BEHIND THE SCENES:
ART BASEL HALL 2.0C1
René Schmitt and ART & LANGUAGE
THESE SCENES, 2016

PART I

I am writing this on the eve of the opening of ART BASEL 2021. It is the first time René Schmitt Druckgraphik, Berlin, is exhibiting and he is showing a very special portfolio that we worked on together with ART & LANGUAGE (Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden) in 2016. During this time, I made an exhibition THE NON-OBJECTIVE WORLD at SPROVIERI London, about the Black Square works of Kabakov and ART & LANGUAGE. The exhibition led to a book. A result of the unanimous excitement and praise of the project (it was displayed in Basel that year) René asked me if maybe the artists would consider making a group of prints on the subject. A new project was born.

It is a vital, robust and strong portfolio that captures the edgy dialectic at the heart of their disruptive approach to the art world as a whole. Having found a place on the edges of artistic creation that often confounds and baffles viewers, this collective project now in its almost 6^th decade makes it clear that the radicalism of the 1960’s is never far below the surface; as aesthetic discourse or digression. They have resisted the siren’s song of pandering to market forces and stuck to their guns, and those guns are coming out brightly in Basel this year.

Their long-time gallery in Belgium Mullier-Mullier will display early works, and Schmitt will offer THESE SCENES, five prints as an iconic mini collection, a testament to a kind of understanding of the reality of modernism, while questioning all the while, what it is to be contemporary. Suddenly in this very disruptive time ART BASEL is trying to catch up with itself and a market, offering us something daring in September, while the carrot of next June is not far away from the tip of our noses.

PART II

In the months before my 2016 exhibition, I interviewed Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden about what they remembered of the appearance of the Malevich ‘The Non-Objective World’ in English during their early 20’s. The interview I will share in snippets here with commentary. The images you will see are the five monoprints made each with a different medium and by hand, they arrive in a hand-painted wooden portfolio box which is a work of art as well. As we have come through a period of great upheaval and it is still with us, it seemed that the social and political dimension of the discussion was still very relevant.

B: The glamour of the appearance of ‘The Non-Objective World’ in the mid 60’s (Malevich was an artist of myth and mystery) may have been attributable to the fact that the work was inaccessible. Remembering that the Soviet Union was at full cry in the Cold war, the Cultural Revolution in China was happening… There was a connection between various discourses about abstract art—heavily reductive abstract art—and questions of social change. Those connections were of a great deal of interest to us. Nobody quite knew how they might really be connected—how social change, revolution and an apparently revolutionary artistic style were connected.

R: About the Malevich book the fact that he went on in this really weird language about a world without things, about art without objects, art without things. What he meant I think was without depicting things. It was still kind of interesting. Remember in 1965 I didn’t know Michael. For me, some of the appeal of the Black Square was that it had a connection to Ad Reinhardt… We were attracted to the possibility of deflating the ‘metaphysics’ of the Square. ‘Conveying the feeling of universal space.’

B: We turned away from those overheated metaphysically grand statements and were being directed by voices which were a lot drier, a lot more analytical and a lot less enchanted with universality and philosophical grandeur.

PART III

B: We have been fucking up monochromes and Black Squares for years. Intermittently, but it has nothing to do with us, well a little bit to do with its formality and a great deal to do with its cultural guise as a sign of purification and distillation. Most artistic purifications and distillations are, to my mind, intrinsically good.

R: But Black Squares can get boring. There is always a sense in which what we produced were guises and sign-exchanges and (dis)guises for these culturally overheated products.

Which is why perhaps in this portfolio you have five different costume changes for the Black Square. They incorporate the strategies and interest ART & LANGUAGE have evidenced from the beginning of their careers. 1) The Suprematist Squares; 2) Secret Painting; 3) Guaranteed Painting; 4) Cracked surface with text beneath; 5) No secret at all. Together this set of works illustrates the varied and unrelenting commitment these artists maintained for decades, to the discussion of language and its place in the visual process we call art.

These works raise issues with a crisp authority. Is reading a text the same thing as looking at a black abstract square? If you put one behind the other is the meaning changed? If you open fissures in the foreground of the abstract monochrome so rivulets of text seep into the visual field, is it still a text work or a painting? How do you read? Is it the same kind of seeing used when looking at a Black Square?

THESE SCENES (2016)
A portfolio of 5 mixed media collage works including:
Monotype, woodblock print, aquatint etching, Xerox print, pencil drawing, crayon drawing and Letraset on 300 gr laid paper in wooden box, each with unique painting.
Each 120.4 x 81 cm, Edition of 12 + 2 H.C (each set is unique).
Each hand-signed, numbered and stamped Art & Language.

Quotes from the book:
The THE NON-OBJECTIVE WORLD. ART & LANGUAGE / KABAKOV, Sprovieri, Edited by Jill Silverman van Coenegrachts.
Texts by Art & Language, Matthew Jesse Jackson, Ilya Kabakov, Rod Mengham, Andrei Nakov.
Sprovieri, London, 2016.

More info:

René Schmitt, Berlin

Art Basel 2021, Basel