Art & language
Brians Sewells words

Art and language was once a cooperative enterprise of as many as thirty artists and theorists, but it is now reduced to two, Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden, Midlanders in their mid-forties. From earlier discussions it emerged in 1968 as a press that in 1969 first published its journal Art-Language. As far as one can tell, so convoluted is the language and so minimal the art, Marxist ingenuities he at its foundations, and its functions were and are to question and subvert the established patterns not only of art, but of art history and the art market, of museums and galleries, and of aesthetics and criticism - no bad thing, one might suppose, and even agree, were one able to understand their arguments. Their basic premise (I think) is that all visual art is conceptually dependent on language. The book accompanying their current exhibition at the Instituteof Contemporary Arts is evidence of fine practice in the art ofprint . ting - the type face is the classically handsome Times Roman,the paper substantial, the layout elegant - but the language of thelimp volume is largely inscrutable and I have scant idea of whatmuch of it means. I sense that Baldwin and Ramsden tell me whatto think and that I must decide nothing for myself- but perhaps thatis the way of Marxists? As with many a left-wing tract thevocabulary is the weapon of thought suppression, the cosh, thewhip and the water-cannon that converts lively intellectual ex-change into the chanted statements of Animal Farm. )What are we tomake of the 'art of pseudo rigour' and 'the universality ofpseudomorphisms'? - of 'malapropisation' and 'perlocutionary'?- of 'individuated iconicity' and 'the Boojum word'? For thislast I turned to Edward Lear's Wurbl Inwentions, but found nothingbetween blomphious (which means absquoxiously) and the oddlyapposite boshblobberbosh (particularly foolish foolishness). If notLear's invention, then Boojum must be Lewis Carroll's - and so it is, as a species of Snark, of which the hunters 'softly and silently varnish away'. Is Art and Language then an elaborate joke? Have we been seduced into high seriousness over a childish nonsense while our seducers slip away to wank behind the cricket pavilion?The cricket pavilion looms large in many of the paintings offered us by Mike and Mel. These are views of poplars on the boundary of a pitch, each with a broad sector in plain colour that began as the verandah post of the pavilion; it acts as a formal device to establish foreground and distance, and is at the same time a necessary reminder that Baldwin and Ramsden are utterly modem painters, for the poplars, seen at different times of day and different seasons of the year, might otherwise seem only crude imitations of the series paintings of Monet and Mondrian. It is intriguing that they should at once refer to the most popular of the Impressionists and the most and of early abstract painters - another little joke, perhaps? Over these paintings is drawn a grid, and enhancing the graph paper impression are outlines that seem to resemble the ground plans of large buildings, but which are, in fact, outlines of the letters SURF, often confused by changes of style and size.SURF is the Boojum word; according to Baldwin at a point when he is concerned with the material nature of what he himself engagingly describes as 'the mess under the glass', he confesses that 'Surf is an abbreviation, conceivably, for surface. It's also an abbreviation for nothing.' I am tempted to suggest surfeit instead, for one can have too much of this foolishness, and nothing comes of nothing.Many of the paintings have been deliberately spoiled, for the literal representation of landscape is not the objective of Mike and Mel, and they do not want to make an icon of poplar or pavilion; they are more concerned with the paint itself as the icon. They have in the past even attempted portraiture in the abstract expressionist style, which means much paint and little in the way of eyes and noses, but in these latest works they assert the nature of the paint by squashing their landscapes under a 'shiny unregenerate slab of glass' to which more paint has been generously applied like half smeared blobs of butter in a sandwich; the effect, combining elements of die Rorschach test and the palimpsest, rhubarb and custard, mustard and ketchup, all oozing and melding as the glass weighs down on it, is remarkably unpleasant. Mike and Mel are quite right to take such risks if they consider the taking to be a work of art, a happening of sorts, an action painting at a remove perhaps, but the rest of us must be allowed to reject these glazed sandwiches as an art form, preferring the conventional painting of Titian and Michelangelo, whom Mel and Mike, in their display of intellectual cacafuego dismiss as comedians.On other works they impose narrow strips cut from paintings of different subjects, much like the abstract affectations of wretched art students who contrive to enliven the dull vastness of an eight foot canvas with a little shock here and there - the art of the cattle prod (imagine Turner's Rain, Steam and Speed bandaged with bits of Dido building Carthage). Sometimes, although Baldwin argues that 'You cannot read and look at a scene simultaneously. Your attention is split', this is precisely what they attempt, but they only prove his point when they superimpose printed statements on their paintings; at worst the images are obscured and the messages confused; at best the message is victorious, and in its pretence of portent convinces us that Mike and Mel are more skilled in the manipulation of language than in any practice that might be described as art.Art and Language deserve an amused footnote in the history of conceptual art, but as writers, not as artists, for theirs is an intellectual juggling worthy of French art criticism - that indulgent literary form that allows the scribbler an ostentatious display of sensibility, letting him conjure the ghost of Baudelaire, plunge deep into the obscurities of Wittgenstein (whom we now know to have been mad), and be Marxist, Catholic, whimsically poetic and quite untranslateable all at the same time - indeed many of die Delphic utterances of Mike and Mel read as though they might well be poor translations from the French. The trouble with this sort of bosh is that the intellectually insecure want to believe it and find refuge in it, and too many curators feel they ought to have representative examples in their cure, so that willy-nilly it becomes established,