fw: blurting in A & L

[claudia westermann]

http://blurting-in.zkm.de/

Introduction

by Michael Baldwin and Thomas Dreher

Blurting in A & L is a printed booklet whose content is a dictionary 
with blurts or »annotations«. The annotations were written by 
american members of Art & Language Ian Burn, Michael Corris, Preston 
Heller, Joseph Kosuth, Andrew Menard, Mel Ramsden and Terry Smith 
between january and july 1973. Michael Corris and Mel Ramsden chose 
terms as headlines for the annotations. The first letters of the 
headlines were used for an alphabetical ordering. In this order the 
annotations were numbered. References to other annotations were 
notated under each annotation with the intent to provoke a 
cross-reading or browsing: An arrow means a »conjunction« in a 
restricted sense (»implication«), and an »&« means a »concatenation«, 
a »conjunction« in a wider sense. After each headline follows an 
annotation, under the annotation follows a rubric with 
arrow-cross-references and under this rubric follows a chapter with 
»&«-cross-references. The points of reference were indexed via naming 
the numbers and headlines.

"Blurting in A & L" develops initiatives which began with the 
indexing project. This first saw public exhibition at Documenta 5 in 
1972. The project continued in Art & Language in both the U.K. and 
the U.S.A. The notions of »blurting« and »concatenation« became part 
of its structural currency. »Blurting In A & L« is therefore a 
continuation of that project which saw its fullest and most complete 
expression in »Index 002 Bxal« (1973, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven). 
This is not to say, however, that the project ended with »Index 002 
Bxal«. It continued in various forms, and with various logical 
transformations, until 1976 (see f.e. "Dialectical Materialism", 
1974-76). It goes on in other ways in the current Art & Language 
practice (s. Kunstforum Bd.155/2001, S.131-135).

»Blurting in A & L« presents the discourse and the dialogue practice 
of Art & Language. The discourse investigates functions of the 
art-world (f.e. annotations 39,49,194), but doesn´t explore the 
function of art works within the context of art (compare annotations 
252-258).

Proposals for wider frameworks were tested within the discourse of 
Art & Language. The resulting conceptions constitute a provisional 
program of Art & Language, whose consequences were exemplified in the 
context of art. These epistemological frameworks were used for a 
critique of the conditions of the art-world in a way which is as 
urgent today as it was in 1973. That´s the reason for the decision of 
the direction of ZKM, to install an online-version.

The members of Art & Language intend to abandon the separation of 
competences between artists, critics and observers, and to transform 
the art-world into a system of communication between contributors 
with equal capabilities of reflection (annotation 55). The 
presentational forms conventionalized within the systems of art and 
art exhibitions, and the ways of coding art itself were antithetical 
to a conception of art practice as discourse-oriented.

Art & Language designs what is, in its time, a new pluralistic 
framework and tests the possibilities of embedding it into a world 
which may or may not be the art world. For the members of Art & 
Language, these experiments with a conception which exposes the 
context conditions of one´s own practice, amounted to a call for a 
change in and of those conditions which were already 
institutionalised. The presentation of the own reflections about the 
context within the context reflected changes of the theory into a 
»theoretical practice« (Louis Althusser): The form of presentation 
creates conditions of reception for possible readers. With the model 
for forms of reflection these conditions were introduced into the 
discourse of art. The model constitutes not only a text, but a 
situation for readers as well as specific relations between the text 
and the reading-situation.

The explanation of forms of presentation became necessary for the 
members of Art & Language, because they developed the target in 
internal discussions, to find non-hierarchical forms of presentation 
with which to activate readers outside the group. The members of Art 
& Language developed their methodological basics within a process of 
»conversational exchanges« (annotation 78) and they wanted to provoke 
readers to proceed with this process. So the form of presentation of 
»Blurting In« sustains a reading habit, which creates a dialogical 
interrelation between parts of the text/annotations as 
»surface-structures« (annotation 338) and »set[s] of contexts« 
(annotations 10,103,236,275), which offer parts of the text. The 
dialogical intratextual character of the reading process should 
motivate further dialogues within contexts outside the group. The 
feedback between group-internal and group-external dialogues was the 
ideal case for Art & Language. In the seventies the members of Art & 
Language were only able to anticipate this ideal with their 
development of systems of indices, but they couldn´t concretize the 
feedback with external readers in a satisfying way. By organizing the 
circulation of Blurts in two stages: (1), to a fragment of the whole 
group who would work on the material as it passed between them, (2), 
subsequent to certain other members, not included in the first 
circulation. The material was then recirculated to all participants 
in stages (1) and (2) for further treatment. They received very 
limited feedback from external readers except in certain special 
cases. These were associated with a system which captured the formal 
or informal notations of the interlocutors of internal readers. The 
desire of Art & Language to carry the internal discourse to as many 
external readers as possible and to integrate the feedback, engenders 
the online version of »Blurting in A & L«. The original 
producers/receivers, interested former members of Art & Language who 
were not directly concerned with »Blurting in A & L«, and users who 
were neither of these, can communicate with each other in english and 
german (see «questions»).


Links:
Feature of the Project »Blurting in A & L online«
Dreher, Thomas: Art & Language & Hypertext: Blurting, Mapping and 
Browsing (presentation of "Blurting in A & L online", ZKM, Karlsruhe, 
7.7.2002)