Emalia Mattia / Art and Language, with The Red Crayola

72 Gordon Street

26th April – 22nd June

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 were 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 conceptual artists, as well as the experimental band, The Red Crayola. While Adrian Piper, Joseph Kosuth, Michael Corris, and Sarah Charlesworth, amongst others, contributed to journals published by Art and Language in New York between 1973-1975, the group’s collaboration with The Red Crayola took on a more unorthodox form. Over the course of 1973, the art group and the band conducted a series of experimental studio sessions together. These culminated in their first collaborative work, the LP Corrected Slogans, released in 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 5 in 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. Between 1974 and 1975, Popović and his wife, art historian Jasna Tijardović, lived in New York, where they connected with members of the city’s underground art world, including the recently relocated Art and Language group. During this time, they contributed articles—both jointly and individually—to The Fox, Art and Language’s short-lived art theory journal. Popović and Tijardović 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 climactic musical performance with The Red Crayola featuring Mel Ramsden, Paula Ramsden, and Kathryn Bigelow (who would later become an Oscar-winning filmmaker).

In both of these video works, shambolic musicality mediates forthright statements about art and politics. It is interesting to speculate the extent to which this transcodification was some kind of self-reflexive or self-critical act by Art and Language consistent with the mood of introspection, pessimism, and fatigue characteristic of the crisis years of the late-1970s. In such a reading, the evidently wry and ironic performances documented in these videos could well be seen as betraying very real anxieties about the emancipatory power of advanced art at this historical juncture – including the type of conceptual art Art and Language had been involved in for almost a decade, as well as radical politics and theory. 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 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 to roll back and dismantle the hard-won gains of the post-war socially-democratic settlement. The anxious sense of belief troubled or displaced by historical change that we encounter in Art and Language and The Red Crayola’s performances might therefore be understood as expressing some 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, with particular emphasis on images of persecution and martyrdom. 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 might 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.