Art & Language

the front cover of Art-Language's first edition, in 1969

Art & Language was (and still is) a long-running and fluid collaboration of conceptual artists started in 1969. The group was formed around their journal Art-Language, the first edition of which claimed to be "the journal of conceptual art". It was here that Conceptual Art as a term was first coined. The collaborations or conversations of this group took the form of both artworks and essays, and often their artistic work included strong textual elements, blurring the boundaries between "theory" and "practice".

They are very much worth looking up.

The group is represented by the Lisson Gallery and examples of their work can be seen on the website there.

There's also an interesting discussion, and images, of their work "Now They Are Surrounded, which involved the placement of paintings of typewritten text within the Guidhall Gallery in London, which is available here:

http://systemsart.org/a_ltext.html

Here we have a double relation between art and text - the text in the art, and the essay on the art... (Are they the same?)

A more detailed discussion of the work by the artists, and its stakes was published as "Now They Are Surrounded" in the Journal of Visual Art Practice 6.1 (2007) - and available in full text / PDF form through the Art Full Text database.