a grumpy adornoishness (Art & Language: Michael Baldwin, Mel Ramsden)
4:45

MB: Cynisme ou subversion
Of the universityfication
As artists we were full of imposture
Ludicrous imposture
Sense of imposture, full of imposture
Ludicrous imposture
MR: And you can't do anything about this past
It just gets bigger and bigger

MB: A grumpy Adornoishness seems to me
In many ways preferable to
The fraudulent democracies
It’s connected and it’s plugged into that system
MR: And you can't do anything about this
MB: Certainly, a grumpy adornoishness
MR: Art & Language
MB: Art & Language and télos

(Interlude)

MR: In the mid-60s there was plenty
Plenty of mad art around
Plenty, plenty of mad art
MB: Is it possible to be subversive?
To think of a great deal of art
Has been the dream work of
The triumph of global capital
Is there a way that we can imagine
Resisting that co-option?
Is it possible to be subversive
Or is it mainly necessary to be cynical?

(Interlude)

MR: You didn’t know where it belonged
Did it belong in a book, did it belong on a wall?
Was it his, was it mine?
MB: An identity, it still does not
Constitute anything
Like an identity that could be purified
An identity, to be subversive, to be cynical
MR: Was it his, was it mine?
MB: To be cynical? An identity
MR: Was it his, was it mine?
MB: Identity, subversive, cynical
MR: Was it his, was it mine?
MB: This is Art & Language

(Interlude)

MB: It was a tactical move, yeah yeah
Tactical move
It’s often a quite interesting
Gedankenexperiment

MR: It’s this great kind of whoa
Judd, Morris, Robert Smithson,
Their writings as well as their work
Writings work, writings work
Is this great kind of whoa
MB: This is Art & Language

(Interlude)

MR: Aesthetics and beauty and contemplation
Start thinking in terms of
Epistemology, ontology, indexing
MB: You can’t have the mainstream and
A nervous breakdown simultaneously
MR: No
MB: Except you want to
MR: This is a seriously worrying thing
MB: You can say
I’m an artist who works with that
Or you can say, okay, get my Adorno done
I say, fuck it
The Pollock-model of the artist
Fuck it, oh Fuck
MR: And it was never called conceptual art

MR: How to work with the wreckage
MB: The naiveties of dematerialization
Ultra-minimalism tending to become absurd
MR: After modernism’s nervous breakdown
How to work with the wreckage
Discursive vividness
MB: Basically it‘s what we do
MR: Discursive vividness
MB: This is Art & Language

If we stopped, it would be as if we’d never begun.