Art & Language and the Politics of Art Worlds, 1969-1977

My dissertation reassesses the role conceptual art played amidst the transition from modern to contemporary art during the second half of the twentieth century by focusing on the movement’s international scope and structure. My inquiry centers on Art & Language, an art collective comprising dozens of conceptual artists, and I emphasize a rarely discussed but absolutely essential aspect of their work together: the collaborations they undertook between the United States, England, Australia, and Yugoslavia that employed travel, exhibitions, publications, correspondence, and communication technologies to forge an unwieldy but productive alliance between likeminded thinkers and practitioners on three continents. I account for the art and writing that emerged from this interconnected web in terms of the innovative artistic and political strategies that Art & Language developed by prioritizing written and spoken language, and I situate their work relative to the realignment of international relations during the period of their association. In so doing, I show how Art & Language conceptualized opposition to the emerging global art world, which was — as it remains — driven primarily by monolithic institutions and official discourses. I argue that Art & Language’s preference for interpersonal contact and intercultural exchange provides tools for articulating a politics of artistic activity adequate to art’s loss of autonomy and its gain of worldliness during the passage from modern to contemporary art