Ever since they emerged at the forefront of late 60s conceptual art, Art and Language have continued unabated to probe the various positions of art and the artist, albeit with their numbers reduced to the gang of three that is Michael Baldwin, Mel Ramsden and Charles Harrison. This exhibition finds them revisiting past works and chasing their conceptual tails by making indexes that question the process itself. And it’s not only Fiona Banner who is causing the annual Turner furore with a pornographic text; in their current Lisson show these conceptual veterans have also made use of the language of pornography which they describe as “being visited by Mrs Malaprop” with the result that it is “rendered hilariously senseless but is still recognisable as pornography.” Displayed in the form of brightly coloured panels, the work bears more than a passing resemblance to the plexiglass structures of another Turner Prize artist Liam Gillick, who has also looked long and hard at these dogged grand-daddies of interrogative art (above, “Wrongs healed in official hope”, 1998-1999, until 11 January).
Originally appeared in The Art Newspaper as 'Art and Language'