[...] One such work appeared in reproduction on the cover of Art-Language volume 5 number 1 in October 1982: a pencil drawing, based on a photograph, of Mel Ramsden wearing a large flat cap and an anxious expression, with one side of his mouth pulled out of its natural shape, as though by injury or disease. Among the published works of Art & Language there are few which are so apparently disconnected from the avant-garde legacy of Conceptual Art, and even fewer which are both so securely if insouciantly connected to a conventional genre – in this instance the single portrait head – and so clearly dependent upon conventional techniques of depiction. At the time of its production the drawing appeared – to me at least – as a symptom of distraction in the practice. It is significant, however, that the issue of Art-Language for which this image served as a cover was one concerned with theories of expression and with a revisitation of Walter Benjamin’s paper on the Author as Producer – a paper in which it was argued that it is the position of artists in the relations of production, and not the success of their work according to prevailing aesthetic principles, that decides the power of that work to turn spectators into collaborators. It is not my aim now to dignify this relatively slight and almost forgotten drawing, but rather to explore the intuition which brought it back to mind in the present context: an intuition – running counter to the empirical evidence of stylistic developments – that the achievement of portraiture, of a sort, and depiction, of a sort, has been and remains a measure of aesthetic worth by which the practice of Art & Language has been involuntarily determined over a considerable period. [...]
