David Wojnarowicz

Image: Untitled (One day this kid...), 1990, photostat, 30 3/4 x 41

Q&A with Saskia Olde Wolbers
http://blogs.artinfo.com/modernartnotes/2008/02/qa-with-saskia-olde-wolbers/
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PlaceboOldeWolbers.jpgThe first time I saw a Saskia Olde Wolbers was at the Hammer in 2003, where Placebo (2002) was showing in a Hammer ‘Projects’ group show. I was hooked from the first moment: the lush, rich, oozing visuals were other-worldly. It took me a minute to hear the voiceover, and another minute to teach myself how to divide my attention equally between the video and the narrative — and by then the six-minute video was up. I figured out how long it would be before Placebo (left) played again, went upstairs to see something else at the Hammer, and returned in time for Placebo to restart. I think I did that one more time that day, and several times over the course of that visit to Los Angeles.
Few video pieces have stuck in my mind like Placebo. It’s catchy like Pipilotti Rist’s Ever is Over All, it’s visually sumptuous in the same way a Shirin Neshat is, and it’s slow like a good Bill Viola. But while each of those artists shows us a narrative, Olde Wolbers writes us one. Her visuals are super, but it’s her cleverness as a writer that keeps me going back a third or fourth or fifth time.
Placebo opens with a line that could have started a classic novel or the best vintage bit of Hollywood noir: “Here I am, lying next to my lover Jean, in intensive care, slipping in and out of consciousness in shifts. Life slowly dripping out of us…” So too Trailer (2005), which is on view now at the Hirshhorn as part of Kerry Brougher and Kelly Gordon’s The Cinema Effect show: “Somewhere in the vast Amazonian forest, among plants whose indigenous, Spanish and Latin names compete with one another outside of their awareness, three species stood out self-consciously. There was the ancient red bark tree by the name of Ring Kittle. And in his shady undergrowth the Elmore Vella, a species of flytrap, used to go quietly about her deadly business.”
For the next 10 minutes Trailer’s narrative wanders away, folds over itself, slips along, and then doubles back in a too-real-to-be-true self-referential loop. Olde Wolbers’ stories are like ice crystals: They’re beautiful and complicated, and you have to examine them carefully to fully appreciate them. Then, just as you begin to figure them out, they melt and vanish. I’ll have plenty of opportunities to ’solve’ Trailer: The Hirshhorn has acquired the piece for its collection.
Olde Wolbers, who is Dutch, lives in London and has never had a solo show in the U.S. She visited the Hirshhorn for the opening of The Cinema Effect and I talked with her about Saskia Olde Wolbers, the writer. Come back for part two tomorrow.
OldeWolbersTrailerTheater.jpgMAN: Are you a writer?
Saskia Olde Wolbers: No. But I guess fiction is my main source of inspiration I’m constantly reading and writing things down, but you know I think writing is difficult. When I’m making actual work, I guess sort of it is ninety percent of it is making, making sets in the studio. In the studio I listen to a lot of novels on tape, so I am constantly engaged in ways of narrating. Even if I’m socializing, I’m looking for stories, so I’m definitely listening for stories. That’s sort of an interest of mine, the way writers sort of filter experience in a distant way: They see the actual story as well as the emotional experience.
MAN: So when you’re working on a piece, do you start with writing, with narrative, or do you start with visuals?
SOW: I usually start a piece with a very thin premise. For instance with Trailer (above right) I stumbled upon a documentary about Judy Lewis, who was the daughter of Clark Gable and Loretta Young, and by the time she found out Clark Gable was her dad she could only see him in his roles. So I started with that distance, how film creates something but it’s not really personal per se.
I had just been in Los Angeles, so I started working on the idea of the cinema as a building, and the jungle as a sort of place for fiction. So I had different strands, but I never have one or the other finished first.
MAN: So you don’t sit down and write out the whole story in one or two sittings?
SOW: No. I do the writing only in pieces. I have a notebook, so I make notes and then I put it into a PC and I end up with lots and lots of unrelated material. I add things I find along the way and then I edit it down.
MAN: Do you outline or go with flow?
SOW: Towards the end, when the visuals are almost done and the story has to come together, I do guide it a bit. But when editing I lay the narrative/voice over down first and then I can slot the visuals into it.
MAN: You’ve mentioned fiction a few times. Tell me what you read.
SOW: There are definitely some particular writers. There is a sort of particular feel I guess to what stories I like. I wouldn’t read just anything… What did I just read? Oh, I just read Dave Eggers’ What is the What and I really liked that. It was great company. [Olde Wolbers also emailed me her reading-plus list. Click below to see it.]
Part two is here.


Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 1981
Oliver Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars
Ryszard Kapuscinski, The Shadow of the Sun
Hearts of Darkness; a filmmaker’s apocalypse, 95 min colour, USA, 1991
Bahr Fax, et al. (documentary about the making of Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now)
Les Blank, Burden of Dreams, 95 min colour, USA, 1982 ( documentary about the making of Werner Herzog’s film Fitzcarraldo)
Alejo Carpentier, The Lost Steps, 1953
Werner Herzog, Aguirre; The wrath of God, 90 min, colour, Germany
Haruki Murakami, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, 1999
Chris Marker, Sans Soleil USA:100 min, 1983
Lauren Slater, Opening Skinners Box; great psychological experiments of the 20th century
Ian McEwan, Enduring Love, 1997
Robert Altman, Nashville, 160 min, colour, USA, 1975
Jim Krusoe, Bloodlake and other stories, 1997, Iceland, 2002
Lars von Trier, The Kingdom, 279 min, colour, Denmark, 1994
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun
Tobias Wendl, Wicked Villagers and the Mysteries of Reproduction. An Exploration of Horror Movies from Ghana and Nigeria. In: Rose-Marie Beck and Frank Wittmann (Eds.), African Media Cultures. Transdisciplinary Perspectives. Köln: Köppe, p. 263-285.
Black Sun, Gary Tarn, 2005, 75mins
Science Is Fiction/The Sounds Of Science, 1927
The films of Jean Painleve
The films of Oskar Fischinger
Amos Tutuola, The Palm-Wine Drinkard, 1946
The private life of plants, David Attenborough, 1995, 50 min
Michel Tournier, Gemini
Mark Hudson, Our Grandmother’s Drums , 1991
Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart, 1958
David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
Zadie Smith, White Teeth
Decasia; the state of decay, Bill Morrison (2002) 67 min
Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari
Ben Okri, The Famished Road
Ousmane Sembène, Xala
Susan Faludi, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man

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Video: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7lta_the-falling-eye

Saskia Olde Wolbers
Artvehicle 25/Review
http://www.artvehicle.com/events/72

6th October 2007 — 11th November 2007

In the downstairs gallery space of Maureen Paley a sequence of fifty snapshots depicts various aspects of life somewhere in Africa. Images of tired buildings, abandoned or not yet completed, sit alongside pictures of children playing in the street. These could almost be the photographs of a naive traveller charting his first experience of backpacking, but the focus on unusual modernist architecture and abstract industrial forms takes them somewhere else. In one, a truck lies upturned by the side of the road, its cargo of timber spilt. In another, two men stand in the dark, one holding a rabbit, the other a knife. What begins as a seemingly banal succession of images develops into an unusual and compelling narrative.

This sequence is a document of a journey made by Saskia Olde Wolbers and is presented as source material for the video piece Deadline which is projected in the space upstairs. The voice of a Gambian woman, Salingding, narrates the film and tells the remarkable story of her family history and of her own sixteen-month journey across 3000 miles of west Africa. In 1960, her grandfather's two wives gave birth to two boys in adjacent rooms, on the same hour of the same day. They are described as twins who had the 'luxury of having grown in their mothers alone'. One of these boys, who would become Salingding's father, was deemed to be the younger by virtue of the fact that he was thought to be a week early, and so these two lives had their fates sealed almost at random.

The story runs almost in the form of a poem and the narrator's voice is accompanied by distant African drums. It seems appropriate to describe the sound before the visual because it is such an extraordinary tale and it is stunningly rendered. Indeed the aural is so powerful that for much of the film it dominates what we see on screen. This is not to take away from the imagery, but the narrative is so rich that at times the visuals struggle to compete, or there seems to be an imbalance of some kind between the two. Like much of Olde Wolbers's work the content is neither wholly based on fact nor purely imagined. She constructed Salingding's narrative from an amalgamation of stories from several different individuals that she met in a Gambian fishing village; a mixture of local folklore and actual histories.

The imagery itself alludes to various aspects of the monologue and is typical of Olde Wolbers's previous work in its abstraction of commonplace objects. She creates strange and unfamiliar landscapes which are imbued with a kind of hypnotic quality through her use of slow, but often very extended, camera movements. There are five or six principal visual themes running through the piece. One depicts snake-like forms with scales coloured like the flags of African nations. This references the 'Ninki Nanka', a python which has the head of a termite and carries a small diamond on its cranium. Another depicts a glass rabbit dripping blood, upwards, from its head. Slowly the relationship to the photographs on the ground floor of the gallery becomes apparent. The woman describes how her brother hit a rabbit while driving. 'He got out of the cab and slit its throat, announcing breakfast as he threw its limp body in the back of the van.'

Towards the end of the film Salingding asks 'do we all have journeys mapped out in our central nervous systems like migrating birds? It seems the only way to account for our insane restlessness' The idea of the journey has always captivated the human imagination. There is a certain romanticism attached to the notion of the traveller as someone liberated from the banality of the everyday. Conversely, people's reasons for moving from one place to another can also be desperate and even essential to survival. Olde Wolbers's film charts an economic migration of a family, a story that falls very firmly within the scope of the latter of those two categories. It offers a bleak portrayal of how fragile the hopes of those who 'desire to travel away from the everyday squalor' can be. Of how corruption, or crime or governments or any number of factors can stand between people and their dreams of a better life for themselves and their families.

Brian Dettmer

'He slices and carves into old illustrated textbooks, dictionaries and such to expose images and text. That’s one of them to the left.' [http://www.greenchairpress.com/blog/?p=188]

Rob Wynne

Thread behind translucent paper


Poured and mirrored glass


Glass

http://www.library.ohiou.edu/subjects/artblog/images/2007/06/wide_shot.jpg

David Buckinham

http://contemporaryartlinks.blogspot.com/2009/11/david-buckingham-at-packer-schopf.html

Daniel Johnston

Jessica Rankin

Jessica Rankin is a New-York based artist who works with hand-embroidered text and geographic forms on stitched panels of cotton organdy: they become places where landscape meets memory. Her debut solo exhibition at The Project in New York in 2004 consisted of mixed media guache and text based drawings that referenced her passage from the coast of Melbourne to the heart of Australia’s Red Center, a meta-narrative of disjunctive language and internal and external journeys.

R. Crumb

… quite possibly our favorite ARTFORUM ad, ever.
scanned from the ARTFORUM FEBUARY 2007 issue

the caption texts read: “R. CRUMB and his li’l pal PRUFROCK PIGGY”
“SO, PRUFROCK, SO LIKE WHATTA YOU REALLY HONESTLY THINK OF ME ?!
Y’KNOW YER, LIKE, TRUE FEELINGS !”
“WELL, GEE, I DUNNO… TEE HEE ..”
“SCHMUCK”

DAVID ZWIRNER
Posted February 13th, 2007 by Nancy Smith

Source: www.artloversnewyork.com/zine/the-bomb/2007/02/13/r-crumbdavid-zwirner/

Raymond Pettibon

Raymond Pettibon, No Title (“Dateline: any town, anytime”), ink on paper, 2007.
Photo Joshua White. Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles.

jack pierson

Apocalypse Now 1988

http://wool735.com/



My House III, 2000

Spike Mafford

Spike Mafford - Braille in nature
Here's a photo inflected with dots that owes nothing to John Baldessari.

spikemafbrailletre.jpgIn Braille, the black dots spell out the title: The Meadow. Braille functions as a coded cloud, a darkness that inserts itself into the clarity of daylight. Mafford's Braille series at the Virginia Inn through Aug. 31.

Jennifer Zwick

Top 10 fears from the worrywart's bible
Tight, tiny handwriting bordered by smudged fingerprints: Jennifer Zwick came up with 100 answers to the old question, What MIght Go Wrong, and turned them into small intaglio prints. They're anxiety's answer to the false cheer of a fortune cookie.

From her 100, here's a sample of 10 guaranteed to take the jaunty down a peg.

Alfred Leslie

Alfred Leslie - the everything artist
Born in 1927, Alfred Leslie was a multidisciplinary artist by his late teens. Abstract painter, portrait painter, improvising sculptor; filmmaker (Pull My Daisy with Robert Frank, 1959), photographer, novelist and graphic novelist, he rejected the idea that he needed one style and a single point of view. In 1988, he made a terrific series of road trip drawings while driving.

Leslie began the drawings for what is now Attacked by the Heart in the early 1960s, some of which were published in Artforum in 1962, and all of which were destroyed by a fire in 1966. In 1991, he redid and enlarged upon them.

More JB

Enlarge: www.3quarksdaily.com/.a/6a00d8341c562c53ef0120a69f0df3970b-800wi

God Nose by JB

From www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/11/words-images-and-playing-games.html:
'Baldessari’s work is full of paradox. It liberates, irritates, inspires and disarms and has been an enormous influence on a whole generation of younger artists. Like looking through a kaleidoscope, he presents us with what is familiar with an unfamiliar twist so that we are forced to think about things in a slightly different way. We are continually confronted by images that ask ‘is this art?’ and if so does such a definition matter as long as the work prods us and makes us look at the world afresh. Baldessari’s own disarming answer, given in an early painting that escaped the Cremation Project, is God Nose.'





From: www.eai.org/eai/artistBio.htm?id=356

A major figure in contemporary art, John Baldessari has been termed "one of the most influential artists to emerge since the mid-1960s." From his phototext canvases of the 1960s to his composite photo collages and installations of the 1980s, Baldessari has contributed to the definition of postmodern art. His ingenious application of certain art-making strategies — including appropriation, deconstruction, decontextualization, sequentiality and text/image juxtaposition — was prescient, as was his cogent and witty integration of semiology, linguistic systems and mass media.

As one of the seminal figures in the language-based Conceptual Art movement of the early 1970s, Baldessari produced a series of videotapes in which he conducted ironic investigations into perception, meaning and interpretation. Rendered with deadpan, often absurdist humor, these droll conceptual exercises make use of cultural artifacts, from film stills and magazine photos to art historical in-jokes, as frameworks for irreverent philosophical inquiries into art and knowledge. With a cunning reliance on misrecognition and misinformation, Baldessari uses irony and incongruity to exploit the gap between what is heard, what is seen, and what is understood. His wry investigations of representation and sign systems succeed through strategies such as the ironic juxtaposition of photographic or video images and written or verbal texts; the use of appropriated material and found objects to underscore the embedded meaning of pop cultural genres; the construction of disjunctive narratives and surreal conjunctions from re-contextualized words and images, and the indexing of objects of actions.

Many of his exercises take the form of parables, allegories, or "art lessons," as Baldessari the performer assumes the role of teacher or storyteller. His fascination with jokes, dreams, aphorisms, sight gags and linguistic pranks, which are linked to Freudian notions of unconscious associations and verbal and written "slips," evoke the visual puns and word games of Dada and Surrealism. Pervaded with reference to art-making and art history, and responding to the tenets of minimalism, performance and Conceptual Art, his tapes question the very limits of art, and form an irreverent critique of modernist practices. Baldessari playfully compels the viewer to question not only the system under investigation — language, representation, narrative, art-making — but also the tools by which the interrogation is being conducted (photography, video, cinema) as conveyers of truth. Ultimately, Baldessari's idiosyncratic, often absurdist logic questions the very process of perception, from vision and meaning to cognition and knowledge.

Baldessari was born in 1931 in National City, California. He received a B.A. and an M.A. from San Diego State College. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, he has taught at Southwestern University, California; the University of California at San Diego; and the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia.

His work has been exhibited internationally in one person shows at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Sonnabend Gallery, New York; Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California; and Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, among other institutions; and in group shows at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Documentas 4,5 and 6, Kassel, Germany; Venice Bienale; Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Kolnischer Kunstverein, Cologne; and the Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial, New York, among others.

In 1990, he was the subject of a major retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, which traveled to numerous sites around the country. In conjunction with this exhibition, a comprehensive catalogue of his work, entitled John Baldessari, was published in 1990.

In 2009, his retrospective exhibition Pure Beauty opened at the Tate Modern in London. It will travel to the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, the Los Angles County Museum of Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 2010 and 2011. The retrospective includes a catalogue publication, also entitled Pure Beauty.






Voluble Luminist Painting for Max Kozloff, 1968
Acrylic on canvas, 59 x 59 inches

From 1966 to 1968 John Baldessari created a series of text-based paintings, hand-lettered by professional sign painters. The use of canvas was his only bow to conventional notions of painting. The canvases contain written extracts from art manuals, his own notebooks, and the essays of contemporary critics, including art writer Max Kozloff. In Voluble Luminist Painting for Max Kozloff, portions of a 1968 Artforum article written by Kozloff have been taken out of context and isolated by the artist. With wit and irony, Baldessari reversed the typical artist-critic relationship, using the tools of the art critic to make the painting.





Kosuth


JB

Pictures that paint a thousand words

Slide show: news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_pictures/8305619.stm


Martin Firrell


Keith Tyson


Ed Ruscha


news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/arts_and_culture/8305617.stm
Tracy Emin

By Alex Hudson
BBC News

"We navigate our whole lives using words. Change and improve the words and I believe we can change and improve life."

Public artist and campaigner Martin Firrell has some big ideas about the use of words in art - both in scope and in scale.

He has emblazoned his work on St Paul's Cathedral, across the exteriors of both the Royal Opera House and the National Gallery, on each occasion the first artist to do so.

Originally trained as an advertising copywriter, his next project Complete Hero will involve a projection on to London's Guards Chapel from next month.

He has enlisted the help of members of the Army along with scientists, philosophers, thinkers and writers to question the modern idea of heroism.

But his project is just the latest example of the use of text in art.

Different picture

"When you look back in history you will see artists have forever used words in paintings," said the artist Ed Ruscha.

"There was a quiet time and come the 20th Century there was a different picture. There was a time in the 1930s, 40s, 50s where artists were producing abstract pictures that were off on their own.

"And I think the so-called Pop artists who emerged in the 60s were involved in something that was inevitable."

The Pop Art movement is widely believed to have come as both a reaction against abstract expressionism and a commentary on a new, commercial world.

Andy Warhol was one such artist who notably borrowed heavily from commercial graphic design.

"Some of the critics were so stuffy you couldn't believe their reluctance to accept anything new. Back then, it really was the dark ages," said Ruscha.

This movement reinvigorated the desire for text in art - paving the way for a whole new generation of graphically and media-aware artists.

Currently there is an abundance of artists showing their work.

In London alone, at least four separate exhibitions are featuring the work of text pioneers.

You can even sit in a gallery and read stories written on the walls.

But why would artists turn so quickly towards a form that appears so devoid of "art" in its most traditional sense?

John Baldessari first exhibited his work in the 1960s and has used words throughout his career.

"My ambience was first and second generation abstract-expressionism and I really got tired of hearing the complaint 'my kid can do that' so I said 'what would happen if you really spoke your public's language?'"

But the question remains on many sceptics' lips - is it art?
“ It is an artist's view of what text is, not an English Don's view ”
Keith Tyson, Turner Prize winner

"If I put [words] on canvas... then that's a signal it's art - a very logical way or reasoning," said Baldessari.

"Is it painting? Of course. Paint on canvas, that's a painting isn't it?"

Turner-Prize winner Keith Tyson's work often combines science, nature, art and literature.

In his piece Operator Painting: Large Abstract, the chemical symbol for chlorine sits next to a line of text about a swimming pool attendant, which itself sits above the phrase "children enacting excerpts from The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Big Splashes".

"It is an artist's view of what text is, not an English Don's view", Tyson said.

"It does things that an abstract painting might... or a non-linear novel - it's just a different type of text from the left to right that we're used to."

For others, the imagery created from words can match and even supersede traditional forms of painting.

'A striptease'

Fiona Banner has made a career out of thinking in more varied - and perhaps more complicated - forms than many of her peers.

She was nominated for the Turner Prize in the same year as Tyson, creating a show which described a pornographic film in detail across an entire wall.

Banner has produced works from the gargantuan - a 1,000-page book documenting six Vietnam war films frame-by-frame - to one piece that just consisted of a single, neon full-stop.

The artist has even done work with nudes.

She agreed with the actress Samantha Morton to produce a text portrait of her that Morton would perform the following evening - without ever having read it before.

"It's a striptease in words," Banner said.

"The language that I use is the language that best describes what happens in front of me. If that ends up being seductive language - it is.

"If it ends up feeling distant or objective at times then it is."

As the actress had never read the work before, Banner did not know how the piece would be received.

"The words are not flattering. If my words were a camera, they don't aim to airbrush or flatten, they aim to expose."

'Sub-poetic drivel'

Recently some critics have been using their own words to suggest that text in art could be losing its edge and slowing into decline.

Telegraph art critic Mark Hudson described Tracey Emin's most recent work with text as "sub-poetic drivel" and even described her medium - neon handwriting - as the "most hackneyed medium around".

And the information onslaught and the volume of work available has led John Baldessari to change his view.

"I haven't given up on text... but I would use it very judiciously knowing that we have information overload. It just makes people shut down and not notice it at all.

"The job of an artist is to get people's attention.

"I think I eased off the idea of using text when I thought the battle was won."

Texting Andy Warhol - An Exploration of Writing in Art, presented by the writer Bidisha, is broadcast Thursday 22 October, 1130 BST, on
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/entertainment/arts_and_culture/8305617.stm

John Baldessari

Texting Andy Warhol
Last broadcast on Thu, 22 Oct 2009, 11:30 on BBC Radio 4.
Synopsis

Novelist Bidisha considers the role of text in art. Does a picture made from words count as literature or art? She talks to gallery visitors reading Richard Long's words on the walls, asks how it is different from a book by Dali, and considers text as art with Keith Tyson, Fiona Banner, Ed Ruscha and John Baldessari.

news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/arts_and_culture/8305617.stm



Avi Adler and John Baldessari



The Pencil Story 1972 - 1973
Marian Goodman Gallery, New York © John Baldessari
Colour photographs, with coloured pencil, mounted on board



Prima Face (Third State): From Aloof to Vapid 2005
Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York © John Baldessari
Archival digital photographic print, acrylic on canvas

Artists who use text

John Baldessari in the 60's?


Born in National City, California in 1931, John Baldessari was influenced by Dada and Surrealist literary and visual ideas. He rose to prominence in the late1960s when he began combining mass media imagery with language, Pop vigour with Conceptual density. Baldessari, early in his long and much celebrated career, began incorporating layers of found materials (billboard posters, photographs, film stills, bits of conversations) on his plain white canvases. These montages, which result from the juxtaposition, edition and cropping of image and text, served to thwart narrative coherence and play off chance relationships between otherwise discreet elements. His photo-based work was also a means of introducing photography into galleries, in an ongoing attempt to undermine certain taboos.

From: www.artfacts.net/en/exhibition/john-baldessari-noses-ears-etc-56255/overview.html