Continuing through March 27
There was a moment that began in the late 1960s when artists became fascinated by language as subject matter for visual art. This was not unprecedented, as the Dada art that emerged during the First World War also displayed that preoccupation, but there was and remains a difference: the post-1960s artists arrived at their subjects in the wake of Minimalism’s closing the door on phenomenology and opening another door onto primary structures that proved to be linguistic building blocks. Thus emerged an aloof reexamination of language as a sensuous and evocative visual phenomenon rather than a willfully disrupted logic. Emphasis was placed on the free-flowing interplay of connotation and denotation taking graphic form.
The prints by the 11 artists included in “Expressions of Language” all address this moment of transition, though in a variety of ways. But the thread that unites their work resides in their exploration of the irrational powers of language extending beyond instruction and proposition.
One of the most striking works here is Robert Barry’s “Untitled” (1978), oddly so because it represents the slow dissolution of memory that connects words to their worldly reference points. Faintly described words hover at the periphery of this soft ground etching, printed in a dreamy soft gray, looking as if they are floating out of distinction and out of view. The words in Hamish Fulton’s “Porcupine” (1982) are more distinct, but just as mysterious. This multi-generational work is printed on three vertically connected pieces of paper that read as a concrete poem saluting the work that Jasper Johns was doing at the time. It could also be regarded as a haiku, only much more ambiguous. In Catherine Wagner’s set of nine photogravures titled “Spatial Verbs” (2021), minimalist forms are just beginning their transformation into linguistic building blocks, each one rendered in a rich range of blue.
William T. Wiley’s 2006 multi-generational print “Charmin Billy” runs in the opposite direction. It includes a cascade of puns and other absurd representations highlighting the digressive qualities of language. This sets up a satirical assembly picture composed around the centrally placed image of the portly boy Billy. Riots-of-misrepresentation are also present in the two spit bite aquatints by Jacqueline Humphries (2016), using clusters of emoticons and other oddball typography to form energized clouds that look like insect hives coming to life. Fred Wilson’s multi-generational “Exchange” (2004) use a similar word-cloud strategy. At first they look like close-ups of fingerprints, then reveal themselves to be a murky infographic tracking racial epithets in the writings of William Shakespeare.
The largest prints here are by Matt Mullican, all yellow, black and white, employing a variety of techniques to explore the friction between nouns and verbs. In “REPRESENT THE WORK, I love to work for Truth and Beauty” (2020), we see the conundrum of activity/process versus finished product displayed as a slogan that invites contradictory interpretation.
Two series of etchings by Ed Ruscha reflect on the dissolution of single words or abbreviated terms. There are six prints from 2023 that are composed on a diagonal axis taking common terms like “This One” or “Baby Jet” as their subjects, usually rendered in two colors. In all six of these etchings, the words are pictured as either dissolving or coalescing amidst broken track lines that crackle across the page, their appearance coming across like a corrupted video signal. The other series, featuring four sequential renditions of the famous Hollywood sign (a frequent subject of Ruscha’s work) is titled “All Found Down 1-4” (2026). This quartet of soft ground etchings highlighted with aquatint comes across as still shots from an animated sequence, showing the way that the sign slowly disintegrates from the left image to the one on the right, finally crumbling like the unattended relic of a forlorn civilization.
