Mel Ramsden, who spent the last half century participating in Art & Language, had antipodean connections (or more accurately disconnections). His early life had been a series of migrations, arriving in Melbourne as a small child in the late 1940s, he returned to his birthplace in Ilkeston, Derbyshire with his mother at the age of 14, after the death of his father in 1958. There, he attended Nottingham College of Arts and Crafts in 1962 and then the following year came back to Melbourne, so by the age of eighteen he had shifted twice between working-class Nottingham and Melbourne.

In 1963 he went to the National Gallery School in Melbourne, for a term, where he met Ian Burn, Trevor Vickers and Peter Booth, amongst other young students. In April 1964 he wrote a score titled ‘The City’ whose stellar cast includes Balla, Severini, Satie, Cage, Léger and Malevich. It was never performed. Ramsden sought the persona of an avant-gardist at the end of the era of high modernism yet found himself marooned in the Australian suburbs. One work he realised before permanently leaving Australia wasLocations. It consists of eight colour transparencies, all taken one afternoon at suburban Wattle Park, an outer suburb of Melbourne. There he placed and photographed a square frame in different locations in the landscape. It was inspired by hearing about Ad Reinhardt’s Black Paintings, from his friend Roger Cutforth, a fellow Nottingham art student, who wrote to him on seeing the first London exhibition of Reinhardt’s in mid-1964. Ramsden recalled:

Cutforth told me that his paintings were almost impossible to see, that they had to be roped off and that if you ‘saw’ the Reinhardts the rest of the show ceased to exist. This made a big impression on me, especially doing work that made other artists’ work disappear … To make the virtual (the hard to see cross) and the literal (the painting support) newly problematical was one immense virtue I saw in Reinhardt even though these may not have been his intentions at all.

Placed in the park, the square frame of abstraction stands in defiance of the conventions of selection and framing integral to conventional landscape painting. Four years later Mel sent one of his impossibly long thin black paintings from New York for the inaugural NGV exhibition, The Field in 1968. The following year, he exhibited Six Negatives, alongside other artworks with Burn and Cutforth at Pinacotheca gallery in Melbourne. A copy of Locations was included in Burn and Ramsden’s book, Collected Works, also exhibited in Pinacotheca in 1971. These works now form part of the pre-history of Conceptual art, before he and Burn merged with Art & Language to become one of the most iconoclastic collaborations of contemporary art.

His last visit to Australia was to deliver one of the Ian Burn Memorial lectures in 2000. His lecture, ‘Remembering Conceptual Art’ appears, along with some dozen collaborative texts he wrote with Ian, in the recently published Ian Burn Collected Writings 1966-1993, that I dedicated to Mel.

Ann Stephen

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