Words

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Fiona Banner 1066, 2010
‘The default take on Fiona Banner’s work is that it’s “about” language. Given that she has made punctuation marks into glowing neons and weighty bronzes, has handwritten start-to-finish running commentaries on Hollywood blockbusters, sexually explicit films and the bodies of life models, and fashioned an ersatz alphabet from fragmented images of fighter planes, that’s not an entirely unwarranted assessment. It is, however, a partial one, obscuring the poetics and acuity of the Merseyside-born artist’s practice, whose insights arise between laterally connected points of reference. Words and how they fail us, yes, but also war, pornography and the vulnerable human body. Banner has suggested that she began making art from war films because she loved them; because she wanted to figure out why they gripped her – how they could be at once seductive and repulsive; how we could hate war, but relish these movies. The earliest war film she found fascinating was Top Gun; in 2004 she made a word-portrait of Black Hawk Down. As for 1066, it does have a beautiful aspect which is the way that one description of what is going – an arrow in the eye, a soldier felled – overlays another, words running in opposite directions evoking the headlong vectors of the tapestry; and the idea that there always two sides to each story of war.’

 

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Jason Rhoades Twelve-Wheel Waggon Wheel Chandelier, 2004
12 wheels, acrylic glass, cables, 48 neon phrases, fishing line, polystyrene, hot glue, carpet, various materials.

 

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Micah Lexier & Derek McCormack I am the Coin (2010)
‘I AM THE COIN WAS A YEAR-LONG INSTALLATION CONSISTING OF THOUSANDS OF COINS MOUNTED DIRECTLY ON ONE WALL OF THE BMO PROJECT ROOM IN 2010.. EACH CUSTOM-MINTED COIN IS IMPRINTED WITH A SINGLE LETTER OF THE ALPHABET. WHAT AT FIRST APPEARS TO BE A RANDOM GRID OF LETTERS REVEALS ITSELF, UPON CLOSER INSPECTION, TO BE A SERIES OF WORDS AND SENTENCES UNINTERRUPTED BY SPACES OR PUNCTUATION MARKS. THE WORDS AND SENTENCES COMBINE TO TELL A STORY THAT WAS WRITTEN SPECIFICALLY FOR THIS PROJECT BY TORONTO WRITER DEREK MCCORMACK. THE BOTTOM HALF OF THE GRID SPELLS OUT THE STORY, WHICH CAN BE READ LIKE A BOOK, FROM LEFT TO RIGHT; THE TOP HALF OF THE GRID IS A MIRROR IMAGE OF THE BOTTOM. THE STORY IS ALL ABOUT COINS, THE INSTALLATION ITSELF, AND THE PEOPLE BEHIND IT.

‘THIS COMPLEX TALE IS NARRATED BY ONE OF THE COINS ON THE WALL, A SLIGHTLY MISCHIEVOUS COIN WITH A TASTE FOR PUNS, PUZZLES, CRYPTIC CONSTRAINTS, AS WELL AS ANECDOTES ABOUT REAL PEOPLE. BUT BE WARNED, THE ANECDOTES ARE NOT NECESSARILY TRUE.

‘A CLUE CONCEALED WITHIN THE STORY REVEALS THE LOCATION OF THE NARRATOR. THE FIRST ONE HUNDRED PEOPLE TO FIND THE CLUE AND IDENTIFY THE NARRATOR ON THIS WEBSITE WILL BE AWARDED A SPECIAL PRIZE.’

 

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Christopher Wool Untitled, 1990
‘This work is part of a series of language-based black-and-white “word paintings” Wool began making in the late 1980s. In an effort to impose limits on his abstract compositions, he tied them to phrases of his own invention or borrowed from other, often popular sources. The lines “The cat’s in the bag. The bag’s in the river” come from the 1957 film Sweet Smell of Success, written by Ernest Lehman and Clifford Odets, where it serves as film-noir code to convey the successful execution of a scheme to bring about the downfall of one of the characters.’

 

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Matt Mullican Untitled (Learning from That Person’s Work: Room 1), 2005
‘Since the 1970s Mullican has been experimenting with hypnosis to create art that both examines his subconscious, and functions as a strategy for breaking from the patterns of everyday life. Working under these hypnotically induced intoxications or psychoses, Mullican becomes his alter ego, what he refers to as that person—an ageless, genderless being that inhabits his physical body. That person’s reality is documented through a series of performances wherein he draws, counts, and writes with ink on large sheets of easel paper (as seen in the video below). The finished drawings are attached to queen-sized bed sheets in a grid-like pattern, and hung through a maze of installation rooms that acts as a diagram of that person’s reality (or, arguably, of Mullican’s subconscious).’

 

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Yi Xin Tong Fishermen’s Words, 2018
‘Gravesend-based Yi Xin Tong identifies as an artist first and as a fisherman second. But it’s a close second.’

 

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Edward Ruscha Pay Nothing Until April, 2003
‘In Pay or Pay Nothing Until April, Ruscha has used a mountain landscape and an advertising slogan painted in a clean modern font. Ruscha lives in Los Angeles and the city and its film industry is important in his work. The mountains he uses in his works have the spectacular and slightly unreal look of a film backdrop. By mixing awe-inspiring natural imagery with banal, consumerist text without any clear style, Ruscha’s painting reflects the city in which he lives, a place he once referred to as ‘the ultimate cardboard cut-out town’.’

 

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Richard Prince Joke Paintings, 1992 – 1999
‘Beginning in 1984, Richard Prince began assembling one-line gag cartoons and ‘borscht belt’ jokes from the 1950s which he redrew onto small pieces of paper. ‘Artists were casting sculptures in bronze, making huge paintings, talking about prices and clothes and cars and spending vast amounts of money. So I wrote jokes on little pieces of paper and sold them for $10 each’. Following the hand-written jokes and subsequent works in which cartoon images were silkscreened onto canvas, in 1987 Prince adopted a more radical, formulaic strategy of mechanically reproducing classic one liners and gags onto a flat monochrome canvas.’

 

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Ray Johnson Rejected cover design for Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations, 1957
‘Ray founded the New York Correspondence School with the first mailings being sent as far back as 1958. Ray was the center and primary proponent of the ‘school,’ mailing mimeographed letters, drawings (often of bunnies), instructions and collage. Text-wise, the work offered 4 primary challenges to the traditional studio/gallery/viewer formulation: Subverted the notion of high or low brow by simply ignoring the world in which those notions held sway. Changed the traditional artist-viewer relationship, offering original work to be viewed expressly in the home in what amounted to a 1:1 setting. Moved past the question as to whether or not language could be trusted. Johnson rendered it moot by mailing the work. If the Post Office could be trusted to deliver the work to the address on the envelope, how could you not ‘trust’ the work inside to be faithful to the same basic notions of language? It could not be reviewed…’

 

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William Burroughs Untitled, 1959
‘It’s a literary technique, but crazy influential as certain folks began to reconsider (again) how we understand the basics of our written language, looking instead to break down structural assumptions in order to find hidden meaning or, according to Burroughs, with potential for divining the future.’

 

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Carey Young Declared Void, 2005
Vinyl drawing and text, dimensions variable

 

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Carl Andre Untitled, 1963
Typed carbon paper transfer on paper

 

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John Waters Various, 1991 – 2006
‘You could just ask yourself, as Waters does in the essay “Roommates” in his 2010 book Role Models, “Isn’t art supposed to transpose even the most banal detail of our lives?”’

 

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Ben Anderson DFYVVM, 2017
Acrylic on faux marble

 

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Ad Reinhardt How to Look at …, 1946
‘These cartoons, neatly conjoining reproduced and hand-drawn line, pedagogically engage with exactly the problems Reinhardt was working out elsewhere and earlier on the sketchbook page and in actual lines of charcoal, ink, gouache, and glued paper. At the same time, they evince the artist’s impulse to both mine and undermine the burgeoning power of New York’s art institutions. (The Museum of Modern Art had opened in 1929, the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1931, and the Museum of Non-objective Painting—now the Guggenheim—in 1939.) The cartoons’ conflation of line and lineage, “actual activity” and critical engagement of institution and context, mirrors the artist’s multifaceted praxis as a whole. Reinhardt was keenly aware of what was and was not on view “about town”; he not only reviewed shows for publications including New Masses and PM but picketed museums and wrote pamphlets and letters to the editor about exhibition policies.’

 

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Larry Johnson Various, 1982 – 1991
‘Johnson’s art is highly formalized. Although he almost always uses photography, he does not consider himself a photographer. He follows a tradition of conceptual photography in which artists use photography for purposes other than capturing a decisive moment. Johnson works with text and images in various combinations invoking the parallel worlds of design and American popular culture.’

Untitled (A Quiet Life), 1990

Untitled (Movie Stars on Clouds), 1982/84

Untitled (Classically Tragic Story), 1991

Untitled (I Hated that About You), 1987

Untitled (Ghost Story for Courtney Love), 1992

 

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Goran Trbuljak old and bald I search for a gallery, 1982
‘The New Art Practice in the 1970s were mostly going on outside exhibition spaces, in galleries that were part of the student cultural centers, but occasionally also in certain state galleries which presented in their programs the local and international avant-garde scene, like the Gallery of Contemporary Art in Zagreb. In 1971, in the gallery of the Student Cultural Centre in Zagreb, Trbuljak exposed only a poster on which it was written, “I do not want to show anything new and original”.’

 

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Marcel Broodthaers L’Art et les mots, 1973
‘Although they may seem arbitrary, everything in those paintings has been carefully studied, from the typography to the kind of printing. The elegance and style of the typography frequently connote the tradition of high culture and its concern with execution and expression. He combines them in his literary paintings with an industrial element, mechanical reproduction, and they are his ironic response to the successive fashions of minimalism and conceptual art, while opening the way for a kind of visual expression which, without necessarily being poetry or painting, is both at the same time. They take to extremes the peintures-poèmes of Joan Miró and, most of all, the work of René Magritte (another Belgian, who had a deep influence on him).’

 

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Kay Rosen Various, 1991 – 2021
‘Kay Rosen is a master of the text-based art medium. She’s figured out how to meld the visual and the verbal into an ideal gallery experience. Using only words in block letters, her work is easy to read, yet beautiful to look at, delivering a mental punch that resonates long after her language is consumed. Specific enough to deliver a message, yet at the same time open enough to invite multiple interpretations. Rosen’s practice is masterfully tuned into the desire of the art viewer.’

 

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Shirin Neshat Zahra, 2008
C-print and ink

 

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John McQueen Bird Brain, 2002
‘On close inspection, the names of various birds are legible.’

 

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Camilio Rojas Flavor, 2011
‘This piece was created using over 3,400 cigarettes that spell the word flavor. The cigarettes are half smoked showing the nicotine in them.’

 

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Christopher Knowles Typings, 1981 – 1996
‘For a person with autism, like the artist Christopher Knowles, the world outside can be so noisy, so busy, so full of information that it becomes overwhelming and, sometimes, terrifying. Knowles’s response to the frenzied world around him is to construct islands of visual and auditory play in its midst. In his art—spanning text, sound, painting, sculpture, and performance—concrete facts, numbers, and patterns are basic elements that not only ground him in the world, but are a source of delight. His work can be disconcerting and strange, but is so imbued with Knowles’s ebullient energy that it’s always enchanting—and fun.’

 

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Rhys Ziemba Frank Zappa Quotation, 2008
Acrylic and vinyl lettering on found artwork

 

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Tom Phillips Humument Fragment, 2005
‘In 1966, at age twenty-nine, Tom Phillips began his Humument project, the “treatment” of the 1892 novel A Human Document, by the Victorian author William Hurrell Mallock. The first artist’s book that resulted was initially published in 1973 and has now gone through five editions; Phillips began a second version in 1980 and continues to work on it to this day. To create these treatments, the artist removed each page from Mallock’s novel and subjected it to playful editing, surgically removing blocks of text to form an Apollinaire-like shaped poem—or, rather, a Mallarmé-like throw of the verbal dice. Sometimes Phillips’s treated pages borrow from pop-culture imagery, sometimes old photographs are used, and sometimes figures are painted on the page. Each page has been worked and reworked, yet it all looks random and informal, as though Phillips had a divining rod that suddenly found the “right words” or else had been spooked by some hidden, subliminal meaning. In either case, a kind of alchemical distillation has taken place, with the lead of Mallock’s heavy prose quintessentialized into lyrical golden drops.’

 

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Jenny Holzer Various, 1989 – 2020
‘Since the 1970s, Jenny Holzer has inserted language into public settings as part of her singular conceptual practice. Her installations—which have taken the form of billboards, projections, park benches, condom wrappers, and electronic signs—feature texts which range from enigmatic, koan-like phrases such as “Abuse of power comes as no surprise” to longer, more involved screeds.’

 

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Richard Hamilton Swingeing London 67, 1968
‘Hamilton’s art dealer, Robert Fraser, and members of the rock group the Rolling Stones were arrested in 1967 by the London police for drug possession. The following year, Hamilton published several prints about the press coverage of the events. Swingeing London 67 is an assemblage of clippings compiled by Fraser’s gallery and laid out to mimic the composition of a page of newsprint. He selected headlines that focused on trivial details, such as the men’s meals, cars, and clothing, rather than on the court proceedings and sentences. Pieces of wrapping paper from an incense packet that appear between the cuttings reference the incense sticks that authorities encountered during 
their raid and alleged were meant to disguise the smell of cannabis.’

 

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Betty Tompkins Various, 2018
‘The artist has literally ripped out the pages of the art-historical canon, altering its images with very contemporary language about women, power, and guilt.’

 

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Zhang Dali Slogan No. 6,’Strengthen the construction of moral thought’, 2007
‘Zhang uses a particular technique of text and image juxtaposition to engage with the civic political slogans that were plastered on the streets of Beijing on the eve of the 2008 Olympic Games.’

 

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Bruce Nauman Eat Death, 1972
Yellow (Eat) glass tubing superimposed on blue (Death) tubing with glass tubing suspension frame

 

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Roni Horn Dickinson Stayed Home, 1992-1993
‘Emily Dickinson is a pivotal figure for Roni Horn, while also a figure of empathy. Born in 1830 in New England, Dickinson wrote some 1800 poems. But she preferred not to publish them, lived as a recluse in her bedroom, and restricted her social life to her Homestead. Her involvement with the world occurred through the books in her father’s library and her abundant correspondence. American feminist criticism, which blossomed in the early 1990s, returned to the question of Dickinson’s poetry and the normative image of her as a “recluse”, reassessing her chosen solitude as a requirement for her creativity and the fundamental condition for her freedom. Roni Horn, who takes the stand of being “before gender”, “neutralises” Dickinson. As a figure with whom Horn identifies, the poet and her poetry are an integral part of Horn’s quest for a centre.’

 

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Dan Graham Rock My Religion, 1982-84
‘Rock My Religion is a thesis on the relation between religion and rock music in contemporary culture. Graham formulates a history that begins with the Shakers, an early religious community who practiced self-denial and ecstatic trance dances. With the “reeling and rocking” of religious revivals as his point of departure, Graham analyzes the emergence of rock music as religion with the teenage consumer in the isolated suburban milieu of the 1950s, locating rock’s sexual and ideological context in post-World War II America. The music and philosophies of Patti Smith, who made explicit the trope that rock is religion, are his focus. This complex collage of text, film footage and performance forms a compelling theoretical essay on the ideological codes and historical contexts that inform the cultural phenomenon of rock `n’ roll music.’

 

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John Baldessari Various, 1966 – 1968
‘In the late 1960s Baldessari neglected painting and started to use words as a compositional element as images. ‘A word can’t substitute for an image, but is equal to it’, explained the artist in an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist and stated further: ‘You can build with words just like you can build with imagery.’ He began to create artworks with pure painted text on canvas and emulsions of photo and text. From 1966 to 1968 Baldessari produced a series of text-paintings consisting of statements about art and its concept. He displayed quotations from known art critics and used formulaic instructions or definitions and comments from art manuals. Thereby the artist transformed the influence of art theory and critics on artworks to the motif of his conceptual text-paintings.[5] As an artist of the conceptual art movement Baldessari’s aim was to produce art without using the conventional art praxis.’

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Guess what, our temperature starts climbing into the gross realm again starting tomorrow. One last (hopefully) sweat pot of a Paris. Yeah, the casting part of making a film is maybe the most exciting, certainly the most important. Maybe especially to a fiction writer like me since my fictional characters never grow surfaces (and I like it that way). Happily slightly belated birthday to Anita! Ha ha, that’s some mom love has there. Explains a lot. Love realising that what we call syntax is what words themselves call an orgy, G. ** David Ehrenstein, I don’t know ‘La Chair de l’Orchidée’, but soon I will. ** Travis (fka Cal), Hi! Oh, no, I’m sorry you had to go through the Covid ordeal. Ah, you are Cal or, rather, were ‘Cal’. Travis certainly works. Two syllables, strong on the first one, nice vowel sound combination. I’m hoping and trusting that your feeling of defeat is some last bit of mindfucking exhaust from your Covid bout. Your talent has always jumped into my brain full-fledged. It’s really nice to have you back. ** _Black_Acrylic, ‘ À l’intérieur’ is the Satan of scissors films. I saw on the news that Leeds won yesterday. Assuming that’s a plus in your world, congrats. ** Russ Healy, Oh, man, is there stuff you can or do take to make the arthritis take long naps? Thank you very much about ‘I Wished’. Yeah, I’m a big sentence fetishist. When I’m writing I think about the sentences more than anything else, I think. And when I read, same deal. And when I read a writer whose sentences seem too amazing to have even been possible — Foster-Wallace and Lutz being great examples — it’s like nerd LSD. And thank about ‘PGL’. Zac and Are super exciting and jonesing to make the new one. Have best day humanly possible. ** trees, Ted! Old buddy! Mega-maestro! You know, I’ve never seen ‘Exorcist 3’, and clearly that’s a gaping gap. That I will plug with it as soon as I find ‘E3’. Which shouldn’t be too hard? I’m well, and you? Love from Paris meeting and greeting your Philly love midair. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Well, we’re looking at initial audition tapes now. When we get to LA, we’ll meet in person with the most promising folks and have them do a little line reading but mostly just hang out and talk with them casually and observe them. Theoretically we’re open to pretty much anyone with any background or lack thereof. The first person we cast for ‘Room Temperature’ about six months ago is a young French guy who starred in a Michel Gondry film when he was 14, but he’s against conventional acting. So he has experience being filmed, which is very helpful, but has no acting tics we’ll have to erode. There are three people who we’re seriously interested interested in right now, and two of them are visual artists, and one of them is a 12 year old boy with no acting experience. So anything is possible. Mm, hm, I don’t remember where that list came from. I must have done a general google search re: films/scissors and ended up seeing a link. The Chills! You keep listening to bands I haven’t thought about in ages and would like to think about (and hear) again. I hate those delays. I managed to sneak into Criterion Channel over here through a VPN, but the connection is so sluggish for some reason that it’s almost useless. ** Misanthrope, Howdy, G! Up? This and that and the other thing, thanks. Argh about the impending extra work. How do you prepare for that, or will just leap into it blind? ** Robert, Hi! Oh, thanks a lot. Sounds nice. I live about two blocks from the Tuileries-Concorde-Champs Elysee corridor where the supersonic jets do their flyover on Bastille Day. I cant see them from my window, other than their reflection in a neighbor’s window, but the sound is immense and borderline apocalyptic earthquake-like. I think you’d like it. I hope your week has begun inimitably. ** Right. You get artistically employed wordage today. See you tomorrow.