At the Chicago Cultural Center, the show “Write Now: Artistsand Letterforms” (through April 2012) collects together work that deals with the printed word, in
prints, type, signage, photography, collage, video, altered objects.
The curators chose work that played both with
and against the narrative implications of word-based work. Michael Dinges
“Captain’s Chair” is a plain white plastic chair, engraved with thin-lined
black drawings so that it looks like a piece of scrimshank carved by a
nineteenth century sailor. Drawings give way to obscure phrases like “Proximity
is no longer destiny” and “Made in France, Found in USA”, which don’t really
make it any clearer who the Captain is, or what story, if any, his chair is
telling us.
That seems to be the artistic maneuver of many of the pieces in the
show: including a word that leads you to want to “read” the piece, then taking
you into a path where meaning breaks down and you’re left with a series of
allusive fragments embedded in a visually arresting thing or image. “Tableaux #4” by Mike Genovese, for example,
is a ragged edge sheet of milled, plated, mirror-polished aluminum, covered
with minute script that suggest the Rosetta Stone.
When you peer up close, you
see that the ‘writing’ is in fact tiny, meaningless marks (or a language that I
don’t recognize). You come up close, but you end up seeing only your only
reflection mirrored back at you. Elsewhere, there are Twombly-esque scribbles
on canvas, gnomic Jenny Holzer-like neon messages, collage galore.
The piece
that worked best, to my mind, was Aron Gent’s “Interstate”, which consisted of
a wall covered from floor to ceiling by hundreds of receipts from the Illinois
tollway.
With its witty combination of the classic Modernist grid and Warhol’s
deadpan reinvestment of meaning in the banal through total repetition, Gent
makes the dead language of the toll receipts speak in a mordant way about how
words surround us to the point where we can become suffocated by them.
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