categorized art collection

Art & Language, Index series, image titles listed from top to bottom: “Index 001” (1972, installation view); “Index 01” (1972, installation view); “Study for Index 003 Bxal” (1973); “Study for Index 002 Bxal” (1973): Art & Language is a conceptual art collective formed in the UK in the 1960s, including figures such as: Terry Atkinson, David Bainbridge, Michael Baldwin, Harold Hurrell, Charles Harrison, Mel Ramsden, Ian Burn, Michael Corris, Preston Heller, Graham Howard, Joseph Kosuth, Andrew Menard, Terry Smith, Pilkington and David Rushton. Many of the members began their careers as critics and journalists, and their earlier work consisted primarily of essays, transcripts of conversations, and mathematical notations. When given the opportunity to showcase their work for Documenta 5 in 1972, the group turned to installation as a physical manifestation of their projects. Hence emerged their Index series, in which they amassed their entire output of texts and stored them in filing cabinets, sorted by index. “Texts were given “markers” (tags) and indexes of the relationships between each text’s tags were produced in print or on microfilm. Mainframe computer time was used to create the index for Index 04, although reports differ on which computer was used and whether the index was in fact random or not.” (Rob Meyers) Though many of the artists would probably deny the accusation, these works display an undeniably formal aesthetic in their installation form, particularly in semblance of an organized structure and the repetition of forms that we find in austere minimalist works like those of Donald Judd. There’s also a sublime factor to them, in the sheer overwhelming presentation of data and the reduction of art discourse to an empirical abstraction. Critics often accuse Art & Language of remaining dogmatic, insular, and deliberately obscure, preferring to remain shrouded in esoteric elitism rather than genuinely engage the audience in open-ended discourse (example). While I think this is a valid complaint, I wouldn’t use it to discredit their entire enterprise, which has produced a prolific and eclectic output of interesting works, some more worthy of discussion than others. This Index series in particular serves as an interesting harbinger to the cataloging of art as data in the age of the Internet, and it’s especially telling now that we find an online archive of their documents.