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Let's Talk About Text - A Review

LET’S TALK ABOUT TEXT - A REVIEW 

Article published in Framework, Vol 5, Issue 1: Transformation, April 2017 

Nasim Nasr, Erasure, 2010, Two channel digital video, Artbank Collection

Let’s Talk About Text, is an exhibition at Artbank in Waterloo that explores text in its sculptural form as well as the semiotic connotations that lay behind the works. The text based art in the exhibition act as representational icons in which several layers of art history are being explored. Artbank have pulled together pieces of art that interrogate the use of language in contemporary society through various means; some works respond to canonical uses of text in art, while others use language to confront its role in the formation of identity and power.

Anthony Johnson’s Five Words in White Neon, 2016, is the first piece that welcomes the audience into the exhibition. The white neon glow engulfs as light creeps from the piece, dominating the entrance to the exhibition and speaks volumes from its simple five words. Five Words in White Neon is an anagram of ‘I Won’t Find No Wives Here’ whereby Johnson’s sculpture poses a critique of the conceptual era of Joseph Kosuth and the lack of female artists represented in art history. Johnson’s work mirrors Kosuth’s sculptural and minimalistic style, which leaves the viewer contemplating the text, pertaining to the legacy of early contemporary art in a satirical voice. The work is about the physicality of the letters and their formality on the wall as much as their meaning. What is Johnson trying to get at in his work? By appropriating and subverting the work of a conceptual icon, the viewer has no choice but to reflect on the 50 years between Johnson and Kosuth and the lack of progress we’ve seen with women’s rights in the art world - and perhaps the inability of five words in white neon to spark institutional change.

Another artwork that draws on the sensibility of the audience to escape within its minimalism is Untitled 99-00, 1999-2000 from Czech artist Eugenia Raskopoulos. This work features the one letter that could be so much more, the simple O. An infinite line of unescapable thought, Raskopoulos’ O glows a soft white calming aura, which allows for space and contemplation. The gestural marks enunciate Zen-like shapes which are emptied of conventional meaning through repetition.

Erasure is another theme within the exhibition which Nasim Nasr takes on literally in Erasure, 2017. The work is a two channel video piece, in which Nasr contemplates the complexity of gender and culture through the poetry of feminist Iranian Poet Forough Farrokhzad. In the video a performer in a niqab erases words, blending their form and disposition onto black cloth. The eraser’s identity is hidden, leaving the viewer to explore both the space that is left behind and the value of the words once that have been stripped of traditional form.

Clinton Nain also considers absence and the implications of what is not said, with What Are You Saying?, 2007. What Are You Saying? is an example of Nain's attempts to navigate the histories and injustices faced by Australia’s Indigenous population and the shame that appears in the cover ups. Nain paints onto her canvas with bleach, in order to literally erase the black painted canvas. The letters are barely readable and instead take on a sculptural form, which conceptually embodies the tracking done by Colonial figures who first came to Australia in their quest for death and domination. Nain balances between the ambiguity of language and text whilst creating visually stunning pieces that tell volumes to the audience. Let’s Talk About Text also explores ways in which a collection of text can be used in paragraph or composition on the canvas to create a unique form.

Two artworks in the exhibition that adopt this style are Lane Cormick’s Untitled (Study for Unearthing the Hawke), 2008 and John Demos’s Antitoxicus and Home, both 2013. From a distance the art works look like abstracted patterns, yet up close the repetition of words create anxiety and friction for the viewer. When looking at either one from their own retrospective positions they resemble organised chaos of sculptural construction. Is this image or text? What distinguishes one from the other?

Let’s Talk About Text is a powerful exhibition that plays with language and text as both literal representations of meanings and as unique forms with sculptural aspects, evocative natures, and the aesthetics of a material encoded with dense information. 

Let’s Talk About Text 16th March – 16th June, 2017 Artbank, 1/198–222 Young Street Waterloo NSW 2017

From: https://www.arc.unsw.edu.au/up...