Emalia Mattia / Art and Language, with The Red Crayola

72 Gordon Street

Opens 26th April

At the centre of this exhibition are two video fragments drawn from a 1970s collaboration between international conceptual art group, Art and Language, and American experimental rock band, The Red Crayola. Accompanying these videos are a recent series of ink on notepad drawings by Glasgow based artist, Emalia Mattia.

Notes

In the early 1970s, Art and Language relocated from London to New York, a move that brought them into contact with a generation of American conceptualists, as well as the experimental band, The Red Crayola. While artists such as Adrian Piper, Joseph Kosuth and Sarah Charlesworth contributed texts to journals published by Art and Language in New York between 1973-1975, the group’s involvement with The Red Crayola initially took the form of a series of experimental studio recording sessions. Eventually released in 1976 as the LP, Corrected Slogans (1976), it is in the prankish spirit of this record – in which political and artistic slogans are awkwardly sung by Art and Language members to improvised musical accompaniment provided by The Red Crayola – that the first video in this exhibition, Nine Gross and Conspicuous Errors (1976), was made. Shot on Sony Portapak, in this work Art and Language members Michael Baldwin, Mel Ramsden, and Charles Harrison are joined by friends, family, and fellow artists in the karaoke-style performance of texts spanning conceptual art, activism, politics, and philosophy. Backed by The Red Crayola founder Mayo Thompson on guitar and electric organ, and 16-year-old Jesse Chamberlain on drums, participants sing or chant lyrics newly written for the recording session by Art and Language, or drawn from the group’s earlier conceptual art works, such as Index 01, shown at Documenta 5in Kassel in 1972.

The second video in the exhibition is taken from Struggle in New York (1976), an hour-long 16mm film by Yugoslav conceptual artist Zoran Popović. In 1974, Popović and his wife, art historian Jasna Tijardovic, moved to New York. They soon became involved in the city’s underground art world, forming a particularly strong relationship with Art and Language — recently relocated from London. During this time, Popović and Tijardović contributed articles to The Fox, Art and Language’s short-lived art theory journal. They also invited Art and Language members Mel Ramsden, Michael Corris, and Jill Breakstone to lead a seminar at the Student Cultural Centre (SKC) in Belgrade, an institution closely associated with Yugoslavian conceptual artists such as Era Milivojević, Raša Todosijević, Marina Abramović, Neša Paripović and Gera Urkom. While the couple moved back to Yugoslavia in 1975, Popović returned to New York in late 1976 to make Struggle in New York, a film that documents the work and material conflicts of artists and activists living in downtown Manhattan. Members of Art and Language appear throughout the film, most prominently in a musical performance with The Red Crayola featuring Mel Ramsden, Paula Ramsden, Christine Kozlov and Kathryn Bigelow — who would go on to become the first woman to win an Oscar for best director, an award she received for her 2008 film, The Hurt Locker.

In both of these video works, shambolic musicality mediates forthright statements about art and politics. One way of framing this performative transcodification is as a gesture consistent with the mood of introspection, pessimism, and fatigue that was characteristic of the crisis years of the late-1970s. In such an interpretation, the evidently wry and ironic performances documented in these videos could be read as somehow masking Art and Language’s anxieties or confusions about the emancipatory power of advanced art – including the type of conceptual art they had been involved in for almost a decade – as well as the direction radical politics and theory were taking in the later years of the 1970s. While Michael Hardt has recently reminded us that the ‘subversive seventies’ were a high point of social, political and cultural radicalism, the later years of the decade nonetheless saw an uptick in political and cultural organisations on the left sustaining significant damage at the hands of revanchist forces looking to take advantage of the downturn in Fordist capital that began in the mid-1970s to roll back and dismantle the hard-won gains of the post-war socially-democratic settlement. The anxious sense of beliefs or commitments troubled by historical change that we encounter in Art and Language and The Red Crayola’s performances might therefore be understood as expressing a sense of the increasingly bleak and desperate atmosphere of late-1970s – a time when conditions hostile to genuine human flourishing were becoming increasingly normalised ahead of a more general right-wing turn that would lead, by the early-1980s, to the new hegemonies of neoconservatism and neoliberalism.

Feelings of anxiety, displaced belief, and disorientation also surface in Emalia Mattia’s drawings. Produced between 2021-2024, these quickly rendered, unfussy works depict scenes of desire and demand unfolding between anonymous figures set within a desolate urban landscape. In this dreamlike metropolis, nude or semi-clothed figures with exaggerated features — demented clown-like smiles; swollen, milk squirting breasts — engage in explicit sex, cradle or loom over one another, or pause in moments of quiet contemplation. Surrounding these city dwellers are a recurring ensemble of motifs: elements of the built environment – brick walls, chequerboard towers, and claustrophobic apartment rooms; heraldic symbols – swords, daggers and blazing clubs; and religious iconography, images of persecution and martyrdom being particularly prominent. Mattia’s drawings also feature sudden eruptions of text that register shifting emotional states – from defiance, to neediness, to empathy, and back again. ‘‘HA! You should know to fuck off’, announces one; ‘Give me your bone’, demands another; ‘IDIOTIC PURSUITS’, says yet one more.

If the archival videos in this exhibition express a structure of feeling we can speculatively link to the crisis years of the late-1970s, then the raw emotional intensity of Mattia’s drawings might be said to resonate with our own post-pandemic moment of change and instability. Viewed this way, the videos and drawings in this exhibition speak to distinct yet parallel periods of historical precarity and social disorientation.