Seeing as the artists’ works function best in the ephemeral zone between escapism and tried-and-true formalist and geometrical principles, the candid and almost vulnerable nature of his humble yet austere thoughts – as in words – regarding his own work positions it in a strange realm: while clearly abstract, the written word would automatically call for encapsulating it in a way as to shed light onto its components, yet the artist clearly states that, regarding his oblong and rather unusual visual vocabulary, he doesn’t even necessarily know where the forms come from and that he wishes the viewer to approach the work not wanting to know what one form might “mean” but instead the audience to be open as to what it might suggest. Thus, the written word eludes the works even further, even if, factually, words are, well, present on a piece of paper that is either handed to visitors or is grabbed by them at the entrance of the gallery. Essentially, the artist’s letter says, “I don’t know, and neither should you”, in the most charming way possible.
What Pîslaru’s press-release shows is not directly the lived-in truth of the works but rather a preoccupation with the dichotomy between abstract art and writing (about abstract art). By virtue of saying “I don’t know” – simplified, of course -, Pîslaru’s intent is not that of diminishing the power of the single work but rather questioning whether or not talking about the nature of the work is of any help at all, especially when decoding an artwork into its many parts. Merely linguistically, even to say one does not “know” is a slight oxymoron, for, as is written, to not know still needs to be put into words. The words “I”, “don’t” and “know” still have to appear on a page. In a sense, to not know still fills the page, paradoxically with more letters than “to know”. To truly not know would mean to not say anything, aka. to not have any press release at all or simply have a blank page, kind of like this:
Naturally, this Wittgensteinian thought-experiment is rather senseless, but it does raise the question: if, sometimes, writing about abstraction is impossible and nearly derivative, is there a way in which the written word, in art and when talking about art, can be extrapolated from its rigorous cage in order for it to not necessarily mean something else, something new, but for it to assert itself in a way that might give rise to a thing outside of the work of art and language; outside of the binary system of seeing and reacting.
Naturally, this approach is much more effective when done in the realm of visual art, since, as one should be accustomed to knowing, to simply write is always additive, even when someone “doesn’t know”, as you can clearly see. If one merely thinks of visual artists working with language, the names of Barbara Kruger or Jenny Holzer might be amongst the first ones to be of relevance, and this would certainly be a decent outset. The only problem is the, amongst others, Kruger and Holzer often – if not only – seem to be more interested in the visual and semantic qualities of the written word and less so in how an absence of linguistic meaning can be accentuated. Kruger’s and Holzer’s works are to be seen as clear statements of intent.
Christopher Wool’s work, in turn and for example, is often, especially in the case of the word paintings, discussed and appreciated for how direct yet effective they might seem, with canvases often sporting provocative phrases, slogans or simply adjectives like “Sell the house, sell the car, sell the kids” and so on. It could but also be arguable that Wool’s paintings are not direct at all, for what they often entail is a fragmentation of language and punctuation, often dividing the words he chooses by the grammatically wrong number of syllables or reducing the space between each word as to make the phrase harder to read. It often feels like what interests Wool is not the clear annihilation of language, but neither is it the provocative and imposing nature of the (often) black lettering on white ground. Instead, one might suspect Wool’s interests to lie in between the two, or rather to make the audience susceptible to the foreloin and ephemeral nature of language when it is not presented in a way with which we might already be accustomed to. Considering the prevalence of, especially in the west, certain punctuation and stylistic tropes language has been inscribed with over the decades, it is actually almost impossible to not feel some kind of resistance when looking at many of Wool’s word-paintings. We might, after having already seen a few, become more accustomed to the “formula” he works within, but the almost epiphanic effect they exude when the actual word finally, after not more than some seconds, reveals itself is always present.
For Mel Bochner, a conceptual-art pioneer, the written word is less fragmented than Wools’s, yet it retains the same quality of “if you blink you might miss it”. Bochner, in contrast to Wool, is more open to certain affectations, certain neologisms, abbreviations and, to much surprise, the importance of punctuation, or rather what we inscribe certain punctuation with. In his work “Amazing” from 2011, the artist presents a colorful canvas adorned with words like “YESSS!”, “OMG!”, “WOW!” and many more adjectives that either imply a generally good or bad connotation. Words, or rather abbreviations, like the aforementioned “OMG!” are not meant to be seen as wanting to alienate the viewer because almost every viewer will know what the abbreviation stands for, even if Bochner never spells it out for you. The exclamation mark at the end should also be noted, because this is precisely what Wool discards in his paintings: the gravitas of linguistic tropes are, in Wool’s case, omitted and replaced with the size of the text on the canvas – one can assume that the bigger the words, the more, literal, weight is given to them – while Bochner does the exact inverse by making the audience, hopefully, aware of how certain punctuation inscribed the words with different affections. Where Bochner might meet both Pîslaru and Wool is in his “Blah, Blah, Blah” series, where the triad of repetitive “Blah’s” is painted onto a canvas, over a background that might remind some of the better Sterling Ruby’s. It should also be noted that often, the paint used for the lettering is smudged onto the canvas in a way as to appear as is dripping downward, almost dripping but not quite, perhaps alluding to the fact that the meaning of words is only ever temporary. In these works, Bochner is somehow able to perhaps go even beyond Wool’s attempts at dismantling language and gets closer to some of Beckett’s better failures, in that he somehow found a way to make paintings that, at the same time, mean very much and very little. Naturally, this should not be held over Wool’s head since he has never seemed interested in eluding meaning completely, as the words of his word-paintings all mean something relatively specific. In the case of “Blah, Blah Blah”, the words of the painting are inherently senseless, but only because we – and by we most of the West is meant – have an understanding of the fact that the triage of “blah, blah, blah” usually is equated to “more of the same” or, in certain cases, “something of little or no importance”, so little that it doesn’t even need to fully be mentioned. It could be arguable that if someone were to see Bochner’s works of this series and not have a prior understanding of what the affectation might imply, the reaction could be a drastically different one; one where the search for meaning will unfortunately or thankfully – depending on who you ask – be fruitless.
A similar insight into the absurdity of the written word and its extremes can often be spotted in the works of American artist Bruce Nauman, especially if we consider not only his many works incorporating neon but the titles of works themselves as standalone pieces of linguistic information (or trickery). In works like “Run From Fear / Fun From Rear” (1972), the artist literally presents the two phrases made out of neon tubing hung one above the other, in two different colors. In similar works like “None Sing / Neon Sign” (1970) or “Eat / Death” (1972), the two phrases might overlap or interchange their lightness, to show one word and not the other at different times. With the use of puns, “dad-jokes” and a slight grammatical trickery, Nauman puts the fun back in funny, creating works that would surely make Wittgenstein, at the very least, smirk from the otherwise of make-believe. Nauman doesn’t want to critique language, but he does show that it is possible to play with even such a seemingly, abhorrently monumental thing such as words themselves. It could be argued that, in fact, works such as the aforementioned “None Sign / Neon Sign” are amongst the closest works of art to not say anything, because, if anything, such a work is doing something; it is implying that simply by existing, it is, even if a phrase like “none sign” doesn’t actually mean anything and is, grammatically, wrong. Nauman is surely aware of his faulty grammar but doesn’t dwell on or in it. Instead, by asserting the presence of the work, the work, evidently, is, no matter how wrong the grammar might be or if a word is spelled correctly or not. By showing the fluid nature of language, Nauman essentially points the middle finger to Joseph Kosuth and his “One and Three Chairs” (1965), wherein the artist, showing a chair, a photograph of the chair and the dictionary’s definition of the word “chair” placed side by side attempts to question the nature of the object. Essentially, Nauman might be saying that if we ought to accept the word chair, it’s objecthood as a chair and it’s relict (as a photograph), we also cannot omit from this equation the fact that the word “chair” can also have different anagrams, such as “air”, “hair” or “car”. In fact, Kosuth seems certain that a chair is a chair (is a chair is chair etc.), or at least he is certain of the fact that the three versions of “his” chair are all intertwined, but it could also be arguable that to omit the possibility of other words in the word “chair” is a grave mistake, especially in the realm of the so-called conceptual art. Just because a dictionary says the word “chair” to be something precise, it does not mean that all other words within it are not true as well.
Beyond all the puns and punctuation, the written word in visual art can also become pure form, such as in the case of Giovanni Serafini’s “Codex Seraphinianus”, a mystical book full of the artists illustrations that is filled with what might appear as amorphous letters in Arabic of Sanskrit, but in reality, every symbol present in the book is completely imaginary, not meaning or translating to anything at all. Here, the semantic and semiotic meaning of language is eluded completely in favor of the purely visual aspect, the “design of letters”, if we will. Serafini’s approach is clearly more intertwined with the history of text based works – such as the novel – than visual art, especially if we think of the pseudo-imaginary language of Joyce in “Finnegans Wake”, but if we look even deeper we might also be able to relate the minimalism and geometrical approach of the artist’s letters to some of the better attempts at Russian constructivism, or perhaps even, even more poignantly so, many of the better Kandinsky’s. What Serafini was able to reach was not a point beyond language, but the creation of a subjective language, one in which he might be the only one to pretend to know what the hell is written in the “Codex”. Simultaneously, by virtue of it not being decipherable to anybody outside the artist’s mind, the symbols retain a certain democracy that is not present in what we deem as “normal” languages, which Kosuth perfectly exemplifies (implying that to know objects also means to know what they are called, making language everything but democratic and more dogmatic). Given these parameters, it seems that the only possible ways in which language is able to transcend and, simultaneously, negate itself is either by, like Serafini did, creating a completely made up one or, as in the practice of Emilio Isgrò, to erase it (almost completely). In fact, one could argue that Isgrò’s work, often characterized by the erasure of the written word with the help of (often) black markers is the antithesis to Serafini, making the audience aware of the fact that even the act of cancelling out something is, at its very core, an additive one, even if it seems to elude something else. Isgró does not play with language itself but instead he chooses to highlight a specific part of the text by erasing everything else around it, making the viewer more suspectable to the power of a single word, of a single phrase, of a single aphorism or of the formal and aesthetic character of the black marker itself. What thus becomes the work is not only the erasure of present language, but the marker lines themselves, creating a cascading rhythm that is dictated by the size of the word that is being erased and by the various paragraphs the pages might (or might not) have. In a sense, this approach recalls Wool’s word-paintings, but it inverts the gaze as to be focused not on what is but what once was and is no longer. The artistic intervention of erasure also questions the sanctity of the printed word, something we usually, especially in the context of literature, seem to be weary of messing with. Once a book is out in print and available to the public, the general tendency is to take the content at face-value just by it existing out in the “real” world, but Isgrò clearly shows that, as aforementioned, the inherent story a word might have is never set in stone. A similar example of a play on not only words but also the medium of the soft-cover book could be the work “50 Shades Of Gray” by Simon Fujiwara, in which the artist displays 50 copies of the eponymous book, placed on a shelf mounted to the walls of whatever institution it might be shown in. This Nauman-eske approach not only challenges the ready-made, inscribing it with a more poignant cultural influx then, let’s say, a urinary, but it also seems to rely on the power of taking something literally versus taking something metaphorically, shining in-between the two. Presumably, everybody could picture what fifty shades of grey (the color) might look like, but everybody familiar with the rather blasphemous book in question will know it to be about everything else except the color gray. Even the books shown in the installation are clearly not made out of fifty different shades of gray; they seem to be more of a placeholder for the linguistic parallels and synonyms of the words “shades”, relating to the possibility of there being other similar objects, with a similar objecthood, up until the number fifty (which is only arbitrary and indicative of the title of the book and not the maximum amount of “possible shades” of the object in question). The word “shade”, in this instance might be a synonym for a similar objecthood, but it also becomes an antonym of the situation presented, in which, as aforementioned, the fifty “shades” – as in books – presented are all the same ones, with the same cover and the same spine-design. Turning Kosuth’s proposition of a chair being a chair (being a chair being a chair etc.) on its head, Fujiwara hints at the possibility of failure within language and the dichotomy between the seemingly fixed written word and its connection to the object’s presence, especially in a scenario where repetition of said object is at the core of the artwork’s idea.
A similar, more metaphorical but still quite literal, approach to language is its use in the oeuvre of On Kawara, (in)famous for his “Date Paintings”; paintings that simply feature a given date of when the work was completed on (often) white lettering on canvases often grounded in deep blacks, reds and adjacent colors. Kawara almost manic approach to the written word anchors it in a time and place where it was made, but the work obviously does not show all of this. This is simply the backstory behind the paintings, which might seem trivial and banal to those that don’t know it, and rightfully so. Yet, Kawara’s meditation on presence, echoed in the written word/numbers, could serve as an incipit to thinking about where language might be able to point towards. His “Date Paintings” aren’t simply dates on canvases, but a delineation of a method of working within a specific timeframe, ending up becoming a talisman for a democratic and non-hierarchical approach to artistic practice. In this case, the work is not simply itself but equally so what it represents metaphorically, which might speak more about how we humans are able to relate one particular accumulation of letters to something completely different, something outside of a particular sentence. Kawara’s dates are not simply dates and places, they are metaphors packaged in the shortest amalgamation of letters (perhaps) possible. In this case, simply reading them as one would a Wool or Bochner painting might not suffice, because, truthfully, there isn’t much else on them than just a rather non-specific frame of time (albeit specific to the end of, as aforementioned, one particular day in which, as stated by the artist, the work has to be completed). In fact, there is an inherent blandness in Kawara’s work, a blandness that, paradoxically, seems to become vital for the existence of the work, almost akin to the kind of blandness we might associate with the taste of water, and yet that is precisely its point. Kawara’s paintings are purposefully bland so that the reflection on being might be undisturbed, as what is important is not what is happening on the canvas but what is outside of it, in the mind of the audience.
A similar attribute – that of something, a phenomenology, happening outside of the physical limitations of the work – can be found in not few artists from the Arte Povera era of abstraction. Take, for example, Giovanni Anselmo, who had long been preoccupied with the intersections between the objecthood of a medium and its relationship to things like gravity, intellect, movement, space and many more. The artist also often incorporated the written word into his works, whether it being a component of the work or the presence of a thought-provoking title. In the work “Entrare Nell’ Opera” (1970) – loosely translating to “to enter the work” – the artist presents a photographic emulsion mounted on canvas in which we see a figure running into/towards a field, photographed from a birds-eye-view perspective. The work exists in many sizes and iteration, but the subject is always the same. Especially on occasions where one is presented with a larger version of the work, the title seems to be as much an invitation as a stage direction for the audience to go up as close to the work as possible, in order to become swallowed by the work, as it is also an implicit codification of the objecthood of the work itself, meaning that by calling the work itself “to enter the work”, Anselmo is effectively questioning the nature of said very work. Am I, the viewer, “entering the work” or is the figure in the photograph, with a stance that indicates an increase in movement, entering the work? If so, what exactly is the artwork? Is it mother nature and the field portrayed in the photograph, the act of perpetuating a motion or none of the above? What is also peculiar is that, more often than not, the artwork, when shown, is referred to by its Italian title, creating an even more fragmented linguistic relationship with a potential viewer and hiding an epiphanic moment of discovery when one is inquisitive enough to decipher/translate the title into their own speaking language. A similar bewilderment can be found in the work “Linea Terra” (1970) – or “Earth Line” – in which the artist displaces an indicative amount of earth/soil onto a wall with the help of a binding agent like glue, forming a line of it parallel to the floor. Here, like in many other of Anselmo’s works, a shift in gravitational pulls dictates the readability of the work, while the title simply accentuates it, precising the materiality of the piece. There is also often an element of tongue-and-cheek humor in many of the artists specifications: the earth used was once the earth we walked on, which we now admire not only from a different perspective but in an aggregation that would never be found in nature. What feels like the inverse of Richard Long’s “A Line Made From Walking” (1967) is actually, similarly to Kawara’s, an approach to indicate a precise space and geographical location. Presumably, when the artist first showed the work in Italy, the earth was Italian earth, which will inevitably differ from any other earth from any other part of the globe. In this case, the title is also not only a demarcation of the works’ materials (to some extent, since it also would include glue) but also a clarification – not that it was particularly necessary but hey – of the works’ geometrical form.
Similarly, in Stanley Brouwn’s by now almost icon “This Way Brouwn” – a performative action wherein the artist asked pedestrians to draw directions for a particular place onto white sheets of paper and then, as the name suggests, aptly stamped them with the inscription “This way Brouwn” – the artist himself positions his own body in relation to that of others and the geographical locations of interest. By inserting his own name into not only a piece of work but also its title, Brouwn effectively assumes both the onlooker’s and the goer’s position; a position of uncertainty, no doubt. More broadly, language might not necessarily be Brouwn’s preferred artistic vocabulary – for that would be walking itself as a form of measurement – but it is almost always somehow incorporated into the final work, with great pains to make his scant output feel congruous and holistic. Thus, what often ends up happening is that measurements, weights or sizes are translated into words; words that, if one were to only buy the catalog and not know the concept behind the work, would be near to meaningless or nonsensical. Yet, if one is, to say, “in the know”, one will realize that, not dissimilar to Kawara’s approach, Brouwn is, most often, trying to relate phenomena into language and vice versa; an act that might seem so simple and banal, perhaps even redundant, that actually doing it becomes fastidious. Yet, by engaging in tasks that could be done by almost anybody, the artist effectively erases himself out of his own work and let’s language work its magic. In a certain sense, it seems that the absence of the action in favor of the reminder of it is what Brouwn’s practice was concerned about. Linguistically, it is also important to note that almost any time Brouwn’s name would appear on catalogs or exhibition titles, his name and surname would be spelled with no capital letters, implying that no letter of his name was more important than the other. It could also have been a purely visual trick, but one might be inclined to consider the former theory. In keeping with the artist’s visual representation of himself, the rest of the current page of this digital document will be left blank in order to echo not only his absence, but also the clear delineation of an absence of words formulated after having proclaimed that “the following page will be left blank”. As mentioned in the begging of this inquisition, even the word “blank” is, decidedly, not.
Relating language to a particular visual effect is also apparent in the work of Alighiero Boetti and his rather infamous tapestry-based works. Featuring a bright grid of various colors, each grid quadrant enclosing a different letter, the works are, like Bochner’s, literally readable, although Boetti always makes an effort to have the individual letters (and thus the final word/phrase) not spelled horizontally but vertically, without any punctuation or (often) spacing in between them. A similar approach to language can be found a series of works that feature an array of canvases, hung beside each other which present the letters of the alphabet on the left-hand side of the first canvas. The artist then adds various comma-signs, progressing horizontally and positioned beside each letter, thus fragmenting the eventual sentence that makes up the title of the work. The audience thus has to play along with the game Boetti is creating in order to unveil whatever the individual words might spell out. It also notable to address the painterly gesture of the comma sign as an indicator for a letter, something that, grammatically, is incorrect. In this way, the comma sign loses its syntactical meaning and becomes an extension of the artists’ visual vocabulary, implying more so a relationship to elements of cartography and notions of position rather than it being a literal indication of possible punctuation. Naturally, the extreme of such an action is also possible, meaning the moment in which language becomes so abstracted from semantics, it ends up becoming purely a sign, only echoing the eventual calligraphic quality of what actually makes up the written word. Clear examples of this extrapolation of language can be found in the work of someone like Hanne Darboven or Cy Twombly, where the written word is either, as in Twombly’s case, only hinted at through the abstraction of words as symbols, becoming eventual incisions or, as with Darboven’s translation of dates into scribbles, circumvented completely. In both cases, the allusion to the written word serves only as a reminder of a particular kind of gesture, of the motion of the pencil or the brush, thus evading syntactical correctness altogether. In this case, both artists seem to be more concerned with the possibility of a personal kind of visual vocabulary that does in fact derive from language or the act of writing but is less so informed by its grammatical structures.
Whoever might choose to work with language in any which way is, according to Samuel Beckett, failing implicitly, for there is no real escape from the medium. Neither is there a way in which to eliminate it fully. Thus, perhaps the only possible way to create a phenomenological foray into the possibilities of language is the use of the sentiments that are, often, either implied in language or that are able to relate it to semantics and/ or semiotics. Take Nauman’s digression into language and one will inevitably note that those neon works don’t exactly lead to anything other than, perhaps, a more precise and acute awareness of the tyranny of language itself. In Anselmo’s case, especially in works like those that feature a seemingly invisible projection of various words – like “particolare” (loosely translating to “detail”) or “infinito” (“infinite”) – that only manifest when one placed an object in front of the projector that is darker than the space itself and is thus able to carry the contrast of said projection, the written word is there all along, we just need to try a little bit harder in order to find it. Once found, once an object is interjected between the projector and the supposed nothingness, the written word becomes, as in it subjects the world outside of itself to its own parameters of wishful existence. To know this, to know that visual art can be determined by the written or spoken word – something rather foreloin and ephemeral – is perhaps already enough.
In memory of Mel Bochner.