Red Faces
Red Faces was an uncompleted 'opera' by Art & Language proposed between 1975 and 1976.
See also: The Fox
Background
Michael Corris, Inside a New York Art Gang, 1996[1]
A questionnaire authored by Mel Ramsden and Mayo Thompson was circulated within the group sometime during late 1975 and early 1976. Thompson — who had recently become involved with Art & Language in New York — had previously spent some time in Great Britain working with Michael Baldwin, Lynn Lemaster, Philip Pilkington and others on a number of songs which would be released during the summer of that year as Music-language. The title Red faces refers to a projected “opera” about the tragi-comic consequences of the group’s — and by extension, all artists’ — contradictory class location. The original document, from which the present text is taken, lists twenty-four questions. Red faces was never completed.
The complete questionnaire is archived in the Michael Corris papers of the Art & Language New York group collection at The Getty.[2]
Mel Ramsden and Mayo Thompson, excerpts from Questionnaire for "Red Faces", 1975-76[1]
Your reply’s to the following list of questions will provide us with the base for your participation in Red faces. Take as much space as you want — just reply in the way you think appropriate — only for Christ’s sake don’t get creative or contrive to “write songs.” Answer whatever questions you want . . . extrapolate. The questions are sort of arbitrary — extracted from a modest text on organization. They don’t ooze relevance and there are no booby-traps:
1. Do you think there is a ruling class conspiracy in the United States? If so, what is it that in your view constitutes that conspiracy? (Rather than “conspiracy,” consider “ruling class complex.”)
2. Liberal institutions make use of radicals and dissenters to give a diversified veneer to their own, in fact repressive institutions. Do you think a) The Fox pack is being or will be used in this way, and b) if so, what would it take for The Fox pack to move on to a higher logical-institutional space — assuming we’re not already in that space. Another way of putting this might be: how do we escape a merely inverse relation to the art-world or, how do we move from dependent critical theory to autonomous radical theory? . . .
8. How do you feel about the fact that M. Ramsden and M. Thompson are scripting Red faces and formulating these questions? . . .
12. Do you think “being an artist” is a description of an ontologically special mind with a fundamental mental endowment called “creativity” or do you think being an artist is a social contribution? Is this the same as saying: being an electrician doesn’t describe what that person is, it descries their social contribution? In saying creativity is either a state of mind or a social contribution should this in fact be framed in either/or terms? Could you imagine any situation in which these either/or terms could be heuristic-propagandistic. What purpose could be served by insisting on an either/or formulation? . . .
Thompson and Art & Language later collaborated on the opera Victorine.
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (1999) pg.476
- ↑ https://www.getty.edu/research/collections/component/10T9HG