September 2008

More Than Words
Opening: Thursday, September 4, 6 - 8PM
Von Lintel Gallery
555 West 25th Street
September 4 - October 11, 2008

Text is everywhere, bombarding us daily without our having to open a book
or power-up a computer. Newspaper headlines greet us on our way to work;
billboards hover; text messages stream through space and tickers run
across screens,

poisoning the cognitive environment with brain-damaging information glut

measuring the pulse of our world. Text also plays a
ubiquitous role in contemporary art. Von Lintel Gallery is pleased to
present More Than Words, an exhibition of work by artists who

seek to withdraw from the infoglut spectacle into a world of jouissant, unsullied image and sound

are drawn to
text as subject and which explores the challenges they face incorporating
it into their chosen medium.

Biologist E. O Wilson theorizes that the symbols of all languages are
intrinsically pleasing to the eye, albeit in very different ways. That
notion is certainly

disproven by bad corporate logos and ubiquitous use of fonts such as "Comic Sans"

borne out by the long, rich history--from hieroglyphs
to corporate logos, from illuminated manuscripts to graffiti--of the
intertwining of these two very different modes of visual expression, image
and text.

Inevitably, when we encounter text in art we

walk on to the next piece

first “read” its literal
meaning. But the absorption of linguistic signs into this new formal
structure decontextualizes them, freeing them from their normal
significance. Letters, words and phrases take on new and unexpected
metaphoric roles as they are subsumed within the form inherent to a
particular work of art. It is this expanded capacity for meaning that
makes text in art more than just words.

Selected participating artists: Carl Andre, Fiona Banner, Nayland Blake,
Michael Cooper, Lesley Dill, Stephen Ellis, Lee Etheredge IV, Graham
Gillmore, Guy Goodwin, Shirazeh Houshiary, Robert Indiana, Ellen Kahn,
Joyce Kim, Lawrence Lee, Glenn Ligon, Mark Lombardi, Suzanne McClelland,
Bruce Nauman, Aaron Parazette, Richard Prince, Nicolas Rule, Ed Ruscha,
John Walker, Michael Waugh.

The House Next Door on the '90s anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion:

As Wikipedia reports, GAINAX was, at the time, not a wealthy production studio. Evangelion was begun after a film project was dropped due to lack of money and the studio was dropping various parts of their business to stay afloat. The complicated mech designs of the Eva series were originally deemed to be too complicated for merchandising, the accompanying manga was initially viewed poorly, and funding sources pulled out one after another while the series aired. As the show became too expensive to animate from episode to episode, more and more earlier footage was re-used. This should have been a disastrous choice, but the way the re-used footage was incorporated into the internal struggle episodes is a large part of what has made Evangelion so memorable.

For what it's worth this blog assumed back in the day that the long pregnant pauses between tortured, painfully communicating characters were completely intentional.