Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

such an assessment. According to Ann Stephen, Ian Burn imagined an art history based on
artists’ anecdotes. It is a notion that is anything but arbitrary; in fact, Burn was simply reiterating
what we in “ALNY” had always taken to be a constitutive feature of our practice. We had
always put those unfairly debased and mongrelized discourses of anecdote and gossip to good
use. In the context of our practice they remained powerful agents for debunking the myth of
Modernism as we saw it. Gossip was the way we blocked our resources from turning into
exalted “topics”; anecdote was how we defeated art-historical rationalization.
On the other hand, those aspects of our past practice which are truly challenging and
controversial have remained obscured. These include the story of why some of us nominated
radical politics to be a cure for art. Many of the documents excerpted below have never before
been published, yet they provide the necessary context to explain why, during the mid-1970s,
many of us turned our backs on art. Admittedly, some of us went down in flames; individuals
such as Jill Breakstone, Preston Heller and Andrew Menard dropped out of art entirely. Ian
Burn, on the other hand, was one amongst us who deliberately interrupted an art world career
for the possibility to develop a practice of social and political consequence within a broader
cultural field. For readers already familiar with his career in Australia since 1977, I hope that
the relevance of these documents to that work is obvious. 1
DOCUMENT I, APRIL 1975
The first text is typical of many which addressed ALNY’s complex, difficult and often bitter
relationship to their English cousins. The projects realized by ALNY between 1972 and the
publication of The Fox in 1975 were more often than not viewed condescendingly by our
transatlantic counterparts. During the early 1970s, for instance, ALNY’s “Handbook” was
severely criticized by Michael Baldwin and others for its allegedly unreconstructed model
of intersubjectivity. A similar jibe was made public by ALUK in a little-known review reporting
on an ALNY exhibition in London and published in Studio International. That
review prompted an angry missive from Mel Ramsden to Baldwin. On another occasion,
Burn was attacked by Baldwin for publishing an article in Artforum titled “The art market:
affluence and degradation” (April 1975). The excerpt which follows—“Strategy is political:
Dear Michael . . .” is part of Burn’s reply to Baldwin’s presumptive reading of ALNY’s context
and work. 2 According to Burn, the latter failed to acknowledge “the pragmatic/contextual parameters
of the article, that it was written in socio-political conditions differing in some fundamental
ways from your own.” ALUK’s repeated misreading of our practice had become a
michael corris inside a new york art gang 471