Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

480
Mr. di Meana said The Fox group arranged some open meetings with Italian workers,
students and others to explain the depth of their commitment,as artists,to social concerns.
“They were completely sincere,” he said, “but to such highly politicized people as Italians
you can’t be candid in that way. The Italians just didn’t trust them,they were so naive.”
DOCUMENT IX, 1976
ALNY has been in a virtually continuous state of crisis since March 1976, when the group
adopted a number of formal principles which effectively disqualified Charlesworth and Kosuth
from continued membership. By June, some of us argued for an organizational structure closer
to a federation: less disciplined than a party, but more cohesive than an amalgamation of subgroups.
At all times, these discussions were taking place in the context of a deep involvement
with the so-called Marxist-Leninist-Maoist left. Throughout the June meetings, one can chart
the relation to “class struggle;” the need to analyze and act upon our contradictory class “location,”
and to sort-out “social-sectional tasks” with respect to the “proletariat,” to socialism, and
to . . . “revolution.” We were generally contemptuous of the “revisionist” stance of “cultural”
workers pressing for a “cultural” revolution in advance of a political revolution. In short, many
of us promoted a startlingly romantic workerism, and by so doing rehearsed and prolonged
the most pernicious illusions of the 1960s left for the benefit of the art world.
During June 1976, (Provisional) Art & Language (PA&L) met in the basement of Carol
Conde’s and Karl Beveridge’s residence at 49 East First Street, Manhattan. Present over the
weeklong course of meetings were Karl Beveridge, Jill Breakstone, Carol Conde, Michael Corris,
Preston Heller, Andrew Menard, Nigel Lendon, Mel Ramsden, Paula Ramsden and Mayo
Thompson. As the meetings progressed, the atmosphere of the discussions grew progressively
more tense, polarized, and argumentative. It became clear to most of us by the end of the week
that the true purpose of these meetings was to force the issue of the “semi-autonomy” of the
sub-groups. This issue was refracted through a discussion of “class” and the nature of our class
location as artists.
The two positions which emerged at these meeting are attributable to the positions held
by each of two dominating blocs or “sub-groups.” Referred to at one point by Mayo Thompson
as the “minority” and “majority,” this allusion to the historically prior ideological struggle of
the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks was clear. The position consistently voiced by Ramsden and
Thompson positioned PA&L as undeniably petit-bourgeois; nor, however, incapable of doing
progressive work within and around our social-sectional “base.” The second position, articu-