Homes for Homes II

Art as theory of the practice and practice of the theory

Art & Language is the name of a group of English artists who choose to work collectively, and the title of a magazine that they founded in 1968. Proposing a critical analysis of the relations between art, society, and politics, Art & Language marks, even in its name, the importance of the “textual turning point” in the 1960s.

Since 1976, Art & Language’s project has continued, through Mel Ramsden and Michael Baldwin, with the literary and theoretical collaboration of Charles Harrison. Working with very varied mediums, from painting to rock, these co-founders of Conceptual art remain, even today, attached to observing the consequences of what they themselves call the “depressing collapse of modernism.”

This publication is built around an important installation “Homes from Homes 2” (2000–2001), which simultaneously references the development of Art & Languages’s work over the decades and the collection of the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zurich, in which it is now included. Each element of the installation is described, annotated, and put in the context of aesthetic, theoretical, and political problematics through extended captions and essays by the artists.

Questioning the notions of conservation, of institutional politics, and the relation between art and its institutions, the publication is designed by NORM in close collaboration with the artists.

Published with the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich.

Awarded in the competition “The most beautiful Swiss books 2006.”