In memoriam: Mel Ramsden
23 July 2024
It is with great sadness that Lisson Gallery announces the passing of Mel Ramsden, a central figure within the conceptual art practice Art & Language. Ramsden was born in Ilkeston, Derbyshire and studied at Nottingham College of Art (1961-63). He moved to Australia and studied at the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne (1963-64) before relocating to New York in 1967, where he joined the group of artists known as Art & Language. Their work has ranged vastly in medium and method, is always formally challenging, bitingly critical and self-aware and, partly through Ramsden's influence, has often incorporated minimal painterly gesture, text descriptions and strong theoretical underpinnings.
Ramsden straddled the transatlantic branches of Art & Language and collaborated on numerous occasions with Psychadelic band Red Krayola and theatre collective The Jackson Pollock Bar. Recent collaborations include performances with musicians J Spaceman and John Coxon and writer Matthew Jesse Jackson. Ramsden was equally instrumental in the conception of Art & Language’s most famous and interrogative series of works, entitled Index (the first of which was exhibited at Documenta and elsewhere throughout the early 1970s). Although Art & Language was at one point at least 50 strong in number, the only remaining artists working on the project over the past three decades have been Ramsden and Michael Baldwin, notwithstanding the literary and theoretical collaboration of Art & Language's long-term editor, Charles Harrison (1942-2009). Ramsden and Baldwin worked continuously together on numerous bodies of work over the past 47 years (Baldwin will now continue the practice from their studio near Oxford). These works have extended over time to include iterations of the Hostage paintings, Incidents in a Museum, Homes from Homes, intimate and revealing depictions of their studio practice, different maps, as well as conceptual portraits of famous figures and politicians, among other ongoing series.
Ramsden’s commitment to this inherently collaborative, self-effacing and self-critiquing way of working is evident in an essay titled ‘On Practice’, which he wrote for The Fox (no.1, vol.1, 1975): “The range of manoeuvres available to us under Modern Art are simply out of phase with the institutional conditions inherent under late capitalism. Hence, if our labour and means of production seem to be our own free possessions to do with as we please, ‘freely’ so to speak, it's only because we naively operate according to an outmoded model of competitive capitalism... The bureaucracy will subsume even the most persistent iconoclasm unless we begin to act on the realization that its real source of control lies in our very concept of our own ‘individual’ selves.”
Ramsden is survived by his wife Paula, daughters and an extended family.
Nicholas Logsdail remembers the artist: “I met Mel Ramsden through Michael Baldwin as he was associated with Art & Language from the early days. I visited his studio in the Bowery and saw his Secret Paintings that incorporated a monochrome painting containing ‘invisible content known only to its maker’, alongside a text panel describing the non-disclosure of the black canvas opposite. In his 100% Abstracts he would list the materials used and so paint the painting, in a totally literal way. He was an important part of the conceptual art story and of Art & Language, but always seemed to me among the most kind, thoughtful and considerate artists of that era.
He dealt with the friction of the fracturing and splintering of those who left Art & Language with his predictably accepting and matter-of-fact manner. When he moved to the UK, he and Michael shared a studio and a practice, which they have been interrogating and documenting, inside and out, ever since. In typical facetious fashion during an interview, I remember Mel answering a query about who painted which parts of each painting: “When Michael paints a good bit I paint it out, when I paint the good bits he paints mine out”.
Image: Mel Ramsden in the studio, 2019. Photograph by Joanna Thornberry.
