Nine Gross and Conspicuous Errors

Nine Gross and Conspicuous Errors is a 1976 video by Art & Language.

Watch on UbuWeb

Track listing

		Track
1.		"It is a G&CE to desire socialism with capitalist desire..."
2.		"It is the task of the pragmatisers..."
3.		"Interpretation is the evident lack of an activist epistemology..."
4.		"Reductionist empiricist without specificity..."
		"Born to Win" (instrumental)
5.		"It is a G&CE to regard language as a classless mode of communication..." (1)
6.		"We must ferociously attack..." (1)
7.		"We must ferociously attack..." (2)
8.		"It is a G&CE to regard language as a classless means of communication..." (2)
9.		"Capitalist cognition produces systems of interpreted beliefs..."

Background

Description in The Fox 3, May 1976

Songs on video-tape have all sorts of anomalies. These nine video-taped 'errors' are all songs of going-on. Separate technology reinforces and is an instantiation of capitalist taxonomy. Leaving the music business to 'professionals' adds up to the same thing: the reproduction of capitalist formalisms and control mechanisms. Video-taped songs are not offered to those who can 'necessarily' afford access (though we do want them to go to schools) — we have something to say and a bunch of nobodies to say it to. But history 'frees' us to adapt ... there are real people out there (here) penetrating separate technology with class activism.

Screenings

• First screened at the "(Provisional) Art & Language" exhibition at John Weber Gallery in New York on June 18 – July 14, 1976
• March 5, 1995: Screened in Chicago with And Now for Something Completely Different
• September 17, 2004: Bookworks, London
• May 18, 2018: Galeria Sztuki Współczesnej w Opolu, Poland

• 
  Postcard for John Weber exhibition, 1976

Exhibitions

• 1976: Galerie Eric Fabre, Paris. Exhibited with "Singing Man" posters
• 2007: "Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll Since 1967" Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago September 29, 2007 to January 6, 2008: "There is also rare footage of Art & Language's theory-driven jam with Mayo Thompson and Red Krayola in Nine Gross and Conspicuous Errors, 1976, one of their many interactions with contemporary musicians that are outlined in the catalogue."
• 2014: MACBA
• June 7 – July 15, 2017: Rob Tufnell, Cologne

• 
  2014
• 
  2017

Physical releases

• May 1976: Full page advertisement for sales and rentals in The Fox 3
• October 1994: The Red Krayola sold a small amount of copies on their Japan tour
• 2000: Circuit 9 DVD magazine: two tracks
• 2010: Unreleased DVD

[Thompson] also informs me that a DVD is in the works for release this year which will include the Art & Language sections from Struggle In New York, a subsequent '76 music-and-video project Nine Gross and Conspicuous Errors, and more material from the period. "We won't be advertising it as featuring Kathryn [Bigelow]," Thompson says, "though [we] naturally welcome anyone who reads the fine print and gets interested because of her."

• 
  Full page ad in The Fox 3, 1976
• 
  Tape sold in Japan, 1994
• 
  Circuit 9 video magazine, 2000

Digital releases

• June 2011: Full video appeared on UbuWeb (along with Stephen Prina's Vinyl II)
• 2014: A portion of the video was uploaded to YouTube. The upload was titled "VTS 01 1" meaning it was sourced from a DVD

Personnel

• Mel Ramsden - lyrics
• Mayo Thompson - music

Art & Language

• Kathryn Bigelow
• Ian Burn
• Christine Kozlov
• Donna Lendon

• Nigel Lendon
• Mel Ramsden
• Paula Ramsden
• Terry Smith

The Red Crayola

• Mayo Thompson - guitar
• Jesse Chamberlain - drums

Retrospectives

Mayo Thompson, 2023

[...] By ’76 the UK/NY [Art & Language] conflict was still on, and at an impasse. The UK was looking for a way to break the ice. The NY group were effectively in disarray—factions fighting over practically everything. Through scheming I shall skip over the nuances of here, around that time I got involved in NY too, and got to know Mel Ramsden and Ian Burn, whom I had met at parties before but never talked with. They were the core of A&L in New York—before it became A&L NY—party to the A&L conversation started in the late ‘60s. We started working together. Music played a role. We made the 9 Gross & Conspicuous Errors video with harangues by Mel, attacking self-image, language management, public-relations life—implicitly, others in A&L NY. Artists were thought the worst of all political allies. Factional conflicts intensified. Before long they came to a head [...]

Mel Ramsden, 2016

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. And at 112 Greene Street — Kathryn Bigelow was the then-girlfriend of Jeffrey Lew — Kathryn Bigelow, who had also worked for Vito Acconci, knew how to get a video camera. And a video camera was something — 'wow, video camera, that's really cool!' And so we got that, and that was just made up on spot. There was no rehearsal or anything and it was deliberate take off on Corrected Slogans to have Nine Gross and Conspicuous Errors. It's almost unwatchable. Its virtues are its extreme embarrassment — to me.

Mel Ramsden, 2019

The performative aspects — I know people keep bringing it up now — Art & Language and performance and drawing and performance. And I'd never thought of the performative aspect of it until we did Nine Gross and Conspicuous Errors, which was an absurd performance. [...]

No, there was no rehearsal. There was just a bit of a conversation then invited a few people. But Mayo Thompson had done that already, years and years ago, because the Red Crayola used to have this thing [The Familiar Ugly] which were some fans that used to follow them around and then they came up on the stage and disrupted the performance. But that's in the late 60s. [...]

Well it was just a preposterous thing to do, to speak those kind of lyrics. But it was called Nine Gross and Conspicuous Errors because, I believe, in response to Corrected Slogans, in some way, because it was done slightly later even though the record wasn't released. But I'd heard some of the tracks. In fact I performed one of the tracks [Penny Capitalists] on Corrected Slogans—Brilliantly, I must say. [...]

Reviews

Frieze

October 13, 2005

Andrew Hunt

Two videos And Now for Something Completely Different and Nine Gross and Conspicuous Errors (both 1976), which have a similar lyrical content to the album [Corrected Slogans] and which both contain ironic posturing that thinly masks an awkward energy brought about by the mixture of political anthems and rock and roll. Of the two videos, Nine Gross and Conspicuous Errors best represents this experimental vitality. Unrehearsed songs are performed by groups of unsuspecting participants as well as the knowing core collaborators Art & Language’s Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden, with Thompson on guitar and Jesse Chamberlain on drums. Activist slogans, such as ‘we must ferociously attack so called institutionalized egalitarianism – it is a smokescreen, which attempts to replace activist content with liberal structures’, are chanted en masse and played out as theoretical quotations and self-mocking mantras. At one point Ramsden sings the line ‘Marx’s old chestnut “the philosophers know how to interpret the world, the point is to change it” is embedded in the nexus of dialectics’ and Thompson makes a dedication ‘to Ludwig Wittgenstein, who said “you cannot be a philosopher and a Communist at the same time”’.

Through visible misunderstandings of each text or acts of insincerity on the performers’ behalf, there’s an inevitable displacement of belief in these videos, where each deliberately inauthentic voice strives for a form of validity. Although the musical backing by The Red Crayola is vital and exciting, the aim, through the unfeasibility of the verbal performances and the lyrics – or the ‘conspicuous errors’ – appears to be to keep the gap between the performer and the text open. This is enforced by philosophical ramblings about the ‘commodification of social relations’ and remarks about language serving a strong managerial role, and interspersed by some expertly amateur routines, with Ramsden, in particular, fluctuating between self-conscious embarrassment – indicating the confusion of the situation – and an overconfidence about his own workmanlike timekeeping. At one point he looks extremely proud of a fellow player who’s so lost she has no idea what line she’s meant to be singing. Baldwin also appears ridiculous in his Travis Bickle sunglasses, growling comedically into the microphone and whistling pointlessly along with Ramsden. [...]

Art & Language and the Politics of Art Worlds, 1969-1977

2012

Robert Bailey

Art and the Public Sphere

2016

Kim Charnley

[...] A work undertaken in New York during the period of The Fox, under the moniker Music-Language (a collaboration between Art & Language and the musician Mayo Thompson of the band The Red Krayola), illustrates how the group developed this strategy of failure. The performance, created and videotaped at the John Weber gallery, was called Nine Gross and Conspicuous Errors. It consisted of nine ‘songs’ written by Mel Ramsden, performed by the members of the group, and accompanied by the improvised guitar and drums of Mayo Thompson and Jesse Chamberlain. The ‘lyrics’ express a form of Marxist militancy, sung in a variety of amateurish ways. In one of the songs, for example, the camera lurches towards Ramsden, who gesticulates like an evangelical preacher, accompanied at the microphone by Ian Burn’s chirpy whistling. Ramsden intones,

"[…] transfixed by the law of contradiction, P or not P, you or me not you and me, can be struggled against by first seeing mind-self as a social institution and historic process, component of historic reality […] not on the G and C E of aggrandizing and individuating self but of developing significant organizational forms."

At another point, Terry Smith, Nigel Lendon and Ramsden sing a round accompanied by manic Hammond organ and laconic drumming. Ramsden claps enthusiastically and all three bob to the rhythm:

"We must ferociously attack so called institutionalized egalitarianism (egalitarianism – egalitarianism!) It is a liberal smokescreen […] which attempts to replace activist content (activist content!) with liberal structure […] (structure […] structure […] structure) we must ferociously attack our social base here in New York […] it is deeply-rooted deformed by self-images and corresponding temptations of public-relations life."

The performances are ridiculous, inexpert, even light-hearted. The lyrics emphasize the reification of individuality under capitalism, and the concomitant foreclosure of meaningful forms of collective action. The haphazard delivery was not intended to undermine this message, but to anticipate and display a problem: that the critique was made from within the sanctuary of art. The songs are ‘errors’ but they are also trying to avoid the errors enforced by art’s usual decorum. Ramsden, in discussing the performance, has explained his attitude to it in this way:

"I meant everything and was absolutely literal-minded about the ‘lyrics’. In performance they were supposed to be ‘errors’ – something not made correctly. […] The fact that the performances were absurd – if that’s the word – and exposed these performers to sniggering and embarrassment was the point. How the lyrics and meaning of the lyrics fared under this exposure was also the point."

The meaning of these errors is connected to the group’s identification with revolutionary Marxism. The performance was intended, in part, to point to subjectively internalised barriers to participation in a revolutionary process, but also satirically to attack the ideological function of art from a revolutionary perspective. This was sometimes understood at the time as an attempt to interrupt a subjective involvement in ‘art bureaucracy’. Bureaucracy and ‘artistic freedom’, Ramsden suggests, are interconnected in a space where ‘the ruling market forms the standard of intelligibility’. Freedom is, in fact, an internalized alienation: ‘the market isn’t just contingently there […] we don’t just create freely and then afterwards get bulldozed by the market […] we now practice with the market in mind (and I’m not loftily excepting my own writing here)’.