MEL RAMSDEN (1944 – 2024)
The artist Mel Ramsden, who has died aged 79, was born in England, at Ilkeston, Derbyshire, in 1944. Since 1977, he has continued to live in England, in Middleton Cheney near Banbury, working throughout that time with Michael Baldwin. Together, they formed the productive core of Art & Language, a previously much larger group of artists which could trace its origins to the emergence of the Conceptual art movement in the mid-1960s. That apparent continuity however, masks a more complicated story.
When Mel was very young, in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the Ramsden family moved to Australia. His father however, died suddenly when Mel was 14, and he and his mother returned to England. In 1962, aged 18, he briefly attended the Nottingham School of Art and Crafts for a year, but in 1963 he returned to Australia. There, he went to the National Gallery School in Melbourne, where he met, amongst others, Ian Burn, who was to remain a friend and colleague until his untimely death in 1993. Both were acutely aware of the provincial nature of the modern art scene in Australia in the early 1960s, and became determined to move abroad. The slightly older Burn initially moved to London in late 1964, to be joined by Ramsden the following year. They then both moved on to New York in 1967.
In Australia the young Mel Ramsden’s practice developed from relatively traditional drawing and painting as taught in the Australian art schools of the time, to an enthusiasm for avant-garde developments mostly picked up from magazines. By the time he had joined Burn in London in 1965, Ramsden was making works of a kind which look like harbingers of a more ‘conceptual’ approach to art. Soft Tape, Ramsden and Burn’s first collaborative work, was a specification for an installation in which spectators (actually listeners) moved in and out of the range of audibility of a tape recorder playing the sound of a statement being read out sotto voce – its audibility being dependent on the proximity of the listener to the machine. The statement begins with the ostensibly modest, but in the light of what was to come, almost clairvoyant observation that: “Some time ago, it occurred to Ian Burn and myself that it was not enough to simply have one’s objects hanging about the walls, but that some way should be found to put the ideas up there too.” These are among the early signs that a wave of Conceptualism was beginning to break across a broad geographical and cultural front, and that Mel Ramsden, in his early twenties, after what one might charitably describe as a patchy education in art, armed with curiosity, determination and little else, was in that first wave.
Although the centre of late modernist art production had been located in New York, by the 1960s it had become internationally hegemonic, for good or ill, and the critique of modernism was advancing more or less simultaneously not only on both sides of the Atlantic but further afield as well. During their early years in New York, Ramsden and Burn continued to work both individually and collectively. Along with Burn’s Mirror Piece of 1967, Ramsden’s Secret Paintings and Guaranteed Paintings exemplify the former. The latter approach appears in the text ‘The Role of Language’, published under both their names in 1968. It concludes: “whatever attitude we have to seeing may depend very much on the kinds of distinctions we typically use in language… to establish any new modes of seeing, the mode must first be established in an appropriate language.” Over the next years theoretical questions concerning the nature of art activity, and language as the medium of those theoretical speculations, fused into one open-ended hybrid activity. By the autumn of 1969, they founded the Society for Theoretical Art and Analyses.
Meanwhile in England, Michael Baldwin and Terry Atkinson had been jointly producing works of Conceptual art probing approximately the same family of concerns. In May 1969, together with Harold Hurrell and Dave Bainbridge, Atkinson and Baldwin published the first issue of Art-Language, subtitled for that one issue only ‘The Journal of Conceptual Art’. Later in the summer of 1969, Atkinson travelled to New York to meet Joseph Kosuth, whose essay ‘Art After Philosophy’ was about to be published in the London-based journal Studio International in October of that year; Atkinson and Kosuth were joined by Ramsden and Burn. As a result of these encounters, Kosuth was named as the ‘American editor’ of Art-Language and the second and third issues carried texts by Burn and Ramsden. as well as the jointly authored ‘Proceedings’ of the ‘Society for Theoretical Art and Analyses’. Shortly thereafter, their ‘Society’ merged with ‘Art & Language’, and the expanded Art & Language collective became a transatlantic entity.
Between 1969 and 1972 Art & Language featured in many group and solo exhibitions in America, England and continental Europe, as well as producing numerous publications, and culminating in Documenta 5 in 1972. For this, Art & Language produced the installation Index 01. This functioned as a kind of reading room (in contrast to the normal gallery space in which spectators looked at artworks). The intention was that potentially interested viewers-readers might be transformed from the relatively passive spectators of Modernist art into active producers of their own individual pathways through the forest of ideas. Ramsden was not involved in the conceptualisation of Index 01, but helped to prepare the installation and became an advocate of developing the basic ‘indexing’ idea into the practice of the New York A&L group. There, it rapidly evolved into a looser project known as ‘blurting’. In this process, the work of the ALNY group became less essayistic, more conversational – as discussion between the participants became the fabric of what the work of ‘conceptual art’ was. Ramsden emerged as central to these activities in the New York Art & Language group, which culminated in the ‘Draft for an Anti-Textbook’ which was published in 1974.
By the mid-1970s, in both the New York and English-based A&L groups, the question of political commitment had come, if not exactly to displace, then to challenge the centrality of the analytical and linguistic preoccupations which had characterised the original impulse to Conceptual art. A new journal titled The Fox became one of its markers. This publication was more outward-looking, more overtly journalistic in some ways, than Art & Language publications had previously been. Various factors contributed to increasing antagonism between the two groups. It would not be accurate to characterise the clash as one between a ‘more’ and a ‘less’ political tendency, but to some extent revolved around divergent senses of what politics was as well as the relation between politics and art.
Ramsden was caught up in these debates and clashes as intensely anyone, but the retrospective evidence of Michael Corris’ published document-collection indicates that he remained more committed to maintining an ‘Art’ practice than the majority of his confreres in New York. Most of them, including by then Ian Burn, having explicitly renounced Kosuth’s commitment to his own continuing advancement as an artist on an international scale, went on, at least rhetorically, to renounce the practice of ‘Art’ in its entirety. Ramsden wrote of an atmosphere of “pandemoniacal despair” and “moral anguish” that attended ALNY debates about art and politics, affirming both that “I share the ideals of the left” while remaining unconvinced that the group had in any way solved the problem of “who do we direct our activism at and who is it for?”. Ramsden’s individual perspective remained committed, first and foremost, to the making of art, albeit an art committed at some level to socialism, an art that was critical of the hegemonic social structures within which it was conducted. As Ramsden put it in 1975, “the greatest subversion of the privileged artworld would be to refuse to make art for that artworld whilst making an art as ambitious as that usually seen in the artworld.” With characteristic honesty he concluded, “I have of course no idea how to do this.”
Ramsden’s aspiration to produce an ambitious art with potential resonance in a wider world of the Left critique of capitalism never left him. Where it took him however, was unexpected. In early 1977 Burn went back to Australia to take up a politically active role outside the normal circles of the avant-garde, and Ramsden returned to England and began the working partnership with Michael Baldwin that was to last for forty-seven years. Their shared commitment to making an ambitious art that remained critical of late capitalism while yet inescapably embedded in it, remained a high-wire act without a safety net that commanded the admiration of all those who understood it during that same period.
During that time, between the late-1970s and 2024, Art & Language, in the persons of Baldwin and Ramsden (and until his own death in 2009, the critic and historian Charles Harrison), produced a body of work which bears comparison in its depth and complexity with that of any of their contemporaries on either side of the Atlantic. The artworld, through its obsession with individualism, with authenticity, with the autograph work of art, and dare one say it, with the ideology of ‘genius’, finds it hard to accommodate the idea of genuinely collective production. Yet it has to be underlined that ‘Art & Language’, as it developed, remained a collective practice. Many were involved, in various ways, at various points; but throughout the period, Mel Ramsden was a central participant in the work, in the studio, with Michael Baldwin – in the ideas, the conversations, and their realisation in the work itself. That body of work encompasses paintings, drawings, posters, performances and installations, as well as a continuous stream of texts – articles, reviews, books, scripts, songs, in addition to conversations, lectures and panel discussions. As Baldwin put it in his remarks at Ramsden’s funeral, “We were comrades.”
Leaving aside those who don’t seem to get Art & Language at all – whether for its Leftism, or for its occasional and deliberate ‘incorrectness’ in contemporary terms, whether for its refusal to suffer fools gladly or for its occasional opacity – all of which is best left (to borrow a phrase from Marx and Engels) to the ‘gnawing criticism of the mice’, there is one point which it is important to clarify about later A&L. It concerns painting. There are several dimensions to this, not all quite the same. For those who saw Conceptual art as a kind of crusade against the iniquities of ‘Modernism’, to put paint on canvas seems to have represented a species of apostasy. For others, painting’s ever-present artisanal qualities disqualified it from true contemporaneity in a world of mass production, and indeed of electronic mass media. For yet others, since Modernist painting had been dominated by expressively-centred male artists (as indeed had the entire Western post-Renaissance tradition been dominated by male artists of various persuasions), painting again represented a no-go area. In a different inflection, High Art, or Fine Art was seen as endemically elitist. And so on, and so on. Yet in a strange way, painting in some sense of the word refuses to die, and remains a part of ‘contemporary’ art. There seems to have been something uniquely self-righteous about denunciations of painting on the part of the Conceptual generation, especially those of a critical inclination. With hindsight this is obviously to do with the hegemonic power of Greenbergian Modernism, which now looks far more restricted a phenomenon than it ever did at the time.
Be that as it may, the erstwhile standard-bearers of language-based Conceptualism rode into a perfect storm when in the late 1970s they produced a series of paintings on the theme of ‘A Monstrous Détente’. Few at the time seemed to notice, but Art & Language’s Portraits of V.I. Lenin in the Style of Jackson Pollock though undeniably paintings, were scarcely ‘painting’ at all as it was then widely understood: that is to say, not Modernist painting and not Expressionist painting; as well as representing an explicit rejection of the burgeoning ‘New Spirit in Painting’ that was beginning to raise its market-driven head out of the mudflats of Real Art once the high-water mark of Conceptualism had come and gone. The Lenin/Pollock series of paintings had actually begun as painted images on paper, that having been cut into A4-sized pieces, were copied in the then-new medium of colour xerox. They resembled, in effect, collages. They referenced the geopolitics of the period – the short-lived ‘détente’ between the United States and the Soviet Union as the crisis of the post-World War II global settlement began to bite, and before emergent neo-liberalism had taken the opposite tack and began to stoke the fires of Cold War again. Within that horizon, the works addressed the characteristic form the Cold War had taken in the register of artistic-cultural competition: between the ‘free art’ of Modernist abstraction and the ‘totalitarian monolith’ of Socialist Realism.
Many other series of paintings followed during the 1980s and 1990s, some on the theme of the artist’s studio, some refunctioning particular works by David, Courbet and Picasso, some employing the device of ‘painting-by-mouth’ to blur the borderlines of artistic incompetence and modernist expressivity, and to raise issues about the parameters of realism in art. The characteristic layering and nesting of indexical reference reached new heights when from the 1990s onwards, the German performance group, the Jackson Pollock Bar, enacted scripts written by Baldwin and Ramsden wherein the actors, miming the soundtrack of the simulated studio conversation, produced unstable, as it were ‘real’, simulacra of paintings. These were referred to as ‘Theory-Installations’. They evoke reflection on levels of complexity, self-reference, and perhaps most importantly the central cultural value of self-criticism-in-consort-with-critique-of-the-social, that is so often the aspiration of would-be radical cultural interventions, yet one which is rarely actually achieved.
In the 21st century Art & Language continued to pursue this multi-layered activity, forever introducing new slants, new devices, to maintain the improbable feat of combining innovation with a relentless probing both of ideo-political formations in the world at large, and the increasing spectacularisation of the artworld itself. The hegemonic practice of art, in the days of the new dispensation of the Global Contemporary no less than in the days of international Modernism, remains a prime site of Art & Language critique. This is perhaps the keynote of the work over recent decades – an intensification of rebarbative criticism of the neo-liberal dispensation in and of the system of art. To an extent, Art & Language paid a price for this; although the exhibitions and publications continued unabated, by refusing to play the game of high-end luxury consumption, Art & Language ceased to command a place at the centre of the international art scene. But then so did the Left in general. The way in which, during the era of neo-liberalism, the artworld has been able to expand, to command more and more resources both in terms of its production and in terms of the institutions wherein its consumption is facilitated, has led to the notable situation where the world of art has been able to position itself as a kind of official opposition within the productive system of late capitalism; preserving nevertheless the moth-eaten jargon of ‘creativity’ and of Art with a capital ‘A’, that Conceptual art thought it had put to bed decades ago. Undoubtedly this relates less to the case of younger artists, who are always likely to find ways of biting the hand that feeds them, even as many established figures maintain virtuous positions within the system while precious little actually rocks the boat of privilege which the whole circus depends upon. All of that remained anathema to Art & Language, a stance that has not won them friends in the cultural establishments of the globalised art world, even as it has resonated with a miscellaneous archipelago of curatorial, academic and artistic misfits of all ages - who somehow continue to muster a few discordant songs against the prevailing chorus of self-advertisement and complacency.
The last series that Mel Ramsden worked on exemplifies the continuing resistance of Art & Language to the culture of the spectacle. A minutely detailed, labour-intensive series of pencil drawings, their affect is of a kind of grubby but stubbornly maintained defensive redout. The studio at all costs. A critical art at all costs. Take a risk or it’s not worth doing. A few people might just catch it. A few might pick it up and run with it, in their own way. There are no guarantees… The ‘Bad Place’ studio drawings of 2022-24 continue the sequence of Art & Language’s difficult, divisive, yet for those who do get it, essential practice. It has been a practice that took what proved to be its definitive form when Mel Ramsden left the wreckage of Conceptual art in New York and returned to England to work in the studio with Michael Baldwin, as he himself put it ‘with no idea’ of how such a practice might evolve.
In a world which just got more and more difficult, more and more alienating, and an artworld that just got bigger and richer, the Art & Language studio provided a sort of metaphorical refuge, sometimes eccentric, sometimes desperate, if not borderline mad, against the prevailing sanity of late capitalism and its client cultures. As Philip Pilkington, himself once of Art & Language in the tempestuous goings-on of the 1970s, put it on hearing the news of Mel Ramsden’s death, he would continue to think of Mel at work in the studio, “for him the safest place in the world.”
PW/MB
22/08/2024
This is an abridged and edited version of an article that will be published in Art Press in January-February 2025.
