“Yvon Lambert Paris is pleased to announce the opening of American artist Robert Barry’s solo exhibition Word Lists. Barry has shown with Yvon Lambert for more than 35 years and this exhibition marks his twelfth solo show with the gallery.
One of the pioneers of conceptualism and minimalism, Barry‘s (b. 1936) work has always been focused on space and the space between: between objects, between time, between artist and viewer. To him, the “idea” of an artwork is as important as the actual art object. The manifestation of this credo has led Barry to work in a variety of unorthodox and sometimes intangible media: magnetism, thoughts, ultrasonic sound and inert gases. Recently, the artist has been interested in the more traditional mediums of painting and sculpture.
Words are an essential element to Barry’s work. They evoke mental states of flux or contemplation and declare to the viewer a temporal and psychic intangibility. In this show Barry will utilize the walls and floor of the gallery space to exhibit individual word-based works, playing with proportion and scale both real and metaphorical. A large floor piece made of chrome colored cast acrylic letters spell out words like “tenuous”, “remind” and “expect.” The walls will contain several large paintings (178 x 178 cm) as well as vinyl and hand painted lettering. One particular wall work will replicate the composition of the sculpture Red Cross recently exhibited at the New York gallery.”
Click here for gallery listing, additional images, and press release
What strikes me on first glance is how the wall and the floor are metonymically aligned with the space of the page and how the words are allowed to resonate with the “white space” around them, their signification affected by color, position, and proximity to other words. In addition, the list suggests syntax without using actual sentence structure. A list of words can be thought of as a sequence, an accumulation, and/or a graphic arrangement and read accordingly. Language as material.
Performance image of Yvonne Rainer’s RoS Indexical, featuring Emily Coates, Sally Silvers, Patricia Hoffbauer, and Yvonne Rainer.
This work is a wonderful meditation on how we experience art, using recordings of Nijinsky’s Rite of Spring (with commentary) and combining daily and extra-daily movements as if to suggest both the familiar and the unfamiliar. At one point, presumably as a gesture to Rainer’s ongoing critique of the performer-audience hierarchy, members of the audience (obviously planted, as some were dressed in homage to the original Rite of Spring) began to heckle and shout at the dancers (who at that point wore what appeared to be kleenex boxes on their feet) and invade the stage. Phrases like, “Go back to Scarsdale!” and “This isn’t art!” could be heard before the “irate” viewers returned to their seats. The effect was quite funny and unexpected.
At one point, a number of banners dropped from the ceiling and unfurled to reveal various words printed on either side. Spinning slowly, they made a kind of ever-shifting poem in the air.
Click here for a terrific review by Richard Hell of Aram Saroyan’s Complete Minimal Poems, which I am reading right now. One especially wonderful short poem goes like this:
Brecht encourages his audience to think rather than becoming over concerned with the plot. Brecht invites his audience to identify with the issues faced by the characters and not the characters themselves. The play is a form of debate rather than an illusion. Brecht’s concept of Alienation involved the idea of, ‘making strange’. He aimed to take emotion out of the production and persuade the audience to distance themselves from the make believe. He also encouraged the actors to disassociate themselves from their roles; all of this would make the political truth easier to comprehend.
In order to detach and alienate his audiences from the story and force them to concentrate on the issue or argument, Brecht used a series of techniques to make the action strange.
Setting stories in unfamiliar locations, in different times.
Use of a chorus to sing the story, as well as narrators who were completely outside of the action.
Unrealistic speech, masks.
Diagetic and non-diagetic music.
Visible stage machinery.
Scene by scene summary of the action often using large signs.
Acting in the third person as well as actors sitting in the audience when not in a scene.
Most importantly Brecht used a technique called, ‘Breaking down the fourth wall’. This meant that the audience was not simply a spectator, but instead became mentally involved in the issues presented {Stephen Berkoff}.
Stage/mis-en-scène
Brightly lit at all times, no need for mood lighting.
No elaborate props, use of placards with instructions written on them.
Musicians on stage and often announced before playing.
Use of non-naturalistic techniques such as montage {series of still images}.
Brecht believed that epic theatre enables the audience to see things differently to how they had originally perceived them. Therefore by seeing the ‘truth’ they can begin to change things in the real world. Furthermore, he believed that by showing the suffering of those on stage, audiences could avoid it. The suffering he portrays is political. Brecht’s ideology is consistent with Marxism in that all human evil is a result of unjust social institutions.
Brecht no longer wanted audiences to be reduced to passivity but instead to be awakened to the truth of what he believed to be a highly formulated and constructed society.
I touch your mouth, with one finger I touch the edge of your mouth, I draw it as it if it came out of my hand, as if your mouth was for the first time just barely open, and closing my eyes is enough to undo it and start over. Each time I create the mouth I desire, the mouth that my hand chooses and draws for you on your face, one mouth chosen from all, chosen by me with sovereign freedom to draw with my hand on your face, and for some random chance I seek not to understand, it perfectly matches your smiling mouth, beneath the one my hand draws for you.
You look at me, you look at me closely, each time closer and then we play cyclops, we look at each other closer each time and our eyes grow, they grow closer, they overlap and the cyclops look at each other, breathing confusion, their mouths find each other and fight warmly, biting with their lips, resting their tongues lightly on their teeth, playing in their caverns where the heavy air comes and goes with the scent of an old perfume and silence. Then my hands want to hide in your hair, slowly stroke the depth of your hair while we kiss with mouths full of flowers or fish, of living movements, of dark fragrance. And if we bite each other, the pain is sweet, and if we drown in a short and terrible surge of breath, that instant death is beauty. And there is a single saliva and a single flavour of ripe fruit, and I can feel you shiver against me like a moon on the water.
from Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar
Now reread this passage and pay close attention to the sensations your body is experiencing as you read.
I cannot figure out who actually said this. Some say it was Steve Martin. Others say the proper quote was “writing about music is like dancing about architecture” and it has been attributed to Frank Zappa, Elvis Costello, and Laurie Anderson.
Regardless, writing about art (or music) and dancing about architecture are wonderful ideas! But I’m a better writer than dancer…
