Word Play

LESSON TWO – Kay Rosen: Triggering the Visual

The printed word has two facets: it is both a sign that carries meaning and an abstract visual image. As we navigate the world, we tend to ignore the typographic style and formal properties of the words we read; instead, we focus on their meanings. Confounding this tendency with deft wit, the work of Kay Rosen (b. 1949, Corpus Christi, TX) asks us to read and see at the same time, challenging us to experience the process of reading visually. Rather than attending art school, Rosen studied languages and linguistics at Northwestern University, which opened her up to the idiosyncratic operations of language and meaning. Pursuing an academic career proved unsatisfying for Rosen, who for nearly thirty years has been producing text–based paintings, prints and installations, work that engages words in puzzling and revealing visual relations.

Rosen's creative process generally begins with a piece of "found language," a fragment of text observed in the world or something overheard. Rather than exploring formal language systems as a linguist would, Rosen is drawn to "coincidental or accidental events in language" that are often humorous or puzzling and, most importantly, are suited to visual expression. "That seems to be the pattern," Rosen writes, "sound triggers the visual, thoughts trigger the visual, and reading triggers the visual." Using sign paint on canvas or paint directly applied to the wall, Rosen translates these fragments of language into striking compositions that encourage us to decode their meanings both verbally and visually. In Belted (2008) the artist pairs two words–shirt and skirt–on a small canvas. A quick tug at the H's waist with a black belt not only turns a shirt into a skirt, but turns one word into the other. Rosen's Pendulum (2005) reorders the letters of the word so that they reflect the back–and–forth movement of a real pendulum swinging in space: PNUUMLDE. Momentarily unrecognizable when read left to right, Rosen asks us to see the word's letters according to the oscillations of a pendulum. In a giant wall text called Blurred (2004), Rosen positions a purple R between the blue letters BLU and the red letters RED. A blending of color at the center of the word performs the very action the word apparently describes.

In these works and others, the visual qualities of Rosen's words come to mimic the text's referential meanings. "The co–incidence of message and structure," she writes, "is the point where the work happens, where they meet to say the same thing linguistically and non-linguistically." Rosen's "small gestures" nevertheless affect "large shifts" in our everyday relation to the printed word.

Featured Artwork:

Kay Rosen, Untitled, 2009. One facsimile page, 11 x 8.5 in.

Rosen's contribution to FAX is a single page of large–print text. At first glance we read the text from left to right: "WIDE EP." What are we to make of this phrase? It carries no obvious meaning. After looking at the text longer, a new relationship between the letters and the dimensions of the page begins to emerge. The word WIDE corresponds to the actual width of the work's standard sheet of office paper. This physical and linguistic connection encourages us to look at the letters EP in relation to those positioned immediately above them. The word DEEP appears not only as we read from left to right, but also from top to bottom. The placement of the E and P in DEEP mimic the spatial relation that the word itself implies; the letters literally plunge below WIDE's baseline, as if the meaning of the word DEEP encouraged them to do it! As a further ironic twist, Rosen's implication of "depth" stands at odds with the work's resolute two–dimensionality (it is, after all, only text on a flat piece of office paper).