Art & Language

Art & Language is an English conceptual artists' collaboration created around 1967. The name Art & Language is derived from the journal Art-Language, which had its origins in the work of Terry Atkinson and Michael Baldwin in association with Harold Hurrell and David Bainbridge. These were its original editors. Art & Language was used subsequently to identify the joint and several artistic works of these four in an effort to reflect the conversational basis of their activity, which, by late 1969, had already included contributions from New York by Joseph Kosuth, Ian Burn and Mel Ramsden. By late 1976 "the genealogical thread of this artistic work had been taken into the hands of Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden, with whom it remains." The facts of who did what, how much they contributed and so on are more or less well known. The (small) degree of anonymity that the name originally conferred continues, however, to be of historical significance.