Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) presents Radically Uncompleted, Radically Inconclusive

Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) presents Radically Uncompleted, Radically Inconclusive, introducing the Philippe Méaille Collection of Art & Language works on Friday 17–Saturday 18 May 2013.

The MACBA has organised this seminar so as to introduce its holdings of documents from the Philippe Méaille Collection of Art & Language, an important art collective that was founded in the United Kingdom in 1968 and played a crucial role in the birth of Conceptual Art. The seminar launches a critical inquiry into a particularly significant aspect of the collection—what is usually called ‘an early Conceptual Art practice’ and its subsequent mythologization. During this two-day seminar, the legacy of Art & Language—often regarded as radically uncompleted and radically inconclusive—will be the object of discussion and evaluation by artists and critics, including Matthew Jesse Jackson (Associate Professor of Art History, University of Chicago), The Jackson Pollock Bar (performance group), Elena Crippa (curator and researcher), Manuel Asensi (Professor, Philology Department, University of Valencia), Mel Ramsden and Michael Baldwin (members of Art & Language), and Carles Guerra (Chief Curator, MACBA).

The Philippe Méaille Collection of Art & Language works includes the most variegated categories of art: written notes, typescripts, documents, essays, photostats, periodicals, publications of all sorts, books, drawings and paintings, and also the fragments of an ongoing conversation. The sheer heterogeneity of this production is an essential characteristic of the history of Art & Language, quite often mistaken as a history of Conceptual Art that went awry. The theory, art objects and the narrative that embraces them suggests that the practice of Art & Language is somehow self-sufficient—indeed, separate and distinct from Conceptual Art. Now all these materials must find their way through the museum.

The seminar is the first in a series of public events organised by MACBA, which will culminate in an exhibition to be held in October 2014.

Detailed programme available at www.macba.cat

MACBA Auditorium
Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona
Plaça dels Àngels, 1
08001 Barcelona
www.macba.cat