and Michael Baldwin. Their focus was to shift art into theory and concept, so that art pieces (namely paintings and drawings) could no longer just stand alone as an image. The group quickly integrated new members, so that by the early 80s more than fifty artists were associated with Art & Language. As the Tate notes:

[Art & Language] identified three main phases of the group – the early years, up to 1972, which chiefly found public expression in the publication Art Language; a middle period divided between New York and England and linked to the publication of the journal The Fox (discontinued in 1976); [and] the period since 1977, during which paintings have been produced.

The group is now primarily known by two artists (Michael Baldwin, Mel Ramsden) and one critic (Charles Harrison). They are still producing work, and remain a controversial element of the contemporary art world.

"Portrait of V. I. Lenin with Cap in the Style of Jackson Pollock"

"Picasso's Guernica in the Style of Jackson Pollock"

The Artbook brings to light one of a series of pieces by Art & Language "in the style of Jackson Pollock." After reading reviews and criticsm of and by the group, it is my understanding that the intent of this piece is to call forth the coming trend of "expressiveness." In their words: "by replicating the style of Pollock, the artists were calling attention to the issue of ‘expression and expressiveness.' Harrison has suggested that Pollock's work of 1947-50 had ‘exhausted the potential for an expressive, unselfconscious art, ... Expression somehow became culture, became cultured and emasculated. That emasculation was a part of what Art & Language was trying to represent as a determining condition. The fixing of an expressive content needed to be taken away from the ‘authoritative aesthetic spokesman, ... what a painting expresses or means must be a function of what it is made of and from, culturally, socially, technically, historically, psychologically and morally, independently of the mind of the spectator ...' " 

I do not believe they are necessarily debasing Pollock's work, but instead challenge the progression of ideas immediately following in which uninhibited expression was filtered into an accepted practice of modern art. That is to say that this type of expression in painting was normalized to the extent that it lost it's original intention, and that the mutation of expression into a style, "expressiveness," caused the importance of Pollock's work to dwindle rapidly. In this piece, Art & Language brings back the idea of purpose and meaning behind abstraction. Also, they are in a way dethroning Pollock from his authoritative role as creator, and returning the piece to the hands of a greater, superior force. Not the viewer, as Harrison notes, but instead, time. To be simultaneously of its time and ahead of its time, that is the true mission of a great piece of art.

Below exhibits the diversity of work of the artists involved in Art & Language. 

"Homes from Homes II"

The following piece was a part of a collaboration done with the band Red Crayola.

"Hard to Say When"

"A Rose Has No Teeth," a play on a Wittgenstein passage

Conceptually, Art & Language can be quite difficult to grasp. Also working on limited resources (internet searches as well as library searches did not provide for much), I feel that I've fallen short somewhat of the true conquest of Art & Language. In the future as I uncover more resources, I hope to flesh out this entry a bit more and provide a clear view of what the group is trying to do, as well as more images. If you're interested in a more detailed biography, check out the Tate full text review on Art & Language. You might run into the same issues in that entry as in this- lack of clarification. I think it is safe to say that with the extent of conceptualization drafted by these artists, few reviews are black and white. The Frieze Magazine also had a pretty good article on Art & Language, though after reading it I still retained a certain level of incoherence of the altogether message and point. 

It is my hope that as I continue as an artist and art historian that I will too discover and understand the pioneering of Art & Language, for art is an ongoing dialogue between self and surrounding, surrounding and self, and in order to truly produce relevant, groundbreaking art, one must constantly be concerned with this process of reflection and re-reflection. 

"The original commitment of Art & Language to the view that visual art is conceptually dependent on language had entailed the pursuit of a long critical and analytical project." To be continued...

JEAN ARP

Hans "Jean" Arp, born in Strasbourg in 1886, was a sculptor, painter, poet, and founding member of Dada. He grew up in the Alsace-Lorraine territory, and was forced to change his name into a Francophone version of Hans upon the end of the Franco-Prussian War. Arp spent time in Paris, then moved to Switzerland to avoid the draft. He remained a radical activist through both writing and art. Arp's simplistic organic sculptural forms are very telling of their time period- a strong gravitation towards deeper meaning through direct, simple portrayals. Dada, a radical group of artists aiming to create turbulence in the art world, was most prominent in the early 1900s. Most of the work that was produced, including Arp's, was abstract and incredibly unconventional.

"Dada is the groundwork to abstract art and sound poetry, a starting point for performance art, a prelude to postmodernism, an influence on pop art, a celebration of antiart to be later embraced for anarcho-political uses in the 1960s and the movement that lay the foundation for Surrealism."

"Metamorphosis (Shell-Swan-Balance-You)" 1935, Private Collection

Arp was one of many during his time who dealt with automatism, which the Artbook describes as "experimental activities, such as nonsense poetry and spontaneous drawing." Another definition: "the performance of actions without conscious thought or decision." This style of producing art, especially circa 1920, is often considered in opposition to the meaning of "art" itself. Creation with intention falls at the centerfold of artistic purpose for many, yet for Dada "artistic purpose" was exactly what they wanted to get away from. The automatism style is highly prevalent in Arp's work. Just from the title- Metamorphosis (Shell-Swan-Balance-You)- a level of spontaneity and disorder can be detected. The piece itself seems to be in a state of transition, birthing a spherical form from within its angular infrastructure. The bronze is smoothed to a fine, sensuous finish. In my opinion, many interpretations can be drawn here, but overall the meaning seems to be irrelevant, almost arbitrary to the aesthetic achievement of the piece. A true Dada work.

I found a lot of Arp's painting, printmaking, and collage really fascinating. Creating art without purpose, drawing or producing while removing ego and filter, has a level of difficulty unmatched. Arp triumphed with original, groundbreaking pieces for his era. I really like the way MoMA chooses to describe the role he played for avant-garde art- "...it was through his investigation of biomorphism and of chance and accident that he proved especially influential on later 20th century art in liberating unconscious creative forces."

"Untitled (Squares Arranged According to the Laws of Chance)" 1916-17, MoMA

"Automatic Drawing" 1917-18, MoMA

"Enak's Tears (Terrestrial Forms)" 1917, MoMA

"Evocation of a Form, Human, Lunar, Spectral" 1950, Hirshhorn

Arp continued to create work until his death at the age of 80 in 1966. The latter portion of his life he devoted to writing and poetry, though produced some works, like a commissioned relief sculpture at Harvard in 1954. He is still very well recognized as a momentous creator of the 20th century.

ARMAN

"I did not find accumulation, accumulation found me"

Armand Pierre Fernandez was born in Nice in 1928. With an artistic father, Fernandez was directed towards painting at an early age. He attended the Ecole Nationale d'Art Decoratif in Nice, as well as the Ecole de Louvre in Paris. Inspired by Van Gogh's signature of "Vincent" on his paintings, Fernandez began going by Armand, but soon changed his name to "Arman" following a printing error in 1958. Arman became a US citizen in 1972 after years of spending time in New York, and lives and works there today. He has worked closely with Yves Klein, a friend he met at a Judo school in Nice, as well as Andy Warhol. Joined by Klein and a number of other nameable artists, Arman is part of the Nouveau Realisme group formed in Paris whose work is concerned mostly with implications of industrial expansion and consumerist society.

"Boom Boom" 1966

Arman started his artistic career developing abstract image-making and carried this out into the late 50s. However, this is not what most know him for. Toward the end of this decade, Arman began to take a strong lean towards Dadaist techniques influenced by Duchamp's work. This is when he began exhibiting his Accumulations, art pieces dedicated to the collection and exhibition of replicated objects.

"I Still Use Brushes" 1969 (I could not find Crusaders online, this is very similar and held at MoMA)

Chosen by the Artbook, Crusaders is a 48" x 48" canvas filled with glued-on paintbrushes. As assumed from the title, this army of stacked brushes takes on a mission of its own, tying in themes of mass production. "...paint brushes are attached to the canvas in almost military formation, their silver-coloured handles and black bristles forming an abstract design." Arman created many other pieces in which the tools of creation are the main feature, eliminating the dynamic of creator and creation. More pieces with this theme are shown below.

"Click, Clack" 1976

"The Big Sax" 1976

Arman also highly publicized a 20th century society of waste and destruction. He did a number of assemblages of trash, such as Full-Up (1960, MoMA) shown below. "Arman's assemblages of accumulated objects reflect our throwaway society, offering a fetishistic portrait of how we live and document our lives." Arman's work groups unexceptional objects of a consumerist culture, puts them on display, and forms an immense statement about the character of the society we live and take pride in.

"Full Up" 1960, MoMA

"Homage a Pablo" 1998

"Summer Time," 1992

It is difficult to relay the variety and amount of accumulations Arman has completed within his lifetime. If you are interested in Arman, I highly recommend you check out his website, complete with his oeuvre and a great introductory video that shows him working on one of his pieces.

Last but not least, my favorite work of his is entitled Long Term Parking and displays 60 cars stacked in concrete. It is currently held on permanent display in France at Jouy-en-Josas. Enjoy!

"Long Term Parking" 1982

AVIGDOR ARIKHA

Avigdor Arikha, born 1929 in Romania, is a Jewish artist currently living in Paris. In the 40s, Arikha was deported to a concentration camp with his parents, where his father died. Arikha survived due to his artistic skill, and was eventually relocated to Israel. He stayed there for a while, attending school at the Bezalel School of Art. He moved to Paris in 1949 upon reception of a scholarship to the Ecole de Beaux Arts, where he stayed for the rest of his life. Not only is his background unusual, but his artistic career follows an interesting path as well. He is the first artist I have seen to embrace abstract art and later reject it. After WWII, Arikha began schooling under Bauhaus influence. However, after a short time period, he decided abstraction insufficient for his purposes, and spent eight years producing prints and drawings. According to the artbook, this was largely inspired by a Caravaggio show he saw in 1965. In 1973, he picked up painting again and continued throughout his life time. He has been commissioned to do a number of portraits, including the Queen Mother. 

Interestingly enough, the artbook chose to depict a painting entitled "Sam's Spoon." Shown above, this painting is a tribute to Arikha's friend Samuel Beckett, and the painting was done on the one year anniversary of his death. Beckett's spirit and memory seems to be captured in this individually presented spoon, laid carefully on a creased napkin. Completed in 1990, this piece is currently held in private collection.

I chose to include pieces from relatively every era of Arikha's life. It is really fascinating to watch the way his style and focus shift, especially related to the recession from abstract to representational art. 

"Haute Rouge I," 1961- still in his abstraction period

"Self-portrait with Open Mouth," 1973

"The Square in June," 1983

"Ludovic Kennedy and Moira Shearer," 1993 

"Head and Shoulders," 1999

ALEKSANDER ARCHIPENKO

Aleksander Archipenko (1887-1964) was born in Kiev, Ukraine. He attended the Kiev Art School as well as participating in an artist's colony in Paris, and eventually established his own art school in Kiev. He came to the US in 1923, and remained there for the rest of his life. Archipenko was a sculptor, grouped under the "cubist" movement. Many of his pieces consist of multiple media, and part of what makes his sculptures so interesting is his use of negative space and concavity.

One of his most famous pieces, "Woman Combing Her Hair" (1915) resides at MoMA. This piece is one of the best examples of his concavity utilized in full effect. The woman's face only exists as negative space, carved out of her hair. One of her breasts and both thighs are sculpted inward, as well as her shins. As MoMA notes,  "protruding elements seems to recede and internal features to advance," resulting in a truly unique method of representation.

"Seated Female Nude" 1909-1911, The Hirshhorn

Archipenko began using mixed media in what eventually became known as "sculpto-painting." For the most part, he used clay and wood and then painted on top in acrylic. Below are some examples found at MoMA and The Guggenheim. 

"Madonna of the Rocks," 1912

"Carrousel Pierrot," 1913

KAREL APPEL

Christiaan Karel Appel, born 1921 in Amsterdam, was a founding member of the aforementioned group CoBrA. Appel took a liking to painting around the age of 15, and has since produced works found in most major museums throughout the world.  Appel's style is thick, colorful brushtrokes, exhibiting vibrant and emotional qualities. His paintings are a bridge between abstraction and figurative work, with themes of intuition versus reason, child-like freedom and unrepressed expression. The Artbook notes that Appel created works "demonstrating that energy and spontaneity were more important than rationality and design."

"Hip Hip Hoorah," 1949, is located at the Tate Gallery in London. This was the piece chosen by the Artbook and is quite representative of the type of work that the CoBrA group was looking to do. On the Tate's website, they quote Appel as having described his piece in these terms: "...the more human figures as male (far left) and female (centre). The creature with two heads (top right) displays both human and bird attributes and the fourth figure (bottom right) is ‘inbetween a woman with a breast and an animal’. For Appel the black background signified ‘the black of night’ and the creatures were ‘people of the night’. "

I found this piece quite interesting, as well. Entitled "Energy," this piece was completed in 1950 and is held at the Hirshhorn. I found the medium really intriguing- "gouache and paper and plastic collage on paper mounted to canvas." The multimedia elements and incorporation of words into this piece make it quite experimental and unusual for the time. Out of all that I've seen, I think this piece looks ahead the most. A very avant-garde approach for Appel.

The pieces below are all from MoMA, and I chose to include them because I think there's a strong connection in each to the work that Alechinsky was producing. Here a connection can be drawn in terms of the influence of style and approach the CoBrA members had one one another.

"Front cover from Appel, Frie Kunstnere Volume 3"

"Toi at Moi," 1963

"With Two Brushes (A Deux Pinceaux)," 1978

Appel died in 2006, but is still quite present in the art world. The Karel Appel Foundation, established before his death, works still to preserve his artwork and purpose. 

CARL ANDRE

Carl Andre was born in 1935 in Massachusetts. Artist, writer, and activist, Andre lived an exceptional life in New York City. Andre attended the Phillips Academy, where he met Frank Stella. Along with Brancusi, Stella was a great influence on Andre's early sculptures. Andre's sculptures are considered "Minimalist" works, a branch of art concerned with "simple, massive forms." 

In 1965, Andre began working for a railway company. This blue collar working experience had a large impact on his sculptures, especially in terms of subject and medium. Andre interworked his experiences with hard labor and man-made simple structures into his art. ‘The railway completely tore me away from the pretensions of art, even my own, and I was back on the horizontal lines of steel and rust and great masses of coal and material, timber, with all kinds of hides and glue and the burdens and weights of the cars themselves’

Andre's sculptures have received quite a bit of criticism. The Equivalent VIII (above) has been particularly a subject of controversy. This piece is part of a series of eight sculptures made out of 120 "equivalent" bricks; though overall composition may be different, they are all derived from the same earthly material, each individual component has the same shape and weight, and there are the same amount of bricks in each piece. The Tate acquired this piece in 1972, which sparked the age-old, circuitous argument concerning the essence of art, what can be considered art and what can't. The taxpayers found this sculpture too simple, too common to be art. I think therein lies Andre's genius, however. In this piece, the line between art and life is blurred, where the physical reality is art, with underlying components of hard labor, human struggle, and simple, straightforward production of work. 

Below are some other images of his work. Tree Bones, 1974, was chosen by the Artbook.

"144 Graphite Silence," 2005

"Tree Bones"

"Black White Carbon Tin," 2004

Andre also produced a number of poems from 1960-65, gathered together in a book called 12 Dialogues. This book is rare, and very expensive. 

(apparently he is the one in the center with the giant beard)

Carl Andre, as mentioned earlier, was also an activist and helped to found the Art Workers' Coalition (AWC). Some of his greatest accomplishments with the AWC revolved around museum work- getting the museums to hold more liberal shows, catering more to the public and to the struggling artists as opposed to the wealthy sector. Andre even helped to establish the once a week free museum nights, still held at MoMA and other museums in New York.

Andre is now living and working in New York, and is represented by the Paula Cooper Gallery.

PIERRE ALECHINSKY

Pierre Alechinsky born in 1927 in Brussels, is one of the leading European artists in abstract expressionism. Alechinsky attended art school and went on to form the Cobra group along with Karel Appel, Christian Dotremont, Asger Jorn, and others. Cobra, an acronym derived from the first letters of the member's home cities (Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam), was short-lived but a had a huge impact on the art world. The group focused their efforts on reverting to child-like abstraction, with "strong, almost violent brushstrokes" and a bright color palette. The group disbanded in 1952 upon the departure of Dotremont to the US. Alechinsky continued to make work in this style, and collaborated with members of the group for years on after. Most of Alechinsky's pieces are in oil or acrylic paint or prints; he was highly influenced by Japanese calligraphy and has a good amount of work done in Indian ink. Alechinksy's media are quite reminiscent of Pollock. His works are abstract, though they appear to be a bit more illustrative than the average abstract expressionist.

(I apologize for this terrible reproduction, will upload a better one soon)

"The Large Transparent Things," chosen by the Artbook, seems to be possibly an obscure choice, as it was impossible to find online and is held in a private collection. Even so, this is an excellent portrayal of the type of abstraction that was going on in the 50s. Akin to many of the pieces of the era, "The Large Transparent Things" is an uninhibited expression of the subconscious. As the Artbook says, this piece seeks "freedom from the constraints of reason," and is a great example of what Cobra was striving for.

Below are also a few paintings and prints I found that I really like. Though they all could be grouped under "abstract expressionism," these pieces  show the variety of subject and style in his work. Alechinsky also created a film, "Calligraphie Japonaise," which I unfortunately could not find online. 

"Untitled"

"Plate II"

"Untitled"

"Bag of Lines"

JOSEF ALBERS

I am proud to present today's artist, Josef Albers, one of the most influential and accomplished artists of the 20th century. Albers, born in Germany in 1888, immigrated to the United States when the Nazi regime closed down the Bauhaus. He taught at a number of universities, with students who later shaped modern art (Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenburg, Eva Hesse). Albers' was a painter and printer, and most of his paintings involve blocks of color that interplay with one another, creating illusionary effects to the mind's eye. He studied color theory quite thoroughly, eventually publishing a book entitled Interaction of Color. His theory is now widely accepted and taught throughout the world. Albers died in 1976, at the age of 88. 

Interaction of Color

Yale University Press: "[Interaction of Color] presents a significantly expanded selection of more than thirty color studies alongside Albers’s original unabridged text, demonstrating such principles as color relativity, intensity, and temperature; vibrating and vanishing boundaries; and the illusions of transparency and reversed grounds."

Homage to the Square

Albers' "Homage to the Square" series consists of three overlapping squares of different colors aimed to play with the viewer's visual perception. The Artbook chose to list one of his studies for this series. I found the video below, which I think beautifully explains what Albers' is striving to achieve- the vibrating effect of the squares' edges, the appearance of interaction between the squares, and the variation in effect that each color produces. 

Josef Albers was a visionary, to say the least. His extensive impact on the art world is immeasurable.