2005: The notes in question are taken from Talking to Michael Baldwin: an incomplete index, which is an artwork of sorts, made in 1973 and now in a private collection in France. Art & Language's Index 01 had been exhibited at 'Documenta 5' in 1972, and the indexing project continued and developed within an enlarged Art & Language community over the next two years, both in England and in New York. The notes are introduced by a statement that was written in 1975, when the materials that comprised Talking to Michael Baldwin were displayed in an exhibition of work by staff at Watford School of Art in England. I was employed there at the time as a teacher of art history. 

 

 

1975:

About 2-3 years ago there was a lot of talk among the members of Art & Language on the question of what constituted membership. How did someone come to be identified (internally) as a "member" of the Art & Language community? The answer seemed to be that he or she had had something to contribute to Art & Language conversations; this of course meant that we then had to consider the nature of those conversations; or rather, perhaps, that we found ourselves in a position to consider those conversations themselves as aspects of (our) nature – i.e. as a major feature of the structure of our world. This may seem circular, but it is in line with recent work in philosophy (including the philosophy of science) and in linguistics; i.e. in line with the principle that any study or practice must at some point involve an examination of those shared assumptions of meaning which lead to the identification of an area of study or practice as such in the first place, and that such an examination will itself inevitably involve research into the distinctive features of language-use among those contributing to the study or practice. (This goes for art too of course.)

 

We thus turned – not as self-consciously as it might seem in retrospect – to the study of our own written and spoken conversations. Someone referred to this process as a "logical implosion"; the phrase is a bit misleading unless you consider that implosion necessarily involves the drawing-in of matter and energy from surrounding space.

 

At about the same time I was faced with my own inability, as a self-employed freischwebende Intelligenz on modern-art matters, to make ends meet without surrendering the right to choose my friends. I found what I thought might be the means to kill three birds with one stone: I would produce a series of artworks. These would involve active participation in, and would provide further stimulus to, the conversation within the Art & Language community; they would provide an incentive – or a directive – to purposeful work (reading etc.) which would counter the incentives provided by the kinds of work I could more easily get paid for (writing and teaching art history etc.); and they might earn me some money through their sales as "artworks". It seemed to matter at the time that in attempting to earn money in this way I would be placing myself in the same circumstances as many of the closest of my friends.

 

The project was as follows. I would talk to the other members of Art & Language, one by one, tape-recording these conversations. Each conversation – or that part of each conversation which seemed best to exemplify the nature of our conversation in general – would be transcribed, and would then be annotated. The annotations might be short and explanatory (though I felt no obligation to explain all that might seem in need of explanation), or they might serve at more length to illustrate my own thinking and reading around any point raised in the conversation. The conversations were thus to be surrounded by a network of points of reference which I hoped would serve to locate them in some sort of ideological space. The complete set of annotated conversations, or collages, would be set out on pinboards and would, I hoped, provide a picture of the interests of the group and of its ways of going on. (At least a dozen individuals were eligible for consideration as members of Art & Language at the time.)

 

Of course the project was ludicrously ambitious. I managed two recorded conversations, and worked on only the first of these – that with Michael Baldwin. Of some four hours recorded with him during a long and bibulous night in April 1973, I transcribed in all about thirty minutes. I then edited this down to provide a coherent typescript of some twelve pages. These pages occupied the top of a 4 x 8 foot pinboard in my study for the next several months. I read to pick up Michael's references and to follow my own interests and where appropriate made notes or whatever on the pinboard, which eventually became covered with pieces of paper. In the process I demonstrated to myself a truth which was already becoming clear from some more corporate A & L work: that a conversation between any two individuals or within any community is like a universe, and that its points of reference are literally inexhaustible. You can go as deep as you like and not touch bottom and as far out as you like and find no edge. As Michael said at the time to a Swiss banker: It is a mystery far more mysterious than ghosts that we are capable of talking to each other. 

 

I never "finished" one of my artworks – indeed I never really skimmed the surface – but I learned a lot from the enterprise. It strengthened my conviction of the complexity of all pictures, and of the need for careful examination of strategies for explaining or describing them; and it taught me that we do not produce reflections of reality – we do not produce "form" – as the inevitable result of a mere exercise of will; our reflections of reality – our conversations, pictures, artworks etc. – are essentially provisional and strategic. We can't reify our experiences or our beliefs (we can't make objects of them); but we can learn about them.

 

2005: What follows are some of the notes and excerpts that found their way onto the pinboard in 1973. They are among the materials that were included, along with a typed transcript of the conversation that provoked them, in the file that composes Talking to Michael Baldwin: an incomplete index.

 

1973:

'How does one elect and how is one elected to membership in a particular community, scientific or not? What is the process and what are the stages of socialisation to the group? What does the group collectively see as its goals; what deviations, individual or collective, will it tolerate; and how does it control the impermissible aberration? A fuller understanding of science will depend on answers to other questions as well, but there is no area in which more work is so badly needed. Scientific knowledge, like language, is intrinsically the common property of a group or else nothing at all. To understand it we shall need to know the special characteristics of the groups that create and use it.' - Thomas Kuhn [from 'Postscript 1969' to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions].

 

The members of a community: fellow subjects in a kingdom of oughts. MB: 'You say to yourself, "Ah well, I don't really belong to that", and then you say, "... in saying that, I belong to another."

Ideological revision: the realisation that one's sense of belonging is merely a sense of belonging.

 

To what does the statement, "I do not belong" commit the speaker? To what does it commit the hearer? If TA says, "Fuck off, I can't go on", to what does this commit MB? If I say, "I don't understand", to what does that commit the hearer? If I say, "I don't belong", in what circumstances is that an equivalent statement? What relationships of entailment obtain between the three sentences ("I don't belong", "I can't go on", "I don't understand")? Is there anything else worth worrying about? Cf Tillich's possibilities of non-being: 'ultimate condemnation', 'ultimate annihilation in death', 'ultimate meaninglessness'.

 

Kierkegaard: 'In all serious business, the law of either-or prevails. Either I am the man whose serious business this is, I am called to it and am willing to take a decisive risk; or, if this be not the case, then the seriousness of the business demands that I do not meddle with it at all.'

 

MB: 'If we weren't mystified by the situations in which we're normally socially dismissed, we wouldn't have this situation in which we talk about the exoticness of the community. If the community was not that which ultimately consumed and concerned us, then it would be something which was dependent on the non-logical reverberations of the academic studies we engaged in; and I don't think it's that. There's a tyranny of somebody finding a deductive rule for Art & Language. It's a fucking tyranny.'

 

On modal categories (homework):

Alethic – predications of propositions (necessary, possible, contingent, impossible); descriptive of states of affairs.

Existential – properties of classes (universal, existing, partial, empty); descriptive of a world.

Epistemic – values of propositions (verified, unfalsified, undecided, falsified); descriptive of a context of knowledge.

Deontic – conditions of acts (obligatory, permitted, indifferent, forbidden); descriptive of an ethic.

 

That which is

necessary/universal/verified/obligatory

is also

possible/existing/unfalsified/permitted.

That which is

possible/existing/unfalsified/permitted

is not also

impossible/empty/falsified/forbidden.

That which is

contingent/partial/undecided/indifferent

is neither

necessary/universal/verified/obligatory

nor

impossible/empty/falsified/forbidden.

 

'Given a social group with an empirically specified normative structure, von Wright's logic would clearly facilitate the analysis of relations among the norms. However, these relations by no means exhaust the interesting and important aspects of normative systems. Two crucial aspects of such systems are the following. (1) There is a need for a method of relating norms to the system of social sanctions or penalties that support them. (2) It is important to relate both norms and sanctions to possibilities for action.' – Copi, Contemporary Readings in Logical Theory.

 

Our problems are not objects of contemplation or puzzles to be solved. They are conditions of our lives. Our mode is not methodological (alethic/epistemic). It is subjective (existential/deontic).

 

JK's decision to take the romance out of his art and put it into his life commits him to methodolatry. Given that his art was going to be outrageous anyway it might just as well have been outrageously romantic. As it is, the problem-world of his art neither touches nor is touched by (his) existential problems or the problems of modal logic.

 

Beckett: I speak of an art... weary of puny exploits, weary of pretending to be able, of being able, of doing a little better the same old thing, of going a little further along a dreary road.

Duthuit: And preferring what?

Beckett: The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express. (From 'Three Discourses')

 

Logical geography functions to rule certain assertions out of bounds. What would happen if we started doing that to each other? Chaos? 'Is there a conversation we would regard as abnormal?' The hell with rigorous Art-Languagism, analyticity, good typography, kangaroo courts, 'Art after Philosophy', Carnap, Language Truth and Logic.

 

To what extent are our ways of thinking modified by actions observed rather than ideas understood? What's the difference anyway?

 

I can't get anywhere with the concept of an observer; e.g. myself as an observer of my own actions/speculations.

 

'Art is what we do. Culture is what is done to us' – Carl Andre. Art as the wage-slave's night out? Bullshit.

 

Learning: the growth of semantic associations around a concept? i.e. not simple 'under-standing'.

 

True in experience. True to experience. Are these truths in different worlds?

 

The notion of deep structure does not offer any solutions to the problem of the indexicality of surface structure; if you filled out all the information implied by the usages in your surface structure you might find that any deep structures mappable from that information were topographically pretty odd – four-dimensional as it were. When you come to think of it, the whole idea of a lexicon of a conversation is in itself a bit mad-scientist-like. I suppose one could deal with it by being very simple-minded; in which case your 'ethnography of the culture' might have to be odd, like a child's drawing of a tree – all lumps and excrescences. And that's without worrying about pragmatics – 'situations' of speakers, utterances etc. And how would one cope with the occurrence of reflexivity within a given fragment/discourse?

 

'At least we realise that we hesitate to cause pain...because we believe that the pain of others resembles our own. At least that.'

 

There is nothing I can do – no activity upon which I can engage – in order to present the different strands of my existence as the different strands of one existence. Is this the same as saying there can be no 'dimension of all-one's-discourse'? No 'art in everyone'? No art in anyone?

 

 

Charles Harrison has been associated with Art & Language since 1971. The practice expanded and contracted in the years after 1968, when it was first given a name, but since 1977 the artistic work of Art & Language has remained in the hands of Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden alone, with whom Harrison collaborates on literary and theoretical projects.  Among his publications are Essays on Art & Language, Conceptual Art and Painting: Further Essays on Art & Language and Painting the Difference: Sex and Spectator in Modern Art. He is co-editor of the 3 volumes of Art in Theory : 1648-1815, 1815-1900 and 1900-2000. He is Professor of the History and Theory of Art at the Open University in the UK.  Art & Language's most recent solo exhibitions have been at Lisson Gallery, London, ZKM Karlsruhe, and Grita Insam Gallery, Vienna.