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It has been a notable feature of Art & Language's involvement in the art of painting that the possibility of continuing a substantial tradition has had to be worked for afresh with each new series of work. In each case this has involved a process of reconnection not simply to a relevant genre but more importantly to its historical problem-field. To address the modern problems of landscape is to look back to the impressionists. Art & Language's landscapes make explicit reference to Monet's paintings of poplar trees, executed exactly a hundred years before in 1891. This reference is established not merely through the laconic use of poplars as a recurrent motif but also through play on different atmospheric effects over the course of a series of related works. The Hostages thus call to mind the last historical moment at which a heightened naturalistic vision could plausibly be made the vehicle for a technically modern art. But they also take upon themselves the distinctive range of formal problems by which the landscape genre as a whole was animated throughout its early modern phase.
This last statement stands in need of some justification. Specifically, it requires an account of the problems in question and of their continuing life in the history of painting. The basic issue can be put like this: In painting that draws much of its figurative and metaphorical depth from reference to a potentially limitless space, how is a sense of presence and concreteness to be achieved in the spectator? That is to say, how is the spectator to be positioned relative to the picture's immediate surface without littering its imaginary foreground with the bearers of anecdote and narrative, weak modern equivalents of those nymphs and shepherd and picturesque peasants that served in classical landscape painting to disguise the fact that these were paintings without properly accredited subjects?...."