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Art & Language and the Institutional Form 83
above, consisted of what the group called “smart essay writing”—smartness,
given the school system’s tendency to favor the hand over the head, the studio
over the study, having acquired the stamp of resistance in relation to the
values of the prevailing educational institutions. 13
In the early 1970s, with participation in the group swelling (and
Baldwin cut off from employment at Coventry College of Art), Art & Language
embarked on a series of groundbreaking projects: the indexes. This
series of projects reXected the group’s increasingly complicated and autonomous
character—equivalent, according to the deWnition advanced above,
to its increasingly institutional character. With the Wrst such project, Index 01
of 1972, Art & Language also entered its most self-reXexive period. Sometimes
called Documenta Index after its Wrst exhibition venue (“Documenta
5” in Kassel, Germany), this work was housed in Wling cabinets that resembled
library card catalogs. It consisted of a series of propositions, drawn from
the Art-Language journal and other sources, together with wall diagrams showing
how the propositions connected (whether they were compatible, incompatible,
or had no relation to one another). Harrison observes that the work
“dramatized the internal ideological and other conXicts in the group” and
further that it “dramatized the social nature of thinking.” 14 In effect, Index
01 was a way of exhibiting the agreements and disagreements among selected
propositions and beliefs held in the group, and in that way it depicted and
thematized the group’s social or institutional structure. Though a discrete
object, made for exhibition and possibly even sale, it was signiWcantly different
from most physical art objects in that it was not merely intended for
beholding or contemplation. Instead, what was essential to Index 01 was its
documentary and functional qualities, and key to this functioning was the
alternative form of sociality and learning that the index reXected in the
group. 15 This was a form of sociality that, like the use of the project itself, was
permeable from the outside and based on participation rather than membership.
Because of its open, dialogic structure, Index 01 allowed the provisional
and problematic features of the group’s sociality to remain at the forefront. 16
The index model became a pattern for the group’s projects over
the next few years. A subsequent series of indexes grew out of the Annotations
project created from January to July of 1973. During that time, a group
of eight participants met weekly in New York City and produced brief texts
that commented on statements made in the previous week’s meeting. In
Britain, this material inspired the intractably complex Index 002 Bxal—which
some Art & Language participants claimed never to have understood—while
in New York, a group led by Michael Corris and Mel Ramsden developed
the more open but no less sophisticated structure that resulted in the Blurting
in Art & Language booklet. Hypertext avant la lettre, this booklet logged