We managed to get to Al Ruppersberg’s exhibition “You and Me or the Art of Give and Take” at the Santa Monica Museum on its last day. My favorite work was a wonderful two-part book drawing Twins, which is in Mike Kelley’s collection. There was another stunning piece in which viewers were invited to rearrange laminated panels on a giant pegboard to “tell the story they wanted.” There were images and texts relating to punk rock and old Americana. On the other side of the pegboard wall was a “Never Ending Book,” featuring images collaged on the wall and, in boxes resting on colorful sculptures, color-print-out of some of the images that you could take home. (We loved the idea of The Never Ending Book, Part 2…ha!) The entire installation was gorgeous and everything was embued with Ruppersberg’s generous humor.

There is a wonderful article on the exhibition here, with great installation shots.

Jutta Koether, The Staging of Restricted Means in the Landscape Redefines the Terms of Pleasure of Painting… (via anaanaancard)

I like the way Koether performs various types of language/discourse about art to underscore the idea of “reading” painting. Painter-as-poet-as-performer, she tosses the phrase “seeing red” in the air like a die as if to see what side is up when it lands. The painting and the page. Her hands are red.

“Violins Violence Silence”
1981-1982
Neon tubing with clear glass tubing suspension frame, 60 1/2 x 66 1/2 x 6 inches
Oliver-Hoffmann Family Collection, Chicago
Courtesy Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, © Bruce Nauman/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

via Art21

This post is dedicated to my son, Aubrey, who, when he was 8, told a sales clerk he was planning to go out for Hallowe’en as “Violence” — she heard “Violins” and thought he was so cute. He ended up going as the Periodic Table of Undead Elements.

Yes, it was lazy. But I could not think my way out of it for some time.

I read Julia Kristeva and was drawn to her ideas about the Semiotic, as that which exists “pre-language” — pre-Oedipal state, pre-Mirror Stage, pre-awareness of differentiation prompting the need for communication. I still believe that such a state exists (even moreso since I have had the opportunity to spend time with infants), but it is difficult for one within language to conceive of something that exists without language.

Getting back to my conversation with my friend…I was finally able to articulate for myself how I have somehow been able to reconcile my conviction regarding the Semiotic with my (no longer melancholic) interest in language, especially within the realm of art. It is simply this: nowhere is it more evident to me that language is an adaptive, mutating, and dynamic system than in (some) writing about art. Art regularly confronts us with experiences that leave us struggling to find the words to describe them. Or even questioning what relationship language can hope to have to art. We are acutely aware of being at the threshold of language while deeply engaged with its most primary informing impulses: the need and/or desire to communicate. (“I want to tell you about this thing.”)

Some artists recogize the need to create a discourse, a foundation in language, into which their work can be received. That discourse does not necessarily exist until they make it. And so these artists write. And they make art out of language.

So, through this blog (a word that was itself born only recently), I write, and I present what these artists write. And I learn why I do it through talking with friends.

Robert Barry at Yvon Lambert

From the press release:

“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.”

Via Contemporary Art Daily

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.

Regardless, writing about art (or music) and dancing about architecture are wonderful ideas! But I’m a better writer than dancer…

I think the implications of mirror neurons for how we understand art may be profound…