“FOX and His Friends”

On the third floor of a midtown office building in Manhattan, down the hall from a professional fingerprinting service, is a small, carpeted room with fluorescent lights built into drop ceiling tiles. Here Empire, a makeshift gallery run by the artist Noah Barker, presents a visual dialectic of The Fox, Art & Language’s short-lived New York publication. Steeped in the cynicism of a post ’68 world and precursive to the ’80s’ ruthless embrace of the market, “FOX and His Friends” chronicles the eventual splintering of the collective along ideological lines.

Founded by Joseph Kosuth, Sarah Charlesworth, Michael Corris, Preston Heller, Andrew Menard, and Mel Ramsden, the magazine launched in 1975 and managed just three highly divisive issues. This fracturing began with a 1975 essay for Artforum in which Ian Burn, an Australian conceptual artist who’d been associated with Art & Language for some time, wrote a self-effacing disavowal of the artist’s capacity for political change. “What can you expect to challenge in the real world,” he jeered, “with ‘color,’ ‘edge,’ ‘process,’ […] which are part of a market now so powerful that even the most iconoclastic work can be comfortably celebrated.”

He went on to make a now well-worn critique of art’s commodification. Though rooted in a Marxist vernacular, his solution betrayed a derision for incremental change, for the unglamorous work of reckoning with context. Burn criticized art collectives like the Art Workers Coalition for stooping to the status of trade unions, to “that of ‘mere’ economic bargain-hunters.”

As a collective, Art & Language endlessly dealt with conversation as an artistic output, pushing expression to the edges of its capacity. Founded in 1967 by British artists Terry Atkinson, David Bainbridge, Michael Baldwin, and Harold Hurrell who fashioned themselves as self-conscious iconoclasts, the group took on London’s art scene with a jeering, hyper-intellectual enthusiasm that later stretched across the Atlantic, with members in New York. The Fox was born out of a multiplicity of responses, printing in its first issue a strident editorial by Sarah Charlesworth which rebuked elements of Burn’s essay and declared “independence” from the group’s British counterpart.

Presented at Empire under a glass vitrine, “THE FOX” is proclaimed on the first issue’s cover, cutting through a manifesto-of-sorts printed in smaller type. Joseph Kosuth, who both funded and designed the first issue, refused to include Burn in a list of “non-hierarchical” co-editors. Meandering between theoretical positions and highly personal attacks, The Fox’s second iteration—this cover featuring emboldened red text on untreated brown paper—heavily criticized Kosuth, taking aim at his mentor Donald Judd, and then, after banning the production of works by any Art & Language member under a single name, pushed him out for failing to cohere.

As the UK division of Art & Language grew ever more reactionary, it shot off a retaliatory text, which The Fox printed, defending a less idealistic role for the artist: “‘Capitalism is capitalism that’s all we need to know,’ is what you seem (Trotskying) to suggest.” To parenthetically accuse someone of “Trotskying” is characteristic of the bitterly ironic tone many of Art & Language’s publications take—walking an at-times inscrutable divide between navel-gazing and critical inquiry.

In many ways, The Fox documented Art & Language’s larger failings, which might be reduced to the tendency of conceptual artists to propose conceptual acts of resistance. The exhibition does not reprint any essays, instead narrating the substantial collection of Art & Language’s print memorabilia with small explanatory wall texts affixed to the glass cases under which they are pinned.

In lieu of including any of The Fox’s language, a video work by the collective is installed across from the small gallery’s chronological display of texts. The Condition of Culture Under Monopoly Capitalism (1976) considers The Art and Artifact Indemnity Act, an obscure piece of legislation that provided insurance for artwork on loan. Clips of politicians and museum officials are interspersed with Michael Corris, Preston Heller, and Andrew Menard mellifluously trading concerns about commodification and market forces on a marble bench, in the shadow of a Greco-Roman statue.

It’s difficult to parse their apparently sincere tone. They might, in fact, be so sincere that the gesture bends back in on itself, unwittingly taking on the extremity of parody. That this was the case, of course, could also not go without vociferous comment from the group, and the failure to deal directly with political concerns spurred Art & Language’s dissolution. Perpetually self-reflexive, several former members embedded themselves in activist movements.

Barker’s curation intervenes to highlight this, pairing the archive of caustic texts with two lightbox images, the negatives for posters made during a 1976 seminar Corris, Heller, Menard, and the artist Sarah Breakstone held in Belgrade, convened to study the contextual experience of the artist in socialist Yugoslavia. Black, white and red text frames the hazy reverse-image of photographs. Here, the sincerity is straightforward.

Jacques Rancière wrote in Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (2010) that art collectives which establish their own “aesthetic regime” ratify a “basic principle: matters of art are matters of education.”1 If there is something to be learned here, it might be the expansiveness of derisive exchange—an endeavor that now feels political in and of itself. Micheal Corris, reflecting on his time with Art & Language in a 2006 essay, wrote “our game […] was conversation”: “[We] set about to explore the mystery of how it is that we can even speak to one another, let alone understand, share and learn from conversation.”2

Rather than weigh in on the divisions outlined by The Fox, this exhibition presents the archive in glass vitrines. The editions, encased, are not meant to be read but rather exist as tokens of the group’s efforts, reliquaries for conversation.