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92 Chris Gilbert
types and intentions” (67). Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, a married
sociologist and artist, began to work together in 1971 forging a breed of environmental
art that resembled a small business. “Effectively,” Green writes, they “worked
as environmental consultants.” Charles Green, The Third Hand: Collaboration in Art
from Conceptualism to Postmodernism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2001), 59–121.
5. Mayo Thompson, interview with the author, October 13, 2000.
6. Andrew Menard, interview with the author, August 21, 2000.
7. Charles Harrison and Fred Orton, A Provisional History of Art & Language
(Paris: E. Fabre, 1982), 15.
8. The history of the Art Theory course at Coventry College of Art is told in a
summary fashion in Harrison and Orton’s Provisional History, 25–27. David Rushton
and Paul Wood began to work with Art & Language in the early 1970s and coauthored
the study Politics of Art Education (London: Studio Trust, 1979). See also
Rushton and Wood, “Education Bankrupts,” in Fox 1 (1975): 96–101, and “Art-
Learning,” in Fox 3 (1976): 170–76.
9. Harrison and Orton, Provisional History, 9–11.
10. Ibid., 21. Art & Language frequently relied on a distinction between “Wrstorder”
and “second-order” art—a distinction comparable to that between a discourse
that might function in business or exegesis and a metalanguage that might analyze
the Wrst, functional discourse.
11. “Conceptual Art: Category and Action,” Art-Language 1, no. 2 (February
1970): 82.
12. Green, Third Hand, 53.
13. Harrison and Orton, Provisional History, 10: “The third [contradiction resulting
from the educational restructuring] was that while the Coldstream Council prescribed
a certain small proportion of the timetable for Art History and ‘Complimentary
Studies’—in line with its higher-educational aspirations for art—the priority, autonomy
and prestige conferred on ‘studio work’ guaranteed a generally irreconcilable
breach between studio and lecture room, practice and theory, ‘doing’ and ‘reXecting.’”
14. Charles Harrison, Essays on Art & Language (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1991), 68.
15. Michael Corris, interview with the author, May 12, 1999: “we always tried to
do something that made it inconvenient to see the work as ordinary, normal pieces
of work, to problematize it, as one would have said in the 1980s.”
16. “[O]ur dialectical loci are organizational tasks that don’t feed off a general sentimentality
about sharing.” Quoted in Michael Corris and Neil Powell, “An Attempt
at a Textual Analogue of a Possible Art & Language Exhibition,” Art-Language, n.s.,
no. 3 (September 1999): 7.
17. The work of Thomas Dreher, the whole of Blurting in Art & Language together
with an introduction and other essays, is online at the Zentrum für Kunst and
Medientechnologie (ZKM) Web site: http://blurting-in.zkm.de.
18. Blurting in Art & Language: An Index of Blurts and Their Concatenation (the
Handbook) . . . (New York: Art & Language Press; Halifax: Nova Scotia College of
Art, 1973), 10.
19. Ibid., 4.
20. Ibid., 12.
21. For more on the importance of the artist’s book, artist’s statements, and the
self-published art magazine in the U.S. context, see Lawrence Alloway, “Artists as