The Philippe Méaille Collection, whose core focuses on a rich and varied body of work by the collective Art & Language, stands out as a remarkable representation of one of the most complex art practices of the second half of the twentieth century. Largely associated with Conceptual Art, the collective Art & Language was founded in 1968 in the UK by Terry Atkinson, Michael Baldwin, David Bainbridge and Harold Hurrell. Art & Language brought together the work that these artists had been producing jointly since 1965. The following year, the group published the first issue of Art-Language (1969-1985), a magazine that reflected on the theoretical problems around conceptual art and which became the main channel for their discursive work (along with the publications Analytical Art, 1971-1972; The Fox, 1965-1976, and Art-Language New Series, 1994-1999). In 1969 and 1970, Mel Ramsden, Ian Burn, Joseph Kosuth and Charles Harrison joined the group, and in subsequent years membership grew to over thirty artists. By the early 1970s, Art & Language had already expanded into an international collaboration. The Philippe Méaille Collection allows a detailed description of the intellectual network woven by the artists who were part of the collective, including Terry Atkinson, David Bainbridge, Michael Baldwin, Ian Burn, Joseph Kosuth, Philip Pilkington, Mel Ramsden and Dave Rushton, together with art historian Charles Harrison. In  the  early  1970s,  Art &  Language  also  included  an extensive  list  of  New  York-based  contributors,  most especially  Michael  Corris, Andrew Menard, Kathryn Bigelow and Preston Heller.

With its practice founded around a community of ideas rather than physical, static pieces, the collective Art & Language challenged the artistic status quo, the existing vocabulary of art history by refusing affiliation to any artistic identity. Since its inception, its development was based on assimilating critical and dissenting practices that relied on a discursive, conversational and language-based perspective that continues through to the present. Through  the collective’s  practice, conversation  –  which  is  often  and erroneously considered  a  mere commentary  on  the work of art  –  becomes the workplace itself; in other words, it takes the place of the art object rather than being a vehicle that signifies the work. In that sense, the works by Art & Language artists featured in the Philippe Méaille Collection may come across as a contingent history of the collective, yet this is the most adequate form of encapsulating what is often referred as a ‘radically uncompleted, radically inconclusive’ practice.

Art & Language – Index 02 (Bxal): Indexical Fragments 6 (detail), 1974. MACBA Collection. MACBA Consortium. Long-term loan of Philippe Méaille. Courtesy of MACBA.

Art & Language – 100% Abstract, 1968. MACBA Collection. MACBA Consortium. Long-term loan of Philippe Méaille. Courtesy of MACBA.

Since 1977, the practice of Art & Language has been in the hands of Baldwin and Ramsden, becoming self-observing and indeed essayistic. Whereas the publication Art-Language active since 1969 provided an access to the multi-theoretical field in which Art & Language evolved through the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, allowing their readers to become empowered, the most recent positions adopted by the artists contaminate the perception of their own collective past. In turn, the Philippe Méaille Collection is further affected by the archaeological perspective with which the Collection was assembled. Many of the works can be found in the form of card files, manuscripts, typescripts, layouts and final prints. All in all, Art & Language remains a contested space, with no privileged point of view to describe its achievements.

Philippe Méaille’s consistent recollection and gathering of early works by Art & Language gives us full access to a fascinating period in which the analytical philosophy, that of language and of scientific knowledge provided the tools to dismantle the notion of art and art object. On the genesis of his Art & Language collection, Philippe Méaille recalls: “In the beginning the intention was to build an international collection of art. Little by little this collection had become an assembling of so-called names. The names that everyone has to have: Franz West, Laurence Weiner, Joseph Kosuth, Art & Language, or Basquiat. And then there was another collection intending to be a collection of Art & Language. I just made a choice from this collection of work because these objects are unstable. As a collector you have a responsibility to buy it and own it. If you just hang it on the wall it’s not enough, in my point of view.” Early works in Méaille’s collection include many not seen since their first exhibitions, included seminal pieces like: Paintings (1966), Frameworks (1966–67), Study for the Air-Conditioning Show (1967) recently installed at the Hayward Gallery in London and at the Pompidou Centre (In 1967 the British duo, Terry Atkinson and Michael Baldwin, published an article in Arts magazine entitled ‘Remarks on Air-conditioning: An Extravaganza of Blandness. It proposed that a volume of air in an empty, air conditioned gallery was actually a work of art. This was accompanied by a difficult and arcane text, which given the empty gallery, was the thing that constituted the art work), Guaranteed Paintings (1967), Secret Paintings (1967–68) and 100% Abstract (1968). In parallel, the Collection of Philippe Méaille has accumulated a vast number of documents that track the massive discursive output that has characterized Art & Language since its inception: “In the art world an important artwork is expensive. And sometimes within the institution the curator doesn’t want to understand that a text can be an important work. I have talked a lot about the column of air over Oxfordshire. This is an important text and artwork. Obviously you don’t have to build this column of air. It would become an expensive artwork.”

ART & LANGUAGE Incomplet exhibition view at MACBA Barcelona, 2014. Photo: EOS-AF, Estudi Orpinell & Sánchez -- Artesania Fotogràfica

ART & LANGUAGE Incomplet exhibition view at MACBA Barcelona, 2014. Photo: EOS-AF, Estudi Orpinell & Sánchez -- Artesania Fotogràfica

A large-scale canvas part of the collection representing Art & Language’s studio as a space occupied by multiple conceptions of artistic practice well exemplifies the modus operandi of the collective. The chaos to be seen in the work Index: The Studio at 3 Wesley Place in the Dark (1982) is not a product of pictorial naturalism, it stands as a metaphor for a new approach to art and life. By showing the studio submerged in a half-light, the studio takes on an allegorical dimension. The myth of practice forces the workshop to position itself as the antithesis of the museum. As a product of the Enlightenment, the museum abhors darkness. As a result, in this painting the studio is relegated to a pre-institutional order. At the beginning of the 1980s – a time when production shifted to the institution – the studio was chosen as the place to display the already convulsive, for the day, history of Art & Language. The disparate fragments are shown bereft of order and clarity – in disarray that frustrates interpretation and avoids at all costs any incursion into the mythology of practice. Art & Language’s workshop refuses to let itself be turned into the projection of a story that conforms to professional or institutional categorization.

Index: The Studio at 3 Wesley Place in the Dark , acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 330 x 780 cm, 1982. MACBA Collection. MACBA Consortium. Long-term loan of Philippe Méaille.

“If one had to evoke The Philippe Méaille Collection synthetically” says artist, art critic and independent curator Carles Guerra who completed a doctoral thesis about the dialogical aspects of the practice of Art & Language, “the resulting scene would strongly resemble that which we see in Index: The Studio at 3 Wesley Place in the Dark. In the centre of the composition there would be a mass of documents among which there would be notes, drafts, manuscripts, edits, first proofs, photocopies and microfiches generated by different group members. An avalanche of writings among which barely a single voice can be discerned and in which authorial issues give way to questions of authority, much more significant than the identification of who’s who.” And goes on saying:” The collection that Philippe has brought together also represents the promise of transcending the act of collecting into an institution of education, or as a space for cognitive work. We still have something to do, a job to complete. It is uncompleted not just because we are missing parts or chunks of the work. It is because it is generative of other types of discursive activities that are not simply related to contemplating works in a museum.” Mel Ramsden, one of the protagonists of the collective, echoes Guerra and comments: “There are times when I look at Philippe’s collection and I think ‘he should have had one of those’ or ‘he should have had one of these’ – but not very often. The way Art & Language seems to ‘pop-up’ is not as a linear series of works but a bit more like a weed. It just ‘pops-up’. I think the work in Philippe’s collection is interesting because of the way various things just ‘pop-up’ unexpectedly against other works. But they are also connected in very strange ways. His collection was not done in a rational way, whatever that means. He had his eye on this or he had his eye on that. But he happened to get whatever we happened to have. Or what he could get his hands on.”

In  2010  the  French  collector  deposited  at  MACBA  in Barcelona his  private collection of works by Art & Language: more than 500 pieces of very different types – paintings,  drawings,  sculptures,  installations,  documents,  writings,  typescripts, annotations, microfilms, maquettes and publications – requiring a reconsideration of the role of writing in the practice of art. “The collection is up to a point where it tells a story. We can give a sense around how Art & Language was born and where it went. And it came to the museum to be shared” affirmed Philippe Méaille. And regarding what made him think that MACBA would be an interesting place to loan his collection, he resolutely affirms: “It’s the Study Center. MACBA is a museum where you can sit and take time to really look at things. The global thing was interesting to me.”

ART & LANGUAGE Incomplet exhibition view at MACBA Barcelona, 2014. Photo: EOS-AF, Estudi Orpinell & Sánchez -- Artesania Fotogràfica

ART & LANGUAGE Incomplet exhibition view at MACBA Barcelona, 2014. Photo: EOS-AF, Estudi Orpinell & Sánchez -- Artesania Fotogràfica

ART & LANGUAGE Incomplet exhibition view at MACBA Barcelona, 2014. Photo: EOS-AF, Estudi Orpinell & Sánchez -- Artesania Fotogràfica

In an art world more and more fascinated by the compulsive desire to build encyclopedic, all-comprehensive collections that unfortunately end up by looking much alike, Philippe Méaille stands out for being a collector with a strong personality and a clear vision. The semantic richness hidden within the act of collecting as well as in the act of creating an artwork engages Méaille’s collected body of work in a generative process rather than a mere contemplative one. Therefore, Philippe Méaille’s collected body of work is an open work that fully grasps the core of Art & Language, by challenging the viewer’s perception, his way of looking not just at art but at the world at large.