Art & Language in Practice

The major work by Art & Language Index: Wrongs Healed in Official Hope, was made with this exhibition specifically in mind and was completed during the present year. The exhibition also contained several smaller pieces of recent work – chair-like objects composed from painted panels – which have been developed from Art & Language’s installation at Documenta X.

In the insecure ground between painting, text and domestic furniture, Art & Language discovers a possible area for cultural subversion. This is not simply an exhibition of new work, however.

One entire wall of the Fundació Antoni Tàpies was devoted to an installation of more than sixty works drawn from the activity of four decades. While these might provide the materials for a conventional retrospective, the normal principles of chronological organisation were deliberately displaced. The viewer was faced with an almost unbroken but highly differentiated surface – and left free to find pathways through the material, to forge types of relationship between its disparate parts, or to work for a characterisation of the whole.

Besides the works installed in the galleries, the production of Art & Language was represented at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies by a collection of archive material, by publications in the library, by a programme of TV and video programmes, by recordings of songs, and in a theory-installation by the Jackson Pollock Bar (the physical evidence of which is a painting made by actors according to the stage directions contained in an Art & Language text).