10.19.2009

Secret Chief: Remember Charles Harrison (1942-2009)


"I certainly wouldn’t want to defend difficulty for its own sake. But in a world in which what seems to be expected is instant ease of transmission, it seems important to stress both that the work of critical cultural production tends to require a degree of exertion, and that a matching concentration may be required to recover what’s of value in art – as in much else. […] As regards the practice of Art & Language, however, it can be said that the objects that practice has generated – whether textual or pictorial or whatever – have generally been difficult to describe, and often contradictory in their apparent direction. They are consequently frustrating of attempts to escape from their internal detail into the vocabulary of cultural topicalisations. This may not have been good for business, but it has certainly been good for me. The need to confront the difficulties in question has remained central to my education as a writer on art over the course of nearly forty years."

From Christopher Heuer and Matthew Jesse Jackson interview Charles Harrison, in InterReview 08


Listen to Red Crayola With Art And Language, Born To Win (Transactional Analysis With Gestalt Experiments) from Kangaroo? (1981)