Art & Language
These Scenes (2016)
Triptych (2018)
10 Posters (2019)
FLAG (2021)
The five works included in this hand painted boxed set incorporate the strategies and interests ART & LANGUAGE evidenced from the very beginning of their careers: 1) Suprematist Squares 2) Secret Painting 3) Guaranteed Painting 4) Cracked surface with text beneath 5) No secret at all. The freshness of this group is evidenced by the way each sheet needed a newly developed technique to realize the works. Even the colophon became unique as it incorporates a hand written addendum by ART & LANGUAGE noting, “Interestingly, mixed media also includes letraset.” Like the prints, it is stamped, signed and numbered.
Together, this set of works illustrates the varied and unrelenting commitment these artists maintained for five decades to the discussion of language and its place in the visual process we call art. Is reading a text the same thing as looking at a black abstract square. If you put one behind the other is the meaning changed. If you open fissures in the foreground of the abstract monochrome square so rivulets of text seep into the visual field, is it still a text work or a painting? How do we read? Is the same kind of seeing we use when we look at a black square? These new works raise’ these issues with a crisp authority.
THESE SCENES, 2016 can be interpreted as a mini-retrospective of the earliest seminal ideas that make ART & LANGUAGE the radicals they are, with a coherent essayistic position that pushes the viewer to entertain a process of thinking and discussion with the artist and with the works themselves. This inventive use of printing techniques makes these works in every way a continuation of the oeuvre and its earliest physical attributes, including the very performance like nature of laying letraset down on paper one letter at a time — (a process that took four people, three weeks to achieve). The making of this project took six months of continuous printing, and in the process one Xerox machine was cracked.
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