Mel Ramsden (1944–2024)
FOR NEARLY SIX DECADES, the subversive Art & Language collective has made art that reflects its countercultural position in the world, all while rejecting the confines of an identifiable or distinctive aesthetic. Mel Ramsden (b. 1944, Ilkeston, UK), among the most prominent artists associated with Conceptual art and one of two remaining members of the collective, died on July 23. Art & Language began as a group of artists engaged in conversation with the aim of questioning the hegemony of the visual in modern art. A hallmark of the group’s early work was its essayistic practice, which filled the volumes of the Art-Language journal and other publications.
Mel’s work spanned sixty years—beginning in Melbourne, continuing in London and New York, and ending in the West Northamptonshire studio that he and his Art & Language comrade Michael Baldwin occupied for decades. Perhaps fittingly, that studio and its environs are depicted in the last works by Art & Language that bore Mel’s hand.
In New York in 1971, when I was searching for a loft to rent, I met Mel for the first time. The sign on the door of the space shared by Mel and Ian Burn read, The Society for Theoretical Art and Analysis. This fictional society declared that “a comprehensive genealogy of the class of ‘art objects’ is out of the question,” and its texts—called “Proceedings”—reflected critically on the rules and conventions in art. My fateful encounter with Mel was sparked by Bernar Venet, one of the organizers of the exhibition “Conceptual Art, Conceptual Aspects,” where I’d viewed the work of Mel, Ian, Christine Kozlov, and Joseph Kosuth the year before. I was employed as Bernar’s studio assistant, and when he learned about the kind of work I was making, he urged me to contact Mel and Ian. What is still remarkable to me about that first meeting is the degree of generosity shown to me, a younger artist, by Mel and Ian. Without hesitation, they invited me to submit an essay to Art-Language; soon afterward, Mel and I coauthored “Frameworks and Phantoms,” published in the same issue of the journal. That text continued to reflect critically on art, with a specific focus on the role of the art media.
By the summer of 1973, we had already been working closely on projects with the burgeoning Art & Language collective in New York. Mel approached this work tirelessly, aiming to marry what he had learned from working with Art & Language on “Index 01” for Documenta 5 (1972) to the context of Conceptual art in New York. In 1975, he became a founding editor and consistent contributor to The Fox, a short-lived but influential publication launched by Art & Language that year. His texts—“On Practice” and “The Lumpen Headache”—still resonate, offering a penetrating critique of art under capitalism. These writings exemplify Mel’s acute sense of humor and his gift of lampooning the pretentions of the art world.
Though Mel was increasingly identified with Art & Language, his path to the collective was the result of a journey to collaborate with like-minded artists. Mel initially produced works of Conceptual art under his own name, including the significant series “Secret Paintings,” but soon realized the centrality of conversational exchange to the purpose of his work. He understood the world-making potential of Conceptual art—that it was an art of re-description, requiring a “constituency of interlocutors—listeners and learners as much as speakers and producers.”1
What attracted me to Mel’s work—especially those pieces produced in collaboration with Ian Burn—was its use of concepts and arguments drawn from the analytic philosophy of language. While none of this critical discourse would have attracted the attention of professional philosophers—except perhaps to deride—it proved crucial to a growing number of artists, providing critical commentary on their practices. To do so successfully meant rejecting the “normal” discourse of the art world and employing resources of expression that were alien to the leading formalist critics of the day. This was a position that Mel occupied passionately. I recall being at parties where the evening would often end with Mel holding court, demolishing the latest views gleaned from the art press.
Mel’s decade of work in New York continues to warrant attention, but his subsequent commitment to the Art & Language project in the UK—alongside Baldwin and the late Charles Harrison—is truly at the heart of his artistic practice. During this later period Art & Language’s prior essayistic practices and publications were richly supplemented by work involving painting, music, and performance. These new modes deepened the group’s conversational practice in unexpected and fruitful ways, especially through their collaborations with the musician Mayo Thompson2 and the German performance group Jackson Pollock Bar.3
It would be a fool’s errand to try to parse any single work Mel and Baldwin produced in the name of Art & Language into identifiable literary styles or passages of painterly expertise. The works, as Baldwin points out, “are the fruit of this collaboration . . . the rather unstable epiphenomena of a conversation, epiphenomena that turn critically upon the conversation that gave rise to them.”4 Out of this illocutionary churn, remarkable creations emerged—works that confront the neoliberal world of art and culture with some uncomfortable home truths. Some of these works were described by Mel as “painted indexes.” That is to say, these paintings revisited various sites of production, like the artists’ studio or the museum, which became the staging ground for imaginative installations of past works by Art & Language. Mel’s vivid description points to the centrality of conversation—both literal and figurative—that has always been at the heart of Art & Language. Turning to a medium that had been reviled or thought “unstylish” by other Conceptual artists, Mel and his coworkers made a claim for painting by simultaneously reconsidering it as a viable medium with which to critically reflect on conventional modes of interpretation and appreciation of painting as an art. What was at stake for Mel and his colleagues in Art & Language was the very autonomy of art, an often quixotic goal that entailed preventing “the authorized account of what art looks like from standing in for an account of its place in the world that makes it.”
As time went on, these indexical works became more complex, revisiting earlier subjects of the Art & Language oeuvre and often remixing themes to the point of obliquity. For example, the series “Index: Incident in a Museum,” depicting a museum gallery space similar to that found in Marcel Breuer’s Whitney Museum of American Art, is populated with an improbable range of images and texts drawn from Art & Language’s publications, previous works, and decidedly non-modernist works of art, such as those referencing socialist realism. What made this series so compelling and critically alive was that these depictions of fictional exhibitions revealed a culture that could only see such works as unworthy of canonical consideration.
I imagine that Mel must have relished this turn to painting because it represented an expansion of Art & Language’s critical resources as well as an ironic return to a medium that was an indelible part of his past. But it’s important to say that the resemblance is superficial. The world had moved on since the “Secret Paintings,” and quite a bit more was at stake for an artistic practice that aimed to advance an institutional critique through such traditional means of expression. Mel met this formal challenge by reimagining painting as a kind of theatrical practice. He remarked that the resulting works were “performative satires—images of artists’ work and artists at work.”5
It’s possible that Mel’s projects with Baldwin—which utilized painting to raise doubts about representation—suited his work ethic more than the abstract arguments and logic that surrounded the original index projects of the early 1970s. There would be more room for satire and a play of masques in a series depicting studio interiors painted by mouth (“Index: The Studio at 3 Wesley Place,” 1981–82); portraits of V. I. Lenin and Picasso’s Guernica rendered in the style of Jackson Pollock; imaginary museum installations (“Index: Incident in a Museum,” 1985–88); collage-like superimpositions of landscapes, diagrammatic distortions of the word “Surf,” and raucous demonstrations of the liquid quality of emulsion that were called “inside out” paintings (“Hostages,” 1990); or chair-like objects constructed of painted canvas panels (“Nobody Spoke,” 2014).
Still, despite this creative flourishing, Art & Language was not without its internal challenges. Mel and I had held opposing views on our level of involvement in leftist cultural politics and its impact on our relationship to the art world, and the group faced an acrimonious breakup in September 1976. Nearly a decade later, in 1985, I reconnected with Mel in England. When we finally renewed our friendship, the newly reunited Art & Language was beginning to emerge from a lengthy creative drought. Reflecting on the group’s revival, Mel told me that “you have to keep on working, working through the failures.” He used the figure of a tennis pro who is off his game. “You have to keep playing, because if you give up, it’s like you never existed.”
Mel was an indissoluble contributor to the skeptical, absurdist, and critical voice that is Art & Language. More than that, he was a consistent presence in my own life, as a colleague, friend, and reliable critic. Reflecting on the scope of Mel’s life’s work as an artist underscores the full measure of loss felt by all of us who knew and worked with him.
- Art & Language (Michael Baldwin, Charles Harrison, Mel Ramsden), “On Painting,” Tate Papers no. 1, Spring 2004; tate.org.uk/research/tate-papers/01/on-painting ↩︎
- For a recent interview with Mayo Thompson, see psychedelicbabymag.com/2023/10/red-krayola-interview-mayo-thompson.html ↩︎
- On the Jackson Pollock Bar, see zkm.de/en/person/jackson-pollock-bar ↩︎
- Michael Baldwin, correspondence with the author, August 20, 2024. ↩︎
- “Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden in conversation with Joanna Thornberry,” in Joanna Thornberry and Ossian Ward (eds.), Art & Language: Nobody Spoke, exh cat. (London: Lisson Gallery, 2014), 55. ↩︎
