Essays on Art and Language

These essays by art historian and critic Charles Harrison are based on the premise that making art and talking about it are related enterprises. They are written from the point of view of Art&Language, the artistic movement based in England -and briefly in the United States- with which Harrison has been associated since 1970. Harrison uses the work of Art&Language as a central cas study to discuss develeopment in art from the 1950s through 1980s.
According to Harrison, the strongest motivation for writing about art is that it brings closer to waht which is other than ourselves. In seeing how a work is done, we learn about its achieved identity: we see, for example, that a drip on Pollock is intregral to ist technical character, whereas a drip on a Mondrian would not be. Throughout the book, Harrison uses specific examplesto address a range of questions about the history, theory, and making of modern art- questions about the conditions of its making and tha nature of its public, about the problems and priorities of criticism, and about the relations between interpretations and judgement.