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Art & Language and the Institutional Form 87
and almost all the other editors. 23 Most notable from the perspective of this
essay was how the discussion of organizational issues in The Fox came, in the
course of its brief print run, to compete with questions of “content.” By the
second issue, discussions addressing the shape and operation of the group
ran through several of the editorial contributions. In the third and last issue,
a long introductory article “The Lumpen-Headache” was devoted to sorting
out issues of organizational unity. This article was framed as a dialogue and
documented an actual meeting in which Art & Language argued about and
voted on their principles of unity.
The debates about unity in The Fox, which focused on the issue
of whether Art & Language participants could operate independently or had
to subsume their work to an anonymous collective practice, may be seen as
a necessary consequence of the drive in the group to assert and keep alive its
act of self-begetting as an institution. Though the disputes had an irreducible
ideological dimension, the crisis the group entered in 1976 because of
arguments about principles of unity was also clearly a reassertion of the organizational
issue. 24 This crisis would represent a Pyrrhic victory for the organizational
impulse, for the years when The Fox was published (1975–76)
were probably the last ones during which Art & Language struggled for and
projected its own internal organization as a form of counterorganization to
the general societal one. If the “Lumpen-Headache” disputes were true to
Art & Language’s original impetus—to persist in and maintain its institutional
character—they also led to the collapse of the large group and the
separation of a subgroup that included Michael Baldwin, Mel Ramsden, and
Mayo Thompson who contrived to take with them the name and identity
of Art & Language. When this group reformed as a smaller body in Britain,
it had a more focused production based on the interrogation of certain arthistorical
genres, while the participants no longer with Art & Language,
including Ian Burn, Michael Corris, Preston Heller, and Andrew Menard,
among others, tended to pursue more activist and less purely institutional
work. (The work of the last three on the short-lived Red-Herring magazine
provided an important ancestor to such directly activist collectives of the
1980s as Political Art Documentation/Distribution [PAD/D] and REPOhistory.)
25 Hence both the group in Britain and the dispersed former participants
in the United States and Australia ceased to be focused on reXexive
issues of organizational structure.
AN AESTHETIC OR ETHIC OF ADMINISTRATION?
The above reading of Art & Language’s initial phase (1968–76) is not just
at odds with the views of many involved, who saw the internal disputes as