In November 2014, an exhibition called Nobody Spoke opened at the Lisson Gallery in London. The show took its name from its centrepiece, an installation of 17 small chairs, each made of 10 canvases painted in black and white with haphazard images and texts.
Some of these reappeared in drawings on a nearby wall; the chairs themselves starred in an adjoining 40-minute video, this time occupied by members of a German artists’ collective who debated the nature of ekphrasis (the description of pictures in words). It was, and was meant to be, very confusing. The work had all been made by a group called Art & Language, one of whose last two remaining members, Mel Ramsden, has died aged 79.
If Ramsden was of the last, he had not been of the first. When Art & Language was founded in the late 1960s in Coventry, he was living in New York. Born in Ilkeston, Derbyshire, Melvyn was the son of Emily (nee Howe) and Ted Ramsden, a hosiery mechanic. When still a young boy, his family moved to Australia, where he was sent to school near Melbourne.
His father died when he was 14, and two years later Mel returned to England to live with an aunt while he studied at the Nottingham School of Art and Design (1961-63). There, he made friends with a fellow student, Roger Cutforth.
On finishing, Ramsden went back to Melbourne, to spend a year at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School, studying with an Australian named Ian Burn. By 1967, Ramsden, Burn and Cutforth were all living in New York, where they formed an early group of what are now known as conceptual artists. This they called the Society for Theoretical Art and Analysis.
In August 1969, the trio exhibited their work at the Melbourne gallery Pinacotheca. Unable to afford to travel to Australia to curate the exhibition themselves, they instead posted it to the gallery in a small black box, with instructions on how the works inside should be shown. Ramsden’s contribution, Six Negatives, was a bound book of printed pages and photo lithographs, the text on the former explaining what the latter were about.
This was very much of its day. The year before, 1968, had seen youth and leftwing protests worldwide, for civil rights and against war and capitalism. Part of the impulse of conceptual art was to make work that was intangible and, therefore, unsellable. In Britain, the newly formed Art & Language had declared a block of air above Oxfordshire an artwork. The work itself was less the point than was the argument justifying its existence. This process was known, broadly, as “dematerialisation”.
Ramsden, trained as a painter, brought a painterly aesthetic to these new strategies. In 1967-68, he made Secret Painting, a black monochrome canvas with, next to it, a rather larger gelatine print, the words on which spelled out the work’s meaning. “The content of this painting is invisible,” the rubric read. “The character and dimension of the content are to be kept permanently secret, known only to the artist.” At least part of the point was satirical, mocking the artist-as-hero hype that surrounded monochrome painters such as Robert Ryman.
In 1970, Ramsden joined the New York chapter of Art & Language. By this time, the group numbered some 50 members, in the US, Britain and Australia. With his American wife, Paula Eck, whom he married in 1974, Ramsden helped produce the group’s publication, Art-Language: The Journal of Conceptual Art (1969-85), as well as working on the group’s most celebrated piece, Index 01. An installation made up of eight filing cabinets filled with papers that recorded the history of the work’s own making, this was shown to acclaim at the five-yearly German art exhibition, Documenta, in 1972.
Ramsden and Eck also began a series of collaborative performances with a Texas psychedelic band, Red Krayola. The first of these was in 1973, the last – an album, Five American Portraits, including ones of George W Bush, John Wayne and Wile E Coyote – in 2010. The band’s leader, Mayo Thompson, called Art & Language “the baddest bastards on the block”.
This seemed an unlikely description of Ramsden, who was unfailingly mild-mannered and amiable. When Art & Language’s American and British sections bad-temperedly fell out in the early 70s, he refused to be embroiled in the feuding. In 1977, he and Eck moved to Middleton Cheney, a village in West Northamptonshire, where they would live for the next 47 years.
There, Ramsden shared his studio and practice with Michael Baldwin, one of the original founders of Art & Language at Coventry College of Art in 1968. For nearly half a century, the two men worked in collaboration, each refusing to take ownership of their art. “When Michael paints a good bit, I paint it out,” Ramsden cheerily said. “And when I paint the good bits, he paints mine out.”
Burn died in 1993, Cutforth in 2019. In the end, Ramsden and Baldwin were the only surviving members of their once sizeable group. For all their insistence on anonymity and self-effacement, time inevitably brought them the kind of heroism Art & Language had been set up to defy. In 1986 the group was nominated for the Turner prize; in 1999, PS1 MoMA in New York held an Art & Language retrospective, and the collective’s work is held in major institutions internationally, including Tate Modern, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and the Pompidou Centre, Paris.
The pages of Six Negatives, made to short-circuit ideas of monetary worth, themselves became objects of value, displayed individually framed. In 2013, the boxed contents of the 1969 exhibition at the Pinacotheca in Melbourne were reassembled and shown at the University Art Gallery, Sydney. Ramsden accepted all this with customary fatalism.
Paula survives him, as do their daughters, Anne and Katie, and two grandchildren, Molly and Edward.
• Melvyn Robert (Mel) Ramsden, artist, born 27 December 1944; died 23 July 2024
