I don't understand quite a good deal of what is said by Art-Language, but I admire the investigatory energies, the tireless spade-work (not calling one one), the full commitment to the reestablishment of a valid language by which to discuss art and the occasional humour in their writings.

In it they published their own text-works as well as items by Adrian Piper, Sol LeWitt and Stephen Kaltenbach[8] or independent works of them like the opera Victorine.

In 1971, Terry Atkinson had also met Ian Burn and Mel Ramsden in New York in 1969 and, having published a number of text-works as the Society for Theoretical Art and Analyses, they joined with Art-Language that year.

In 1973, Atkinson eventually resigned.In virtue of this prototype of present art-school sensibility, William Morris and his followers have helped spawn the resolute craftsmanship bias in British art education in the earlier part of the century.

The journal continued to be published until 1985, and the implications of the indexes of 1972-3 persisted in bearing in various ways – and to a greater and lesser extent upon its content.

Apart from Baldwin, Ramsden and Harrison, into whose hands the work of Art & Language had been taken by 1976, its contributors included Philip Pilkington and Paul Wood.

But, since during the internal problems that the group encountered between 1975 and 1976, the name Art & Language remained in the hands of Michael Baldwin, Mel Ramsden and Charles Harrison, it is logical to give them the authorship of the texts from Volume 3 Number 4.

In place of unpretentious inquiry we are subjected to a hodgepodge of explanations and justifications which serve as obfuscation in the attempt to convince us of the existence of thought.

[27] By putting forward its forgotten card-files and print-outs (its caskets of information) conceptualism recapitulates a kind of Mallarméan aesthetic: social subjects are presented as enigmatic hieroglyphs and given the authority of the crypt.

[28] I don't understand quite a good deal of what is said by Art-Language, but I admire the investigatory energies, the tireless spade-work (not calling one one), the full commitment to the reestablishment of a valid language by which to discuss art and the occasional humour in their writings.