PLAYING with WORDS:

How text artists experiment and play with the written word by Jerome Fletcher

For the last one hundred years or so, since the end of the first World War and the advent of Modernism, the Western artistic tradition could be broadly characterised by one word – experimentation. Whether in music, literature, the plastic or visual arts, there has existed an almost continuous avant garde of practitioners engaged in a process of experimenting with new technologies, new materials, new forms, new crossovers between practices, challenging accepted cultural norms, and it could be argued (and many scientists would agree) that experimentation is very much a form of play; sometimes directed play, sometimes apparently aimless play. One area of the visual arts where much play has taken place is in relation to words. Words used to be the sole domain of the ‘writer’. Now, text artists are playing with the visual possibilities of language, using words as their raw material, just as sculptors, say, might use stone or metal.

Of course, written words always have a material form. They are not abstractions. They have to take on a physical form to appear in the world. The form that we are most familiar with is the one you are looking at here — two-dimensional, black marks in horizontal lines on a white surface, typically created with a pen or keyboard. They are of a certain size to make them readable yet portable in large numbers. This arrangement is so common we don’t even think about it. Indeed, traditional writers expect us as readers to ignore the material form of the text, to look through the words, to their ‘meaning’, as if the two can be separated.

But what you are engaging with here is only one possible form for written words.

Historically, words have been incised on stone, papyrus, animal skins, tree bark, metal, clay, wax, even on water. We have used chisels, styli, sticks, brushes, projectors, even shadows, to write words. They are organised horizontally, vertically, from left to right, right to left, from top to bottom or bottom to top, or left to right to left alternately (a direction of writing referred to as ‘boustrophedon’, from the Greek word for ‘ox-turning’, as in ploughing).^. Overall then, what written words require to come into being are a surface or substrate on which they appear, tools of inscription (pens, typewriters, printers, etc.) colour, a size and scale, a dimension, and a sequence, or syntax.

What follows is a small sample of contemporary text works which give a sense of how visual and performance artists have been playing with one or more of these material features of words.

Song Dong - Stamping the river

A man sits in a shallow river with a large wooden stamp or ‘chop’ in his hand. Carved on the stamp is the Chinese character for ‘water’. He repeatedly brings the chop down on to the surface of the river with all the glee of a small child slapping the surface of its bath water. A series of photographs records this event.

At first sight this looks like pure play, stamping the water for the sheer pleasure of it. From another perspective trying to print the word ‘water’ on the surface of moving water looks like the height of absurdity and pointlessness – the sort of thing you expect from frivolous performance art. Written words are designed to endure, as are the surfaces on which they are written.

But there is something else at play here. The river that Chinese artist Song Dong is sitting in is the Kyu Chi, or Lhasa river, which flows through the capital of Tibet. Since the invasion of 1950, Tibet has effectively been under Chinese rule. For Song Dong, however, trying to stamp Chinese authority and values on the Tibetan people is as pointless and impossible as trying to stamp a word onto the moving surface of the river, the stamp being the officious, bureaucratic, writing tool par excellence. In other words, when the site, context, surface and writing tool are taken into full consideration, the meaning of this piece of playful performance is transformed into an act of political satire and criticism, one which could put the artist in some jeopardy with the Chinese authorities.

Pierre Vivant – Les caractères de la Verrière

Pierre Vivant, a UK-based French artist, employs a sort of double writing process. Working at night he uses a projector to project a word onto a three-dimensional space then fills in or picks out the space of the word with different types of material, so that in daylight the word is visible, but only read clearly from the spot where the projector was set up. Vivant used this technique in one community arts project at La Verrière, a housing estate near Paris. Here the words he played with were the names of French typefaces. In one instance he projected the word (meaning ‘brilliance’, ‘flash of light’) in the Éclat typeface onto a children’s sandpit on the estate and filled it out with shards of broken mirror.

Needless to say, this provoked some outrage among the estate’s inhabitants who complained that filling a play area with shards of shattered mirror was highly inappropriate. Vivant argued that in fact the sandpit was largely used as a dog’s toilet by people walking their pets. It wasn’t the artwork that was the safety hazard; it was the playground.

In a similar piece, Vivant gathered 500 litres of litter from the estate and arranged it, using the projector, to create the word STOP in the typeface of the same name.

In both these cases, the material the words are made up of - shards of mirror and litter - is integral to their meaning in this context. Neither is neutral nor inconsequential. The fact that the words can only be clearly read from a single point - the point where the projector was mounted - says something about ‘perspective’. Perhaps Vivant is implying that you need the right perspective to see what is in front you.

But there is another form of play here – a literary play on the title of a classic 17^th century French work, Les caractères de La Bruyère. Jean de la Bruyère was a moralist and observer of contemporary French society. It was said of his book of observations of social types that it would gain him many readers and many enemies. Pierre Vivant is placing himself in the same tradition as la Bruyère (whose own book references the Greek Philosopher, Theophrastus’s book Characters, which described 30 ‘moral types’) – a critic of contemporary mores, albeit in a playful and engaging way.

Jean Dupuy – Complémentaire

Another material aspect of written language that we tend to take for granted is the colour of text. The default position is black text on a white surface for maximum readability. But changes of colour can be used to create some playful effects. This is Jean Dupuy’s ‘Complémentaire’, a four-word text created by using different colours.

By mixing the colours of ‘trou’ and ‘verge’, two additional words are formed - ‘vert’ and ‘rouge’. The choice of red and green, with their various connotations, adds another dimension. And as ‘trou’ means ‘hole’ and ‘verge’ can mean ‘penis’ there is clearly some erotic word play going on here. A highly condensed text piece.

Barbara Kruger The Milk of Dreams & Xu Bing The Glassy Surface of a Lake

The reader of a novel, say, will often talk about becoming ‘immersed’ in a book. Where the language installations developed by Barbara Kruger are concerned, this is literally the case. Her words are physically overwhelming. Language here operates on the sort of scale that we are used to seeing in public advertising. The sheer size of the words, plus the emphatic insistence of the colours, are the visual equivalent of being shouted at through a mega-phone, and there appears to be no escape from them. This is intended to mirror her equally overt political message – often a critique of all-pervasive capitalism and consumerism.

A gentler project which also creates an immersive language installation is Xu Bing’s ‘The Glassy Surface of a Lake’. The title comes from a section of On Walden Pond by David Henry Thoreau. In that passage he describes the totally unruffled surface of a lake and imagines what it might be like to be under the surface of the water looking up through the water at the landscape around. Xu Bing recreated the Thoreau text in metal letters caught in a linked web and installed the piece in the stairwell of the Elvehjem Museum, Wisconsin, such that the visitor can read it as if they, too, are looking out over the glassy surface of a lake.

However, by descending the staircase, they can also recreate Thoreau’s vision of looking up from the depths of the lake through the surface to the landscape beyond. Here then, language is being seen from multiple perspectives, inside and outside, above and below.

An important aspect of both these works is the site in which they appear, i.e. the art gallery. This is a place of authority, where judgements, choices and reputations are made. Because the work of artists like Barbara Kruger and Xu Bing has been welcomed into the art gallery, it has blurred the line between an artwork and a text. This can be a fruitful breaking down of barriers between disciplines, but it can also lead to confusion in the mind of the viewer or reader about how exactly to understand and judge such work. It may take a while before a suitable discourse is developed where this sort of wordplay is taken seriously and its richness is fully appreciated.

Morten Søndergaard Wordpharmacy & Fiona Banner Drama Queen

‘The Glassy Surface of a Lake’ allows the reader literally to reach out and physically touch the words. Artist Morten Søndergaard also explores how words act on or through the physical body, and in his installation ‘Wordpharmacy’, he equates the structure of language with pharmaceutical products. The installation consists of ten medicine boxes, each of which represents one of ten different word groups and contains the sort of typical user information that comes with boxes of pills. Verbs, we are told, ‘…have a great effect on the motor function’. Moreover, ‘Verbs make the world work…’ Other packets advise the user to ‘Speak to a poet or visit your local library if a side-effect becomes worse or if you experience side-effects not mentioned here’.

In effect, the ‘Wordpharmacy’ is structured like a 3-D grammar, and argues in a playful manner that just as drugs have a physical effect on the body, so too with words. Words can change perceptions and identity. Pronouns for example ‘…point to you and your things and make you something other than you are. They fix you and your things in place’. Words can alter the way we see or feel about the world.

Fiona Banner’s ‘Concrete Poem’ is likewise three-dimensional and palpable, although the letters are actually made of polystyrene and plaster. As the letters are free-standing and not fixed, they can be played around with. Here we have two spellings of the same phrase.

There’s a wonderfully playful performativity here. The phrase ‘Drama Queen’ is playing a role. It has literally fallen apart and is lying in a heap - exactly the sort of behaviour you’d expect from a drama queen.

Herb Lubalin Mother & Child & Alan Riddell The Honey Pot

In both ‘Concrete Poem’ and ‘WordPharmacy’, words are very much treated as material objects; things that can be picked up, dropped, kicked around, played with, re-arranged, consumed even. There is also no necessary linear sequence in which to ‘read’ the words, as opposed to the western tradition of text on the page, for example, where you enter at the top left-hand corner, follow the rows from left to right top to bottom and exit at the bottom right. The literary term ‘concrete poetry’ however, plays with this notion that words need to be arranged in rows or columns. A couple of examples will suffice to illustrate this.

The wit and tenderness of this word image by Herb Lubalin relies entirely on the placing of the words in relation to each other. Obviously to write this text in a linear fashion, i.e. Mother & child, would not change the meaning of the individual words but it would totally change the impact.

In a similar vein, above is Alan Riddell’s 1969 poem ‘The Honey Pot’. The poem obviously depends on the letter ‘b’ in English having the same sound as the word ‘bee’, and the ‘poem’ is probably untranslatable. But as with much concrete poetry, there is no specific beginning or end to this poem, no sequence. The reader starts where they like and scans it as an image.

The ways in which these and other contemporary visual/text artists play with the material form of written language draw attention to elements of a script which are often glossed over in the literary field. In opening up radically new, interesting and rich forms of displaying text they not only produce serious works of art but also add layers of meaning to the written word through play.