ART & LANGUAGE IN RESISTANCE

Conversation with Catherine Millet

Conceptual art was one of the movements that artpress endeavoured to make known in the 1970s, which was not without certain lexical difficulties. In the decades that followed, we remained attentive to the development of some of its representatives, including the most radical, such as Jan Dibbets and Art & Language. This group in particular, which now consists of only two members, Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden, has often baffled audiences by presenting landscape paintings or ones with erotic content, popping up in unexpected places. This was the next stage in a critical undertaking, whose humour was not the least of its tools. How could we fail to interview them as we look back over the past half century, whilst keeping a close eye on the current world and the traps of its many “bad places”? The most important collection of Art & Language works is held at the Château-Musée de Montsoreau, directed by Philippe Méaille. Over the course of our electronic table tennis, he proved to be an excellent ball-runner.

May he be thanked.

Catherine Millet A BAD PLACE which we were able to offer a version to our readers during the pandemic (1)—thanks to you and Philippe Méaille—is a good starting point. For me, it was pertinent to display it on the wall of my office: it is so difficult to keep alive a magazine like artpress today! Under what circumstances and why did you present A BAD PLACE for the first time?

Art & Language The three words first appeared in 2018 on one of the ten prints in an edition.The edition re-describes or reconfigures the Ten Posters, Illustrations for Art-Language of 1977. They appear slightly later in a large work (252 x 710 cm) composed of 144 pages of text (some of our ’theoretical’ writings) over which A BAD PLACE was inscribed in letters more than a metre high. This was first shown in Berlin in 2019.

CM The last article we published on your work, Art & Language and the Damage Done, by Jean-Philippe Peynot (2), in 2016, ended with a quote from you. You suggested, about “the social and economic developments of the last thirty years” that it was a “damage done to [you]” and perhaps “a general horror”. Is A BAD PLACE a response to this “general horror”?