Art & Language

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Art & Language is a group of conceptual artists who have produced collaborative work under this name since the late 1960s.

The name Art & Language was first used in 1968 by the British artists Terry Atkinson, David Bainbridge, Michael Baldwin and Harold Hurrell, who had been collaborating on works since around 1966, and who were at that time teaching art in Coventry. Their early work, as well as their journal Art-Language which first appeared in 1969, is regarded as an important influence on much conceptual art both in the United Kingdom and in the United States.

In the early 1970s Ian Burn, Michael Corris, Charles Harrison, Preston Heller, Graham Howard, Joseph Kosuth, Andrew Menard, Mel Ramsden, Terry Smith and from Coventry Philip Pilkington and David Rushton joined the group and worked under its name. Art & Language produced a good deal of art as well as theoretical writings, though by the end of the 1970s the group was essentially reduced to Baldwin, Harrison and Ramsden as the political analysis that developed within the group resulted in many members leaving to work in more activist political occupations. Ian Burn and Terry Smith returned to Australia where they joined forces with Ian Milliss, a conceptual artist who had begun working with trade unions in the early 1970s, to set up Union Media Services, a design studio specialising in social marketing and community and trade union based art initiatives. Karl Beveridge and Carol Conde who had been peripheral members in New York, returned to Canada where they also began to work with trade unions and community groups. Other UK members drifted off into a variety of creative, academic and sometimes "politicised" occupations.

The Art & Language group that exhibited in the international Documenta exhibitions of 1972 included Atkinson, Bainbridge, Baldwin, Hurrell, Pilkington and Rushton and the then America editor of Art-Language Joseph Kosuth. In 1986, the remnants of the group were nominated for the Turner Prize.