Word Play
Overview:
"When language becomes material, it becomes visual as well, and there are so many ways we can shape the letter, the word, the phrase, the story, especially when working outside the conventions of typography and word processing software–when the pen or pencil is connected to the hand, and the hand is connected to the brain."
Joseph Grigely, artist and FAX participant
Since the emergence of conceptual art in the mid-1960s, visual artists have gravitated toward written language as a medium of artistic experimentation. Eschewing established art forms, such as painting and sculpture, which have deeply–rooted aesthetic conventions and historical traditions, conceptual artists of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Sol LeWitt, Lawrence Weiner, and Joseph Kosuth, sought to expand the field of art beyond physical materials to include ideas. For them, ideas could be understood as art, and language–written, spoken, and imagined–became a logical means of conveying their new aesthetic ideas. The critics Lucy Lippard and John Chandler famously describe such work as "dematerialized," for conceptual art often avoids physical realization altogether and exists only in the mind.
Conceptual art not only challenged modernist notions of the art object's finish and autonomy, but it also challenged established expectations regarding the very definition of art. Over the course of the 1970s, conceptual art increasingly called the institutions of art (the museum, the gallery, etc.) into question. This is especially apparent in the work and writings of artists such as Hans Haacke, Daniel Buren, Robert Smithson and Adrian Piper. Responding to and, in some cases, moving beyond the concerns of such institutional critique, many artists of the 1980s and 1990s, including Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer, employed language in their art to explore the power relations and identity categories that exist in our society more broadly. Today, in a world where anything and everything seems to enter the field of art, the written word remains prominent as artists continue to explore language as art and art as language.
Since the fax machine is primarily a technology of communication, it is no surprise that many artists in FAX have used it to communicate aesthetic ideas, sometimes using the resources of written text to explore the very nature of language itself. Tauba Auerbach's text-based work investigates the slippery relationship between spoken language as sound and written text as image. Kay Rosen's minimal paintings, billboards, and wall–texts array words in puzzling configurations that encourage us to experience language in visual terms. Subverting the conventional function of fax technology to transmit business information, these artists use the technology to transmit their aesthetic ideas to even wider audiences.
