Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

lated mainly by Corris, Heller and Menard, mapped the artists’—and by implication, the
groups’—class location within a more transitional space. To support this claim, the notion of
the “proletarianization” of the petit-bourgeois professional was muted. It was a favored concept
of Menard’s, and one that would make its influence felt in the pages of Red-Herring, especially
in that publication’s latter numbers.
The group was virtually evenly split between those who wished to continue to work in
and around the art world and its institutions and those who were willing to jettison such a
commitment once and for all. Those who supported the latter offered up a program of voluntary
merger with suitable “working class”—oriented mass organizations and/or “pre-party”
formations. The principal candidates for amalgamation at the time were the AICU [the Anti-
Imperialist Cultural Union] and the RCL [the Revolutionary Cultural League]. As a self-styled
“mass organization,” the AICU was already well known to us. Dismissed by Baldwin months
earlier as “Maoist pipsqueaks,” the AICU was nevertheless held in some esteem by PA&L. The
RCL, in contrast, was not a mass organization, but a “pre-party” formation; it was not open to
White volunteers, only “auxiliary” members.
The following text, taken from an unpublished position paper authored by Andrew
Menard, is a reflection on the internal history of the group since March 1976. It was circulated
between the end of June and mid September, 1976; precisely on the cusp of the final fragmentation
of (Provisional) Art & Language.
At first glance it almost seemed that the March meetings,culminating in the provisions and ushering
in our second phase,were not simply a means of purging Joseph [Kosuth] and Sarah
[Charlesworth],but a resolution of the contradictions defining our first phase,a “negation of a
negation.” While it was necessary to expose the opportunist-cum-anarchist finery of Joseph and
Sarah as the ideological equivalent of the “layered look”—liberalism—it was also necessary to
take a bead on opportunism within the group in general. So we developed the idea of “collectivization”:
making work public under one name only and generating work from the center of the table.
More importantly,the provisions were the first explicit standard of membership the group had
ever developed,and thus appeared to be a strategy of sorts,a more or less inarticulate groping
towards “party unity.” Though the provisions were seen as “procedural constraints,” applying only
until we reached “further clarity in relation to organizational form,” they were constantly evoked
in discussions during the second phase. Both the method of generating work and the work itself
were constantly judged according to this standard. As such,it was assumed that adhering to
the provisions would “resolve,” or begin to “resolve” the accelerating contradiction of the group’s
michael corris inside a new york art gang 481