From the Press Release by Noah Barker, empire gallery founder and curator of this exhibition:
“The Fox was, first and foremost, a project by Art & Language, published by New York members of the collective. The intention of this group was to critically address the conditions of art production in New York, a city that had become synonymous with the art market. The contradictory and multivalent lines of argument appearing in The Fox were conjured by the spirit of its mammalian title taken from Isaiah Berlin’s 1953 essay “Hedgehog and the Fox”, which in turn refers to a line from the Greek poet Archilocus: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” In its pages, voices from within and without the Art & Language collective critiqued the art system, The Fox, and even the very possibility of critique itself. The fiery editorship and contentious discourse indelibly begot the formation’s splintering by its third issue.”
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This exhibition begins with a chronology of publications, exhibitions, and projects that took place concurrently with the New York based publication, The Fox.
Supplementing the chronology are elements of projects developed by various participants active in the Art & Language collective in New York; these include:
The Organization of Culture Under Monopoly Capitalism, 1976 (Michael Corris, Preston Heller, Andrew Menard), is a set of nine meter-square photoprints with silk-screened text, accompanied by a 53-minute documentary videotape—How Do You Feel About the Arts and Artifacts Indemnity Act?—about government support of the arts in relation to foreign and domestic policy. During the exhibition—The Fox & His Friends—empire gallery will continuously screen thevideotape, last viewed in New York in 1976. A transcript of the videotape, titled “The Organization of Culture Under Monopoly Capitalism, Part I ‘How Do You Feel About The Arts and Artifacts Indemnity Act?’”, appears in The Fox 3 (1976), pages 128-145.
Also on view is a French translation of the “Draft Form of Organization”, a proposal presented at a meeting of Art & Language on March 2, 1976. This document, which was exhibited in Paris at Eric Fabre Gallery in April, 1976, proposes a series of procedural constraints on the members of the group, such as “all work which is ‘made public’ will be represented under the collective name”; “all work which is ‘made public’ has to be discussed and accepted by the general body”; and “working ‘publicly’ in an individualistic manner will be considered as self-disqualification from this process.” (Michael Corris, “Inside a New York Art Gang: Selected Documents of Art & Language New York”, in Alex Alberro and Blake Stimson, eds., Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.)
The conversations that framed the proposal and acceptance of this document by all members of Art & Language in New York, save Joseph Kosuth and Sarah Charlesworth, were reconstructed by Mel Ramsden and published in The Fox 3 as “The Lumpen-Headache”, under the pseudonym, “Peter Benchley”. After the March 1976 meetings and up to the dissolution in September 1976 of the New York wing of the group, all exhibited work would be presented under the name (Provisional) Art & Language.
The Organization of Culture Under Self-Management Socialism, 1976 (Art & Language, New York), consists of nine text and image photoprints documenting conversations held at The Student Cultural Center, Belgrade (October 13-16, 1975). Jill Breakstone, Michael Corris, and Andrew Menard initiated discussions on issues relating to international exhibitions, cultural exchange, cultural imperialism, and the situation of avant-garde artists in Yugoslavia. Two film negatives of panels in this series are on view at empire. With permission, empire gallery fashioned a new display environment for the negatives in the form of custom-built light boxes. A recent discussion of this project in the context of the former Yugoslavia may be found in Branislav Jakovljevic, The Performance Apparatus. On the Ideological Production of Behaviors (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2025).
Two additional videos are being screened continuously as part of the exhibition at empire: Zoran Popovich, Struggle in New York (1976) and Red Krayola and Art & Language, Nine Gross & Conspicuous Errors (1976).
Struggle in New York (56 minutes, black & white, 16mm) presents a fascinating perspective from the point of view of a Yugoslav artist, on the groups and controversies that animated the politicized art scene in New York. Struggle in New York is a film that “Zoran Popović realized on 16 mm stock in New York during November of 1976. It amounts to an X-ray of the confrontational political avant-garde art scene that was active in New York that year. The contribution by the International Local group (Sarah Charlesworth, Joseph Kosuth, Anthony McCall) is about the status of collectives in the art world; Artists Meeting for Cultural Change read their manifesto “Boycott this Museum,” aimed at the Whitney Museum; Ian Burn from Art & Language reads a report on a right-wing political coup in Australia and discusses the possibility of organizing international anti-imperialist solidarity; Jill Breakstone, Michael Corris, Preston Heller, and Andrew Menard (Red-Herring group) analyze the metastasis of the contemporary art industry in the US; Art & Language members, including Kathryn Bigelow and Mel Ramsden, perform with the band Red Krayola, singing a song dedicated to Plekhanov and announcing that “most of the power and clout in the art world is in the hands of fascists of one kind or another”; there are also scenes from the studio life of union activists Carole Conde and Karl Beveridge, and one sees a presentation of the journal The Fox. The final scene shows an Art & Language quotation [the famous Monty Python catch phrase]: “…and now for something completely different.” [Source: Kontakt Collection, https://www.kontakt-collection.org/objects/5016/struggle-in-new-york] For more on Popovic’s film, see: http://handelstreetprojects.com/zoran-popovic.
Nine Gross & Conspicuous Errors is a 26-minute music video produced and performed by Mayo Thompson (guitar and keyboard)—a founding member of the punk band, Red Krayola—Jesse Chamberlain (on drums), with the participation of members of (Provisional) Art & Language—Mel Ramsden, Paula Ramsden, Ann Ramsden, Nigel Lendon, Donna Lendon, Christine Kozlov, Kathryn Bigelow, Ian Burn, and Terry Smith. Selections from the complete video are available online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6cnevh5bPc.
A review of Fox and His Friends by Theodora Walsh, may be found online at e-flux Criticism: https://www.e-flux.com/criticism/6782300/fox-and-his-friends
Michael Corris 