Art & Language has been one of the defining groups in conceptual art since the 1960s. The group follows a multidisciplinary approach (its work includes paintings, drawings, sculptures, installations, written documents, typescripts, microfilms, models and publications) and a collective concept in which the personal identities of its members merge, trusting in the discursive ability of works of art to address conflicts and analyse their role in the context of the present. The nature of the collective thwarts any attempt to classify its output, which constantly questions art as an institution rather than providing answers. The Hostages series, begun in the late 1980s, is an interesting exception: the collective has only rarely used painting as a medium, and most of its eminently discursive career is based on other forms of expression. This series reflects on the nature of painting by seemingly referencing distinctive features of abstract expressionism. And it does so in a way that questions that movement rather than paying tribute to it: a critical vision of the claims of creative originality and the supposedly automatic, unconscious, impulsive gestures that critics have traditionally seen as inspiring the abstract painters of the post-war period. To quote group member Mel Ramsden “Occasionally we mess around with painting. I remember a series of paintings, the early Hostage paintings, that have the appearance of semi-Abstract Expressionist works. There are certain things you have to do in order to make that sort of painting. One of them is you have to mean it!”

Hostage LXVI (1990) is part of a subgroup known as The Dark Series presented at the Lisson Gallery in London in 1991. These works came out of an approach which was initially textual: the self-imposed mission of a writer to depict a landscape close to the group’s studio, a banal, trivial element that serves as an excuse to present images that tend to confuse viewers. This mystifying effect is based on the dual nature of the surface of the work: the traditional oil-on-canvas piece is backed by wood and covered with a sheet of glass riveted onto the whole thing and painted on its inner face. This interplay of layers brings to light figurative elements, but produces a sense of strangeness that frustrates the expectations of viewers accustomed to looking at a painting as a single surface, forcing them into awareness of the constructed nature of the scene and making it difficult for them to decide whether it is abstract or figurative. That decision may in any case be a meaningless one in terms of conceptual art. With these elements, Art & Language pose questions about some of the most problematic aspects of 20th-century painting, such as the relationship between figures and backgrounds, iconicity versus abstraction and the literal versus the metaphorical. The feeling of uncertainty that the work inspires is also reinforced by its status as an object: its combination of formats gives it the look of a large glass stele. The generic title ‘Hostages’ is also disturbing in that it is highly fraught from a political perspective. This intensifies the link that viewers forge with the piece; a link that is difficult to negotiate and leads to disorientation and uncertainty.

Carlos Martín