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[31a] Carles Guerra, ‘The Last Possessions’, Art & Language in Practice, Vol. 2, Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, 1999, pp. 185-195.

The Last Possessions
A dialogical restoration of Art & Language

Our last possession might be babble, or, the possibility of discourse rather than language?
(A-L vol. 3 no.1 1974 p 105)

We might say that Art & Language has made a political project out of the problem of demarcating political and aesthetic spaces. On the negative side, that has meant that the aesthetic restoration of certain formalisms has given way to a field of political action whose boundaries remain changeable and somewhat unpredictable. The identification of work spaces that enable socialisation and active reflection has been a constant feature of their career. Different kinds of conversation have followed one another over thirty years. Although the structure of that dialogue has changed and different protocols have been tried out, the dialogical activity has always had a particular representation and effects. We cannot expect the representation of the dialogue to provide us with obstacle-free access to the original activity, but we can at least attempt a dialogical restoration with what remains.

Some of these visages will have been masks.
Disguise is the first of the plotter’s tasks.
We know what images, what politics
Lie under the hats of ‘simple’ rustics.
(Victorine, 1983)

The de-aestheticisation of politics has frequently led Art & Language to adopt rather populist images. This is a deceptive populism, however, like the kind that Inspector Denis suspects is concealed beneath the appearance of rusticity. That character, who spoke the four lines above, belongs to the libretto for an opera written by Art & Language in 1983 entitled Victorine.

The plot exploits a curious inability on the part of the police to grasp the appropriate uses of the painted image. Paintings of female nudes, especially the ones done by Courbet and Manet between 1850 and 1870, are confused with the victims of a serial killer who is stalking the streets of Paris. The models’ poses turned into words become female corpses. The rhetoric used transforms an art critic’s description into a pathologist’s report. The police are made the representatives of those who cannot allow innocence in representations. The authors of the images are suspected of having blood on their hands. Sergeant Nozière wonders, with a further twist in the topsy-turvy logic, whether the crimes should be seen as a form of political art.

It could all be summed up as a very peculiar way of understanding the connections between a series of paintings – a way that is by no means exotic; which is, in fact, rather vulgar. In this case the incompetence which leads to an incorrect way of interpreting the paintings produces a consistent series of explanations – a genuine logic. The logic of Victorine is founded on the inability of its characters to relinquish a particular way of thinking images. In the end, because he is incapable of replacing one way of seeing by another, the Inspector seems to us to be a victim of his own gaze.

There is a speculative benefit to be derived from this anomaly. In approaching art objects as if they were evidence, the policemen deny them their aura. What that accident or defective logic sweeps blithely aside, however, is no more than another kind of confusion. The aura conferred on works of art can indeed be seen as no more than an institutionalised falsehood. And yet in our recognition of the policemen’s error, the aura is in a sense restored as a dialectical possibility. The libretto for Victorine makes this substitution into a theme. There is a symmetrical structure to that dispute over the use of images which the characters are made to represent. Their dialectic persistence makes the parties look increasingly alike. Authors, experts and philistines are stuck with the particular uses they make of images. Out of touch with one another, because of the different interests they each make their examples serve, their problem is not how to adapt to a universal or public rationality; it is how to make their own ‘rationality’ stick.

A rehearsed commitment to the distinction between ‘political form’ and ‘social content’ leads to a critical hiatus – a hiatus in basic tasks. The hiatus is, however, something that has to be lived in. (‘The intellectual life of the ruling class...’ 1976)

Victorine also takes as a theme the hiatus between political form and social content warned of in that extract from a pamphlet distributed at the 1976 Venice Biennale. From that standpoint, political commitment entails a certain anxiety. To make the space between political form and social content habitable is to make a dwelling of the shadow between those two entities.

Often, Art & Language has resolved the hiatus – understood as the invisible that needs to be represented - by means of a mask. (Disguise is the first of the plotter’s tasks.)

The mask of populism, which Inspector Denis mistrusted (We know what images, what politics/ Lie under the hats of ‘simple’ rustics), has been the face of art’s politicisation. In other words, that populism does not actually represent the popular, and neither does vulgarity represent the vulgar. Both are masks. (Some of these visages will have been masks.) Populism in the domain of art has meant the politically directed appropriation of a repertory of images. The history of aesthetic populism is tied to the history of property relations; it is not the story of the vulgar. The salvaging of icons which have political connotations or are associated with a kind of popular reception has provided Art & Language with an optimal resource for clarifying the boundaries of the social. They have questioned whether the boundaries between what is political and what is in fact social can be considered as properly drawn. At the basis of the association between the political and the popular is Socialist Realism, an academic solution which eliminates anything contingent in that association and transforms it into a fait accompli. Art & Language has revealed the gap between political form and social content through a genealogical reconstruction of the connection. A series of paintings like the Portraits of V. I. Lenin in the Style of Jackson Pollock is demonstration enough.

If in the last twenty years Art & Language has addressed the problem of political form and social content largely though images and painting, for the ten years before that they posed the problem primarily within the space of dialogue. In the ‘70s, as they would say themselves, Art & Language worked to establish the conditions in which it would be possible to speak non-trivially of a social or socialist art. In a circumstance characterised by the international distribution of art, in which Art & Language was implicated, such intentions had to be formulated in confrontation with the contradictions and paradoxes entailed. Not only were there episodes that confirmed conversation as a social tool, but also moments when socialising implied disorder. For it is evident that dialogical socialisation can have disruptive political implications, and that the concept of conversation as a solution to social conflicts is an idealisation. What is not clear is the exact dimension we allocate to the social. Political art takes advantage of that imprecision about the coordinates of the social – mostly so as to leave reality intact.

If, in order to simplify matters, we have to focus the dialogical characterisation of Art & Language on a period, we would choose the one between 1972 and 1976. This was a moment powerfully characterised by the activity of conversation and by the problems of its representation. By this time the arguments about ontology and deontology had ceased to be central to the continuance of the work. These had in a sense been preliminary questions. By 1972 Art & Language had exhausted all the clichés peculiar to the purist agenda of Conceptual Art. Whereas Conceptual Art never went beyond a task of identifying and representing ideas (Idea Art, Concept Art, Analytical Art, etc.), Art & Language now embarked on an investigation into the circulation of those ideas. In Grundrisse Marx suggested that systems of social relations based on money and capital were forms of production characteristic of advanced capitalism. Similarly, Art & Language examined the distribution of ideas as a form of production that would bring about an increase in cultural and cognitive capital. The system of circulation in itself would be the object to be produced – a condition of learning and thus of value added to work with ideas. Paradoxically, as genuinely capitalist as that form of production seems, far from integrating Art & Language, it distanced them still more from the dominant economic structure and the forms of distribution of the art market.

AL and me... What I know, care about... Going-on as Grammar. No money, no prospects... Fear... Starvation...
(Handbook(s) to Going-On, A-L vol. 2 no. 4 1974 p.26)

The conversations of this period can be more or less reconstructed from publications such as Handbook(s) to Going-On (1974), Draft for an Anti-textbook (1974) and the next three or four numbers of Art-Language (vol. 3 nos. 2, 3 and 4). The transcribed discourses are grouped according to subject. The moment around which the activity revolved was an implosion which sucked the effort of revision into the mass of text accumulated so far. So there was chatter and two main forms of presentation. On the one hand, the Index as an expositive form of that conversation, and on the other the Art-Language journal that had been distributing the work of the group since 1969.

... and there is no clear demarcation when our socializing becomes work.
(A-L vol. 3 no. 1 1974 p. 98)

The Index unfolds in the transformation of the links that can be found between the sequences of text. The accumulation of vectors which represent connections between speakers, subdivisions of expressions, or segments of text is distributed on a map. With no dominant theory, informal arguments systematically confront one another on centre stage. The accumulation of fragments of discourse, the lack of distinction between theories incorporated into the conversation, the ideologies themselves in constant transformation, and even inarticulate exclamations, make up a heterodox mass of discourse.

In the end, quantity was no less a problem than questions of methodology. The processes of those years, marked simultaneously by conversation and the production of different versions of the Index, resulted in a dialectical explosion. There was a superficial growth of conversation. But ‘the more ‘index’ you write-in, the more difficult it is to go-on...’ (A-L vol. 3 no. 1 p. 83). That combination of growth with difficulty suggests the unfinalisability that Bakhtin and his commentators attribute to dialogical processes. In reference to Art & Language, we have to translate unfinalisability by incompleteness, which could be considered an explicit virtue, a positive feature that determined the use the spectator would make of the Index or any fragment of it: ‘It denies completeness, and it might be useful.’ (A-L vol. 3 no. 1 p. 7). As Philip Pilkington has said, such incompleteness prevents anyone from being able to exercise a psychological privilege over the contents. ‘Because indexing was an actualising process, the Indexes were not a metalanguage and not a metapractice. They were not an explanation or guide to what AL thought; they were AL thought.’ (A-L New Series no. 2, 1997, p. 10).  The rest was mere furniture, about which Art & Language felt some continuing anxiety. Curiously, the growth of Information Technology, the quintessential instrument of administered societies, might have saved Art & Language this anxiety over the aesthetic gestalt of its Indexes.

Ideology is just a failure to conform to the conditions of rationality.
(‘Dialectical Materialism’, 1974)

Even if the quantitative and cognitive problems of the Index proved capable of solution, the whole effort at organisation that had characterised the period was threatened by the impossibility of containing the ideological implications of the conversational activity. The machine for dealing with problems of that kind has still to be invented. Dialogical reflectiveness displaced the monological reflectiveness of modernity (which still invested Minimalism, Conceptualism etc...). This transformation marked the beginning of an effectively boundless ideological critique. ‘Pace Lukacs, the icy finality of criticism in the dialectic is only the margin of (our) index (soul) contents’ (from Proceedings 0012 Child’s Play 1973-4). ‘...dialogue is the context in which learning occurs’ (A-L vol. 2 no. 4 1974 p. 52).

Art & Language’s sense of a public, as viewer or as spectator, becomes in this process an objective to be worked for - something to be produced by the work and inseparable from any conception of it. This sense of the spectator as both making and being made by the work had been to some extent anticipated by Michael Fried’s analysis of Minimalism in ‘Art and Objecthood’ (1967). Fried saw the spectator of the Minimalist work as part of the situation (phenomenologically speaking). This was somewhat contiguous with the format of the Index, which allowed the spectator to become integrated. In the case of the Index, however, the integration was cognitive rather than phenomenological. Methodologically, the Index had to be transparent and to be reconstructible from certain basic operations, ‘an explicit public access device... intended to make the reading of a particular body of material more ‘real’ for someone...’ (A-L vol. 3 no.1 1974 p. 83). The Index was capable of highly abstract formulation, which rendered its operation transparent, but in practice this operation was consummated dialogically.

In so far as the participants in the conversation already constituted an audience, the boundaries between cultural producers and consumers were eroded. The notion of a public was nevertheless subject to calculation. The public would be the product of an analysis of the class struggle, which would identify those to whom one could speak and whose class interests one might share. The Indexes of that time could have been labelled class-specific art.

There is no institutional access to A&L, there is only social access, an encounter - if people misunderstand this, tant pis.
(A-L vol. 3 no. 1 1974 p. 98)

That production of a public extends dialectically. We might say that the notion of public is reproduced intersectorially, as when Art & Language propose art students as potential interlocutors who have to be persuaded of the problematic nature of their situation (culturing reciprocity). Thus the project of the Index overflowed its artistic boundaries and spread dialectically to the field of art education and political activism. Collections of articles were published, following the example of Art-Language. In addition to making a political analysis of art education in a context of institutional reforms, these publications proposed ‘self-activity’ to overcome the impasse which was seen as a dialogical breakdown. By way of example we might mention Politics of Art Education (1978), edited by Dave Rushton and Paul Wood, and School Book (1979), on whose cover were the words: ‘THE NOISES WITHIN ECHO FROM A GIMCRACK, REMOTE AND IDEOLOGICALLY HOLLOW CHAMBER OF THE EDUCATION MACHINE: ART SCHOOL’. The point was to extend socialising activity and to reproduce it outside the sphere of Art & Language itself. In spite of our earlier doubts about the effectiveness of conversational activity, the tendency of the Index to ‘overflow’ lends support to the idea that, rather than being seen as a mere representation, it should be considered an entity whose wider effects define what it actually was. This was a job whose repercussions went beyond the boundaries of the work place.

What sort of effect would we want to have, and how might we measure it? If in terms of the degree of transformation of (social) reality, how, from the centre of a transformed world, would one assess his status as a contributing ‘cause’? And what motives might we have for wanting to do so?
(A-L vol. 3 no. 2 1975 p. 29)

In the spirit of that quotation we should avoid any complacently sociological reading of an ‘Art & Language effect’. We might bear in mind in that connection one of the songs on the record Corrected Slogans, whose words were written and performed between 1973 and 1976 by the members of Provisional Art & Language. The title already speaks for itself: ‘Don’t Talk to Sociologists...’. That is to say, don’t talk to sociologists because ‘social life has no sociological content.’ Indeed, it is one thing to quote the lyrics of the song and another to listen to the arrangements by Mayo Thompson. In a way, it is as if Lou Reed and Velvet Underground had put their voices to the slogans of an ultra-left faction. Or the other way round, as if Art & Language had discovered the potential of ventriloquism.

Returning to the question of effect, we must ask ourselves to what extent that musical flirtation with the forms of pop justifies our approaching Art & Language as one might a form of Pop Art. At best, the link with pop has a merely rhetorical value in opposing that prejudice which imagines the conversational practice of Art & Language as bound to a Conceptual and, in the end, Postminimalist genealogy. If we limit ourselves to a sense of the linguistic origin of the indexing project, and concern ourselves only with the details of its physical remains, then we are provided with the material only for snapshots. These would be images of frenetic activity in a rarefied atmosphere – the members of Art & Language camouflaged in a party at the Factory. This would be to reduce the Index, whether exhibited or published, to no more than a sequence of moments, poses and (logical) frozen gestures. Those snapshots would misrepresent an engagement with the analytical tradition as mere existentialist vagueness. From such a perspective we might say that the conversation of Art & Language brought about a conscious combination of recreation and bureaucratic organisation, which also revealed the strong social control to which the work sphere (including the artistic practices of the ‘70s) was subjected; that the conversation imposed its own ideal temporality; and that the Index was a form devoid of content which was waiting to be replenished, because content was not what had to be produced.

In fact it is only by applying such a rigid sociological view that we are liable to confuse the conversational practice of Art & Language, carried out by young people without the contractual ties of the market, with the image of Pop Art as mere indulgence. However, those social labourers who work in the absence of profit and form do have more in common with the teleology of Pop Art than with the compulsive productive efficiency of Warhol and his school. A conversation does indeed require those taking part in it to do so with a quite different sense of time than those integrated into the dominant production system. Just as the musicians and stars of pop culture prefer to imagine themselves in a different, alternative temporality, at least according to what their lyrics say, those who subscribe to the talk are never sure of what they may obtain from that activity. The conversation becomes a non-recoverable investment. What this reveals is that normal measures of the productivity implicit in socialisation and conversation have be displaced. Time becomes the conversationalist’s capital, insofar as what can be lost is also what can be managed and set to produce. Socialisation, too, reproduces a system of exchanges and protocols that in turn become the basis for further discussion.

It is obvious that what we have just done is to gloss over the features which have been left to us. But in fact, adjustment to genealogies of styles confiscates the trajectory and the historic position of a work, even as it interprets it. In that way, there is also something irrecoverable about the Index in spite of the logic which expressly invites the spectator to reconstruct. Cognitive accessibility does not guarantee that we will come across the original context of production, any more than we do with any complex work of art. Charles Harrison himself once said that the Index is like one of those paintings where the white is beginning to turn yellow.

...there is no ‘naturally’ privileged context.
(A-L vol. 3 no. 2 p. 37 1975)

In order to discuss the circumstances of the Index’s production, rather than delving into its internal logic, it might be more effective to make it dialogically accessible; in other words, to try to situate ourselves in a place from which the conversational practices that make up the project of the Index can be recovered and shared for the time being. That means displacing (in the end, indexing) the explanation of that activity – lost as it is through the effect of time and representation – onto an object nearer at hand (though one no more transparent for all that). If we propose a reading of the Index as an avant-garde talk show, we are not looking for an analogy. We are thematising conversation as a public, social and political practice, the evolution of whose protocols is not irrelevant. It is not for nothing that we are comparing an art form (the Index) with something everyone agrees is a vulgar form, the talk show. Who would dare to decide if that is a displacement or a step down?

One of our problems... it may turn out to be an advantage... is that we can’t separate the ‘knowledge’ from the ‘noise’... the knowledge industry tries to exclude noise...
(A-L vol. 3 no. 1 1974, p. 3)

The typical talk show, as seen on television, is a shouting-match. The noise of the participants makes the messages indistinguishable from one another, the order of speaking degenerates into disorder, and individual opinions prevent guest experts from expounding their theories. Authority is overturned and even ridiculed. In those situations the protagonists of the programme and the studio audience merge in the uproar, whilst the home audience enjoys the cathartic spectacle from the security of their armchairs. That chaos is a kind of culmination of the dialogical process. Whether we like it or not, the talk show, as a genre, comes closest to structurally reproducing a substitute salon of the kind that Habermas associates with the beginnings of the formation of the public sphere. Even the most reflective and civilised discursive practices have to go through a stage at which the conversation takes its own course and threatens regression (‘We are into indefensible areas... there is a kind of regress.’ A-L vol. 3 no. 1, 1974 p. 86). When Walter Benjamin imagined the cooperation between intellectuals and the proletariat in his text ‘The author as producer’ (1934/7), and let fall the enigmatic phrase, ‘Work itself has its turn to speak,’ he left the door open for an answer to that crisis in the progress of dialogue, albeit an ambiguous one: ‘The account [the work] gives of itself is a part of the competence needed to perform it.’ The job – not only the speaker – talks. If the talk show, an updating and reincarnation of the newspaper that Benjamin himself saw as a way of going beyond aesthetics, gives a voice to work, what work releases is a current of social discourse.

However, the proliferation of those currents of discourse, which are difficult to turn into statements, is trapped in the spectacle of media distribution. In spite of the obvious vulgarity which is its main characteristic, the talk show makes explicit with each second of the broadcast that individual opinions are no more than a fiction of the public idea of democracy. The sociological neutralisation of that idea has turned the opinions of those who take part into mere symptoms of the culture in which they are formed. Those taking part are ridiculed as simple transmitters of ideology.

The expository attitude of the talk show is openly therapeutic and not educational. The normal condition of the genre is a permanent crisis which threatens to bring violence to the surface. Programmes seem to have to end abruptly without reaching a consensus or a synthesis of positions. An avant-garde talk show, on the other hand, would presuppose the necessity of its own termination. Most avant-gardes have found the purest form of their identity at the moment when they self-destruct (thanatophilia).

The activity of an avant-garde has always been participation in the type of open society conflict so beloved by certain sociologists.
(A-L vol. 3 no. 3 1976 p. 25)

The avant-garde talk show produced by Art & Language used the conversation space itself to discuss its termination, which real talk shows do not. Although the conversation of Art & Language explicitly avoided integrating itself into the spectacle of culture, they did not realise that the conversation itself would reproduce the logic of that spectacle, in which figures are constantly extruded from grounds. ‘If this text is inextricably linked to the context... is context perhaps, then you have – as we say – a remarkable epistemological problem: how can it be interpreted ‘transituationally’?’ (A-L vol. 3 no. 2 1975 p. 36); warnings of this kind testify to a systematic ambiguity in the relations between figure and ground by which the dialogue is affected. We might say that at this point Art & Language began to resist the inexorable tendency of the conversation to swallow. The crisis of the exclusively dialogical model referred to so far could have no better illustration and solution than one of the first Indexes to incorporate images. ‘Above Us the Waves (A Fascist Index)’ (A-L vol. 3 no. 4, 1976 pp. 63-71) ushered in a definition of the work-space of Art & Language along negative lines. That is, in attacking the other, its own outlines emerged. That warlike characterisation, explicitly simplifying and reductionist, discharged and relieved the Index of its natural obsession with its own connections (and imputations) by engaging with an emerging and superficially politicised semiological art (‘The French Disease’, A-L vol. 3 no. 4 1976 pp. 23-34). Just as at a moment of crisis the participant in the talk show marks out his place with insults, Art & Language defined its besetting milieu as a fascist front. (As Wittgenstein told Russell, "Where there can be a proper noun, it is better to eliminate adjectives”.) The prolific publication of reviews which undertake to analyse other theoreticians, artists and cultural events at length, which is also part of the work of Art & Language, has a similar function to the Indexes and related ‘orthodox’ conversation and should not be prised apart from them.

You know as well that the only hope of any sort of authentic (sic) practice lies in being able to keep our dialogue growing... more conversations... the moment we let it go, fade away, we don’t have any hope and can just as well be thrown onto the garbage heap of modern art.
(A-L vol. 3 no. 2 1975 p. 86)

There is no theoretical model or methodological apparatus to connect the representation of the conversational practices of Art & Language to the contemporary talk show. To build the bridge, we would have to pervert the imagery of the efficient public sphere put forward by Habermas in 1972, just as the activities of the Index were beginning. In Habermas’ history no time is wasted. Two modes of conversation may outwardly resemble one another, but it may be almost impossible to find deeper connections between them. This takes us back to the first example of this essay. With Victorine, what Art & Language were doing was precisely to offer us an allegory of the violence generated by a proliferation of ways of speaking. Within that resonating system it was possible to interpret paintings as evidence of crimes, and crimes themselves as initiatives in public hygiene. To draw the consequences of the latter example, we might say that dialogical practices prevent the Haussmanisation of modern art. The price those conversational practices pay is not to be monumentalised by history. So that the only monuments that remain are office filing cabinets (Index 01 1972), screens for watching microfilms (Index 04 1973) and scraps of paper (Index 002 Bxal 1973) which are exhibited on the occasions when Art & Language mount a retrospective. As happens with public monuments, those objects also rust, are scratched and turn yellow. Whereas the connections suggested by those systems for representing conversations can still grow. Their depth does not depend on optical illusion, but rather on the desire to socialise.