Art & Language

“Brouillages/Blurrings” collects forty years of works on paper by the artist collective Art & Language. Images from the heroic days of Conceptual art, like Drawing for Six and Four Suprematist Squares, 1965, and 100% Abstract, 1968, attack the logic of high modernism: the former by dumbly repeating Malevich’s presumably inimitable spiritual gesture, the latter by taking the mantra about medium specificity so literally as to render it absurd (the drawing depicts the percentage breakdown of toxins and nontoxins in a tube of paint). Even better than such moments of late-modernist self-criticality, though, are the more recent works. Notable is the prominence given to Gustave Courbet’s famous Origin of the World, 1866, which shows up in a fine, rather blunt 1992 pencil study and in the 2002 series “Now They Are Elegant Again,” in which versions of Courbet’s image are paired, against colored polyester backgrounds, with images of trees: a satire, according to the artists, of interpretive excess, a pun on the multiple meanings of bush, and, perhaps, a comment on historians’ inability to see the forest for the trees. Best of all, however, is the 2003 series “There Were Sighs Trapped by Liars,” which functions as an emblem, and allegory, of the whole show. On top of images of a 1996–98 installation, called Sighs Trapped by Liars, is painted a flurry of white acrylic dots. To quote the artists: “the decorative deathbed of a phantom [is] now a tomb, blown by the snows.” As is Art & Language; and so goes the history of Conceptual art.