Sole Distributor: 20th CENTURY ART ARCHIVES.

This reprint was made in response to a growing demand for issues of Art-Language which are out of Print and increasingly hard to find. The edition comprises all 19 issues of the first series. All are reproduced in fascimile: none has been re-edited. Vol 2 no 4 (March 1974), Vol 3 No 1 (September 1974) and Vol 3, No 2 (May 1975) were originally printed in A4 format. They are now reduced to appear in the standard A5 format of all the other issues.

Art-Language commenced publication in May 1969. The original editors were Terry Atkinson, David Bainbridge, Michael Baldwin and Haraold Hurrell. Joseph Kosuth was listed as 'American Editor' on Vol 1 Nos 2 and 3 (February and June 1970). An Editorial board consisting of Terry Atkinson, David Bainbridge, Michael Baldwin, Ian Burn, Charles Harrison, Harold Hurrell, Joseph Kosuth, Philip Pilkington, Mel Ramsden and David Rushton was formed in the autumn of 1971. It is named in Vol 2 No. 2 (Summer 1972) and, with the addition of Graham Howard, in Vol 2 No 3 (September 1972). Charles Harrison was General Editor for Vol 1 No 4 (November 1971) and for all subsequent issues except Vol 3 No 1 ( September 1974) which was edited in New York by Ian Burn, Mel Ramsden and Terry Smith.

The first issue of Art-Language (Vol 1 No 1, May 1969) is subtitled 'The Journal of Conceptual Art'. by the second issue (Vol 1, No 2, February 1970) it had become clear that there was some Conceptual Art and more Conceptual artists for whom and to whom the journal did not speak. The inscription was therefore abandoned. Art-Language had, however, laid claim to a purpose and to a constituency. It was the first imprint to identify a public entity called 'Conceptual Art' and the first to serve the theoretical and conversational interests of a community of artists and critics who were its producers and users. While that community was far from unanimous as to the nature of Conceptual Art, the views of the editors and most of the early contributors shared a powerful family resemblance. Conceptual Art was critical of Modernism for its bureaucracy and its historicism and of Minimalism for its philosophical conservatism. The practice of Conceptual Art was primarily theory and its form pre-ponderantly textual.

Conceptual art is now well represented in both historical and analytical anthologies. While these rarely essay a well-formed synthesis, the requirements of coherence and extensibility provide conditions for cultural and historical tidying-up and occasionally for anachronistic exegeses and for exercises in meaningless philosophical hygene. The material reproduced in this reprint is often untidy, multivocal, tendentious, conversational and obscure. With certain exceptions, it is inadmissable to the agendas of the art-world, an anomaly and an inconvenience for those who seek an historical overview. These texts do not narrate a steady process of purifications, nor do they go unproblematically to its postmodern others. They attest instead to the puzzles, problems, work and scandal with which Art & Language has transformed itself and by which is has been transformed.

The first issue of Art-Language New Series was published by Art & Language in June 1994. The New Series is not included in this edition.

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PLEASE NOTE THERE ARE ONLY A FEW SETS REMAINING AND THESE SETS ALTHOUGH NEW HAVE SOME STORAGE MARKS TO THE BOX AND SOME HAVE A BIT OF RUST TO THE STAPLES. THESE ARE THE ONLY COPIES OF THIS ITEM NOW AVAILABLE.