Corrected Slogans

Corrected Slogans
Studio album by Art & Language
Released	1976
Recorded	1974-1975
Studio
Label
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Track listing

Side A

No.	Title	Length
1.	"Maharashtra"	1:35
2.	"Keep All Your Friends"	2:20
3.	"Imagination I & II"	1:11
4.	"Coleridge vs Martineau"	1:26
5.	"An Exemplification"	1:08
6.	"Postscript to SDS' Infiltration"	0:25
7.	"War Dance I & II"	3:30
8.	"An Harangue"	3:05
9.	"Ergastulum"	3:01
10.	"The Mistakes of Trotsky... Thesmophoriazusae"	2:09
11.	"Louis Napoleon"	2:33

Side B

No.	Title	Length
1.	"Seven Compartments"	2:42
2.	"Petrichenko"	2:47
3.	"Don't Talk to Sociologists..."	2:14
4.	"What Are the Inexpensive Things the Panel Most Enjoys? ... An International"	1:01
5.	"History"	3:55
6.	"It's an Illusion"	1:43
7.	"Penny Capitalists"	2:31
8.	"Plekhanov"	3:08
9.	"Natura Facit Saltus"	1:20
Total length:		46:34

Background

• Writing began in 1973
• Unrecorded song Two Small Countries
• Retroactively considered the first collaboration between The Red Crayola and Art & Language

Further reading: Lisson ON AIR podcast episode with Art & Language on their collaboration with the Red Krayola (2019)

• 
  Postcard ad for Corrected Slogans and Art-Language Vol. 3 No. 3
• 
  Postcard ad for Corrected Slogans and Art-Language Vol. 3 No. 4

Personnel

Music

• Vocals: Art & Language
• Lyrics: Michael Baldwin & Philip Pilkington
• Music: Mayo Thompson
• Drums: Jesse Chamberlain

Releases

First pressing

• Initial pressing of 1000 copies
• Self-released in the US and UK
• First sold at Art & Language's 'Music-Language' exhibition on June 18, 1976
• Cover design consisted of glued-on text labels

• 
  Front
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  Unused original cover labels, 1976
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  Postcard for John Weber Gallery exhibition, 1976

Robert Self gallery version

• Alternate sleeve with artwork from Art & Language's series "Ten Posters: Illustrations for Art-Language". This image, reportedly a caricature of Joseph Beuys, was used for all subsequent issues of the record. This is the only version that says "Art & Language" on the front cover.
• Sold at Art & Language's exhibition at Robert Self gallery starting June 28, 1977

• 
  Sleeve from the exhibition at Robert Self gallery, 1977
• 
  Ten Posters: Illustrations for Art-Language, 1977

Recommend Records reissue

• In October 1982, the German zines Spex and Sounds reported that People's Records was releasing the first reissue of the record. However it appears that the label folded before this could come to fruition
• This reissue was distributed by Recommended Records who would also release Black Snakes in 1983

• 
  Front
• 
  Half-page ad in Spex, October 1982

Drag City reissues

CD reissue

• Released June 16, 1997 on its sublabel Dexter's Cigar

LP reissue

• Released April 21, 2015

Retrospectives

Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden of Art & Language, 2016

Ramsden: When we met Mayo Thompson, the Red Crayola was not in existence. The Red Crayola was a memory of something that took place in Houston, Texas in the mid 1960s. Mayo met Michael [Baldwin] in England, but at the time he was living in New York with Christine Kozlov — so there was a kind of social circle — and working for Robert Rauschenberg. And when I started vaguely working with Mayo, it wasn't as a musician. I mean, I vaguely knew he had a guitar at home, but he never spoke about music in particular. He was interested in work that Art & Language were doing at that time in New York and he just began to participate. The first musical project came up with Michael in Haughley.

Baldwin: He and I were having some little conversation about the Red Crayola and the fact that he had this band and it was moribund [...] And out of this conversation emerged the possibility of — would it be possible — what if I were to write some sort of lyric-like material, but I would want this lyric-like material to be utterly improbable as the content for a rock & roll song. And he seemed to warm to this idea. And then off he went to work for Bob Rauschenberg and one way or another Bob Rauschenberg paid for me to go to Captiva Island in Florida at his place there and sit in a shed in clouds of mosquitos writing these improbable lyrics, these strange, partial extractions, versifications of Trotskyian economics and unlikely things like that. Interestingly enough, I was apprehended by the US immigration service in Miami, Florida and my passport was taken away, and I was thrown in the cooler for a moment or two, because, I think, some agents of the US government had been present on the plane and noticed these unspeakable commie tracts in my possession which I was taking with me for various cribs and uses in this lyric-writing enterprise.

But it arose out of that and, in a way, one of the reasons that came up is that we'd been working on some work in which the more apparently theoretical and discursive texts that had been associated with Art & Language had started, we'd started, or I'd started to compress them into more slogan-like political entities — texts, scripts — and there seemed quite a natural way in which this compression could then give rise and take them into the world of the song lyric.

Anyway, Mayo got going with that, started writing the music, came back over to England and we all trooped down to a 16-track. In those days that was the very bee's knees in recording studios, and performed until we more or less got it... I don't know, I hesitate to say 'right'. [laughs] We got to the end, anyway.

Ramsden: So it wasn't really a case of "great, let's make an 'art band,'" or anything like that. It all started in a very kind of casual way.

Baldwin: A rather speculative way.

Ramsden: And he wasn't the Red Crayola, he called the... Corrected Slogans thing was pub— was by Music-Language, so he had an Art-Language kind of take on that music language.

When we made that so-called 'insane' video Nine Gross and Conspicuous Errors, one of the reasons why that took place was that one of the tracks on Corrected Slogans was recorded at 112 Greene Street.

Mayo Thompson, 2010

By 1978, things with Art & Language weren't working out and I'd come to England unsure what I was doing. I'd read about Rough Trade [...] and went in one time and asked to hear "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo", the Pere Ubu single [...] That was my first visit. I came back a while later and took twenty-five copies of Corrected Slogans, an album I had made with Art & Language, in to see if they would buy them. Geoff [Travis] said that he could sell them all, a claim that later turned out not to be true, but gradually more copies found their way into the system: more importantly, I found my way into the system.

Reviews

Art Monthly

December 1977, no. 13

Peter Smith

Interview

January 1978, vol. 8, iss. 1

Glenn O'Brien

The best LP I borrowed this month was Music-Language: Corrected Slogans by Art & Language. You won't find this in any record stores, but maybe at a great art book store like Jaap Riteman (W. Broadway & Spring). It's words and music by a noted bunch of conceptual art agitators and sounds for the most part like Monty Python gone to Stalinism and folk music, but one cut really knocks me out and that's "An Harangue" which features a Velvet Underground influenced New York garage-rock rhythm guitar solo with an Oxford accented Marxist/Leninist/Anarchist/et seq. class analysis tract overdubbed.

OP Magazine

198?

Bonnie Gordon and Edward Kaplan

Combine the nerdiest aspects of folk music with the creepiest parts of political rhetoric, and add a dash of "music" that is nearly inaudible. To give an example of some of the rhetoric: "The struggle for realism, a social practice is vitiated by private commitment. The only first step is the performance of concrete organizational tasks. Organization on class lines against the institutional ideology." Now take these words, and sing-talk them, just off the top of your head, the way a nine year old might do it. Only try to do it with as little imagination as possible. Also: sing as if you're tone deaf. Pluck a few guitar strings, sounding as lame as possible. You're getting the idea. you just can't dance to it. A lot of language here, very little art.

The Trouser Press Guide to New Wave Records

1983

SG

[...] Rather unusual even for that time, [The Red Crayola] faded into limbo until turning up to do sessions in 1976 with the art rock band, Art & Language, which yielded the demos collected on Corrected Slogans; work on the album parallels the serious/silly music of Robert Wyatt. Largely acoustic in nature, with extremely simple songs, complex with satirical/political lyrics, and operatic vocals, Corrected Slogans qualifies as rock only by association.

Image gallery

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  Catalog photo of Corrected Slogans for Germano Celant's 1977 exhibition 'The Record as Artwork'