Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

86 Chris Gilbert
The purpose of Blurting was, like the Documenta Index, to make
“working relations in the group visible.” 18 It is notable that in the two years
since the Wrst index the group had acquired a more passionate didacticism,
marked by references to the project as a learning device and sometimes as a
teaching machine that readers could explore and share in (with “readers” being
understood to include creators as well). The aim, then, was nothing less
ambitious than a complete rethinking of the social and institutional conditions
in which the eight participants were currently threaded. The introduction
to Blurting makes this goal clear: the project aims not just to make a
study of philosophy or abstract theory but to bring under consideration the
“pragmatics” of the gallery situation and the daily conversation that took
place in it:
This means that we are critical of these conventions or are at least in a position where
we can view them critically. In other words, we are trying not to be alienated from them
(?)—all of the activities going to make up our pragmatics can be seen as necessitously
related. For example, you don’t just deal with bits of the art-domain (art-works), you deal
with all of it. 19
The ambition to deal with and rethink “all of it,” meaning not
just the whole social and political structures of art production but even the
related facts of daily living, lay behind the Blurting project and the paperand-text
remapping of Art & Language’s lifeworld that it offered. However,
because it was published and circulated outside of the group, Blurting also
sought to restructure the social relations of the anonymous reader-participants
who might engage it. Accordingly, Art & Language at this time was “neither
a model nor an attempt to convert—but, importantly, a bit of both.” 20
THE FOX
The Art & Language participants working in New York City in the mid-
1970s operated under the heavy inXuence of the U.S. art market as well as
the emerging practice of small-scale artist publishing initiatives. The result
was that their next important publication, The Fox, initiated in 1975, took
on some of the characteristics of the art magazine (trade journal–style) and of
the artist’s book. 21 Despite this new mode, The Fox—staffed by Corris, Kosuth,
Ramsden, Sarah Charlesworth, Preston Heller, and Andrew Menard 22 —
preserved much of the intragroup reXexivity of the early indexing projects
in the extended dialogical threads that evolved among contributors. For
example, Ian Burn and Adrian Piper carried out an ongoing exchange in the
journal about the pricing of works of art, which is just one instance of the
numerous back-and-forths in its pages among Burn, Kosuth, Charlesworth,