Corrected Slogans

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

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.	"Organisation"	2:37
7.	"It's an Illusion"	1:43
8.	"Penny Capitalists"	2:31
9.	"Plekhanov"	3:08
10.	"Natura Facit Saltus"	1:20
Total length:		46:34

Background

Writing and recording

After albums with the Rockin' Blue Diamonds and Manos Hadjidakis failed to materialize, Mayo Thompson moved to New York City in 1973. Thompson became an assistant to sculptor Robert Rauschenberg and became acquainted with the Art & Language group.

Michael Baldwin began writing the lyrics in 1973, including the unrecorded song "Two Small Countries".

• Recorded in the winter of 1974/1975
• Uncompleted opera Red Faces

Release

In May 1976, The Fox 3 contained full page ads for Corrected Slogans and Nine Gross and Conspicuous Errors

Released at John Weber exhibition on June 18, 1976

• Video Nine Gross and Conspicuous Errors
• Film segment And Now for Something Completely Different
• 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)

Advertisements

• 
  Ad in The Fox 3 (1976)
• 
  Postcard ad for Corrected Slogans and Art-Language Vol. 3 No. 3 (1976)
• 
  Postcard ad for Corrected Slogans and Art-Language Vol. 3 No. 4 (1976)

Ad in The Fox 3, May 1976

The distribution of function has brought a reproach to songs which differs from that levelled at 'fine art'. Songs have been expropriated extensively to the sub-sapient leisure industry. It is an illusion that songs have taken to commoditous distribution and media reinforcement somehow inviolate. Songs have become as meaningless as restrictive formalism. And reification is more complete in a world that fetishizes and sells as authentic those edited lumps of venality which are its characteristic output. A song can go-on ... absorbing and denying its own condition.

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
• 
  Unused original cover labels, 1976
• 
  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, 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

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

Personnel

• Michael Baldwin - lyrics
• Philip Pilkington - lyrics
• Mayo Thompson - music

Art & Language

Vocals

• Michael Baldwin
• Lynn Lemaster
• Charles Harrison
• Orlando Harrison
• Sandra Harrison
• Pauline Harrison
• Harold Hurrell
• Philip Pilkington
• Mel Ramsden
• Mayo Thompson

The Red Crayola

• Mayo Thompson - guitar, piano, organ
• Jesse Chamberlain - drums

Retrospectives

Mayo Thompson, 2005

When I first met Art & Language, […] I gave them a copy of my solo album, Corky’s Debt To His Father, and they said, “It’s kind of personal isn’t it?” I said, “Something wrong with that? You got another idea?” They said, “Yeah, we could try a whole new thing.” I said, “OK, give me some lyrics and I’ll put them to music and we’ll see what happens.” Next thing I know I get four pieces of text through the mail. Sure enough, when I started working on it I thought, this is a new language for me. I was also convinced by that time that you could put anything to music, language-wise, so I though, Yeah, let’s see.

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

Peter Smith

[...] 'Corrected Slogans,'—the record—is extraordinary. [...] The LP consists of 21 songs mostly to the accompaniment of various combinations of piano, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, and drums. [...] I also like Phillip Pilkington's Don't Talk to Sociologists which contains passages like 'Don't unite artists and don't talk to them if it suggests to you that there is a rational core [...] This seems to happen with those 'songs' which have the strongest lines and these for the most part are spoken rather than actually sung. [...]

Interview

January 1978

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.

An American Rock History: Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico: A Southwestern Pilgrimage

1990

Corrected Slogans is a collection of largely acoustic demos, simply constructed with operatic vocals and satirical and/or political lyrics which came out of sessions with the Art and Language organisation in 1976.

Art & Language International: Conceptual Art between Art Worlds

2016

Robert Bailey

The Unfinished Wish

2017

Seth Kim-Cohen