Reviewing The Writing’s on the Wall: Language and Silence in Visible Arts appears like providing water to the ocean. Curated by Hilton Als, the exhibition mirrors the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer’s stripped but thorny prose — see, as an illustration, statements just like the deceptively easy “You know what being is. It happens to you all the time,” in his 2,000-plus-word essay accompanying the present. The exhibition is comparatively simple — although no much less wealthy and evocative for it — asking and suggesting solutions to the query: What’s the relationship of language and silence to visible artwork? Sometimes, nonetheless, it drowns in a dense, vexed community of obscure associations that made me yearn for strong land.
The primary, simple stage of expertise is outlined by understandable works, in addition to the wall texts, info contained within the Bloomberg Connects app through scannable QR codes, and Als’s curatorial essay — in different phrases, all the things that guides a viewer towards which means with out overdetermining it. This contains works that use phrases because the medium, comparable to Christopher Knowles’s typewritten one-line experiment “Untitled (Dance)” (undated), during which “dance” repeats throughout the web page in a type of bodily rhythm that successively leeches the phrase of which means, changing it to pure sound, in addition to Ian Hamilton Finlay’s “Poster/ Poem (Le Circus)” (1964), whereby phrases and symbols transfer freely throughout the web page in numerous colours and fonts — for instance, “hoop” inside a circle.
A few of the most profitable items reinforce the concept that we transfer by a flood of language and its fragments within the type of promoting, signage, and data (and although not explicitly talked about, digital media and scrolling). Andy Warhol’s acrylic and collage on linen work “Close Cover Before Striking” (1962), depicting a matchbook cowl with the titular phrases, together with etched scratches on the charcoal-gray placing floor, as an illustration, suggests a type of dialog between the producer’s printed instructions and the patron’s mark-making. A pair of untitled 2008 paper works by David Salle incorporates fragments of what look to be commercials, recalling the discovered poetry that seems in peeling layers of pasted-over subway adverts.
Andy Warhol, “Close Cover Before Striking” (1962), acrylic and collage on linen
Ellen Gallagher additionally appropriates adverts in “DeLuxe” (2004–5), during which she reworks these culled from magazines focusing on Black audiences by including watercolor, plasticine, toy eyeballs, and extra. They jogged my memory of doodle on public adverts and infrastructure (e.g., goatees, blacked-out eyes, graffiti tags), one other type of expression and dialog. And Ronny Quevedo attracts upon neglected types of communication in “body and soul (Reflection Eternal)” (2022), incorporating a costume sample of layered instructions and arrows, and “puntero” (2018), a chunk that inscribes the bodily actions of sport from a aim towards the middle of the sphere.
Equally integral to the exhibition, as instructed by its subtitle, is silence. Works associated to the theme vary from the cutesy, comparable to Vija Celmin’s “Pink Pearl Eraser” (1966–67), a large-scale replica of the eraser (although she’s able to inducing a deep type of quiet), to those who hush the thoughts, as in two works by the queen of silence, Agnes Martin. “Untitled #20” (1988) evokes a lined web page or a music employees absent its notes, however possesses a proper completeness that forestalls the dread of making an attempt to fill it. “Untitled 20” and an architectural aid panel by Jennie C. Jones, “Fluid Red Tone (in the break)” (2022), most efficiently obtain one of many exhibition’s acknowledged goals — “show[ing] what silence looks like.”
Among the many stars of this present is Ina Archer’s “Black Black Moonlight: A Minstrel Show” (2024), an almost 20-minute video set up that mixes and manipulates a century’s value of clips from movies and TV broadcasts, notably together with the enduring debate between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley on the Cambridge Union in 1965. In its dizzying pastiche of references severed from context, the artist creates an overload that ends in the type of silence Als defines as a state the place “everything and nothing speaks to you.” This silence pertains to Édouard Glissant’s idea of the marginalized topic’s proper to opacity — the political place of refusal. As Adrienne Wealthy warns us in one among many quotes on the wall: “Do not confuse it/ with any kind of absence.”
Jennie C. Jones, “Fluid Red Tone (in the break” (2022), architectural felt, acoustic panel, and acrylic on canvas
However The Writing’s On the Wall additionally wields silence in ways in which verge on obstinate obscurity. Which means glimmers winkingly on the horizon of 1 room, which units a Nineteenth-century male guardian determine made by an unrecorded Betsi-Nzaman artist upon a Modernist desk, invoking the gaping voids of historical past — the Euro-American artwork world makes a lot of Twentieth-century Modernism, however not sufficient of the corpus of West and Central African sculpture that impressed it. Pasted on the window behind the pairing is {a photograph} of {a photograph} of a person in an eyepatch and bowtie pasted on a window, its title suggesting that it was probably taken only a block down from the Hill Artwork Basis. However a close-by quote by James Joyce is the one indication apart from the guidelines that that depicted determine may be the author. Past that, one would wish to reach outfitted with data that he was a Modernist to make the connection that every one the works right here relate to the historiography of the motion. To totally put collectively the connection between all that and silence, a extra apt quote may need come from Portrait of the Artist as a Younger Man (1916): “I will try to express myself … using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use — silence, exile, and cunning.”
The exhibition all however loses me solely within the nook throughout from this set up, which pairs a photograph of Joan Didion holding a cigarette with “Rieuse,” an 1890 sculpture by Medardo Rosso portraying a laughing lady. Beside that may be a quote by Didion on Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Music (1979) in regards to the “vast emptiness at the center of the Western experience… a dread so close to zero that human voices fadeout [sic]….” Silence as a type of exhaustion, of defeat? Or perhaps we’re imagined to snigger within the face of nihilism, like Rosso’s bust? That picture of Didion is positioned excessive up within the nook, mirroring Kazimir Malevich’s intentional set up of his “Black Square” (1913) in a excessive nook, a typical place of Russian non secular icons — is it punning on her standing as a literary icon? Is it simply me who has no thought what’s occurring right here? Silence as “everything and nothing speak[ing]” to me, certainly. Is that the purpose? In that case, what’s the purpose? Fittingly sufficient, my stressed ruminations on this one vexingly inscrutable set up may be finest summed up by one other work on this typically evocative and compelling present. Stenciled in vibrant blue letters in Christopher Wool’s “Untitled” (1990) are the phrases: “Cat’s in bag; bag’s in river” — there appears to be some type of secret to unlocking the which means right here, however it’s misplaced on me.
Christopher Wool, “Untitled” (1992), enamel and graphite on paper
Set up view of The Writing’s on the Wall: Language and Silence within the Visible Arts
Set up view of The Writing’s on the Wall: Language and Silence within the Visible Arts
Christopher Knowles, “Untitled (Dance” (undated), typing on paper
Agnes Martin, “Untitled #20” (1998), acrylic and pencil on canvas
Vija Celmins, “Pink Pearl Eraser” (1966–67), acrylic on balsa wooden
Element of Ellen Gallagher, “DeLuxe” (2004–5), grid of 60 photogravure, etching, aquatint and drypoints with lithography, screenprint, embossing, tattoo-machine engraving; some with additions of plasticine, watercolor, pomade, and toy eyeballs
David Salle, “Untitled” (2008), oil on lithograph on paper
Ronny Quevedo, “puntero” (2018), wax on paper
The Writing’s on the Wall: Language and Silence within the Visible Arts continues on the Hill Artwork Basis (239 tenth Avenue third ground, Chelsea, Manhattan) by March 29. The exhibition was curated by Hilton Als.
