Art & Language (Michael Baldwin, Charles Harrison, Mel Ramsden)

Art & Language is a British conceptual art collective founded circa 1967 by artists Michael Baldwin, Terry Atkinson, David Bainbridge, and Harold Hurrell. By 1970, artist Mel Ramsden and critic Charles Harrison joined the group. The collective’s name reflects their focus on the use of language as both a tool and a subject in their work, exploring the relationships between language, theory, criticism, and art-making.

The series Map to indicate… expands on Map Not to Indicate (1967), an early conceptual work playing with the conventions of cartography and how symbols and shapes come to signify meaning. Printed by Alain Buyse at his workshop in Vieux-Lille, France, the works are part of the poster series ART?. In 2014, Art & Language explained, “it is essential to our sense of ‘map’ (or for that matter ‘index’) that it is genetically linked to something, even if the modality of that link is no more than a possibility.” In Map to indicate…, the reference is a world map, where according to the indication, geographical boundaries are abstracted and indexed by squares and rectangles.