#Art and Language

[jt1674]

[bernardcalet]

ICI ÊTRE LÀ-BAS, 2024

(HERE TO BE OVER THERE, 2024)

Lettrage jaune sur vitrail

Art dans les Chapelles, Pontivy

[pencildragons]

bro i LOVE indigenous fusion music i love it when indigenous people take traditional practices and language and apply them in new cool ways i love the slow decay and decolonisation of the modern music industry

[pouletpourri]

"You just have to look closely."

[mimimar]

(open pages for better image quality)

the moment I heard elphaba's delivery of "there's a girl i know..." in i'm not that girl i knew i had to draw this comic, i strongly recommend listening to it while you read for the full experience!

this comic is a companion to this piece (which was inspired by glinda's delivery of the same line in the i'm not that girl reprise).

pages 1-4 are from elphie's pov, pages 5-8 are from glinda's.

prints of individual pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

flower meanings in order of appearance:

[longlistshort]

Writer Hilton Als has brought together a wonderful collection of works exploring art and language for The Writing’s on the Wall: Language and Silence in the Visual Arts at Hill Art Foundation.  Quotes from several authors are included alongside the art, adding another dimension to the show.

From the gallery-

This group exhibition presents artists whose work explores the relationships between communication and language. In the curatorial text, Als explains: “for this exhibition, I wanted to show what silence looked like—at least to me—and what words looked like to artists.”

“Writing and erasure have been important sources of inspiration for many of the artists in my family’s collection, including Christopher Wool, Rudolf Stingel, Vija Celmins, and Cy Twombly,” says J. Tomilson Hill, President of the Hill Art Foundation. “Hilton Als has identified a fascinating motif and introduced important loans to illustrate the rich history of these lines of inquiry into the present day.”

In his accompanying essay, Poetics of Silence, Als probes the power of visual art to skirt the written or spoken word. The works included convey “the sense we have when language isn’t working,” evoke “EKGs of rhythm followed by silence, or surrounded by it,” reveal “painting as language’s subtext,” illustrate “what we mean to say as opposed to what gets said,” and “find beauty in the tools that one uses to erase words—and then to make new ones.” He reflects on his own entry into the art world as an art history student at Columbia in the 1980s, and his efforts as a writer and curator to create a democratic “language of perception” that transcends traditional connoisseurship.

The Writing’s on the Wall encompasses a range of mediums, from video installation to printed zine. Artists in the exhibition include Ina Archer, Kevin Beasley, Jared Buckhiester, Vija Celmins, Sarah Charlesworth, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Fang: Betsi-Nzaman, Ellen Gallagher, Joel Gibb and Paul P., Rachel Harrison, Ray Johnson, G.B. Jones and Paul P., Jennie C. Jones, Christopher Knowles, Willem de Kooning, Sherrie Levine, Judy Linn, Christian Marclay, Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, Claes Oldenburg, Ronny Quevedo, Irving Penn, Umar Rashid, Medardo Rosso, David Salle, Rudolf Stingel, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, Steve Wolfe, Larry Wolhandler, and Christopher Wool.

Als’ essay provides not only more information on the show and the art included, but also his own experience of learning about and experiencing art.

Below is a brief excerpt but it is well worth it to read the essay in its entirety.

Part of the experience I hope to evoke here draws a line between language, which is to say active contemplation, and being, which requires nothing more than your presence first and language second (or third). You know what being is. It happens to you all the time. You may be in a museum, or a public park, or sitting dully in your house, with “nothing” on your mind, and then there you are—a kind of walking phenomenology, language-free, but not feeling. In fact, you are suffused with feeling. Your feet are on the ground, and your body, released from the chatter of the everyday, is porous to the surrounding world with its various silences—a world where everything and nothing speaks to you. The clouds; some pictures on a white wall; a beautiful, hitherto-unknown sculpture reaching for eternity; that blank wall standing between you and the wonders of a garden that manages to grow right here in the middle of Manhattan—they all became part of your being, the self that is always on the verge of discovery, if only you can listen to its silences.

Silence says so much, if you listen. (From Marianne Moore’s 1924 poem “Silence”: “The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; not in silence, but restraint.”) And since I have been a writer all my life, it’s a relief not to think in words sometimes, and to look at pictures, which do not so much deny verbalization but are without language, only the experience of here and now. Sometimes being simply means that we are somewhere, and we are porous to contemplation. When we think about visual culture or production, words aren’t the first things that come to mind. What does is the thing itself. And for this exhibition, I wanted to show what silence looked like—at least to me—and what words looked like to artists. The struggle to speak, to say, to reveal language or an attempt at language—communication—in a visual medium that has a complicated relationship to speech.

Als’ website includes his older writing ,but you can read more of his recent essays and reviews on The New Yorker’s website and he frequently posts on Instagram.

This exhibition closes 3/29/25.

[lungthief]

this isnt even funny i just wanted to draw miles and maya doing steel samurai discourse

[druid-for-hire]

There's this sort of anthropomorphizing that inherently happens in language that really gets me sometimes. I'm still not over the terminology of "gravity assist," the technique where we launch satellites into the orbit of other planets so that we can build momentum via the astounding and literally astronomical strength of their gravitational forces, to "slingshot" them into the direction we need with a speed that we could never, ever, ever create ourselves. I mean, some of these slingshots easily get probes hurtling through space at tens of thousands of miles per hour. Wikipedia has a handy diagram of the Voyager 1 satellite doing such a thing.

"Gravity assist." "Slingshot." Of course, on a very basic and objective level, yes, we are taking advantage of forces generated by outside objects to specifically help in our goals. We're getting help from objects in the same way a river can power a mill. And of course we call it a "slingshot," because the motion is very similar (mentally at least; I can't be sure about the exact physics).

Plus, especially compared to the other sciences, the terminology for astrophysics is like, really straightforward. "Black hole?" Damn yeah it sure is. "Big bang?" It sure was. "Galactic cluster?" Buddy you're never gonna guess what this is. I think it's an effect of the fact that language is generally developed for life on earth and all the strange variances that happen on its surface, that applying it to something as alien and vast as space, general terms tend to suffice very well in a lot more places than, like... idk, botany.

But, like. "Gravity assist." I still can't get the notion out of my head that such language implies us receiving active help from our celestial neighbors. They come to our aid. We are working together. We are assisted. Jupiter and the other planets saw our little messengers coming from its pale blue molecular cousin, and we set up the physics just right, so that they could help us send them out to far stranger places than this, to tell us all about what they find out there.

We are assisted.

And there is no better way to illustrate my feelings on the matter than to just show you guys one of my favorite paintings, this 1973 NASA art by Rick Guidice to show the Pioneer probe doing this exact thing:

"... You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing. Embody me. ..."

Gravity assist.

[sukinapan]

[featherfangart]

Two Sides Of the Same Coin

[bibbysstuff]

Cuteness Aggression

[bigimango]

Some fluffy sketches~

[chomplicated]

can a tumblr girl really love a reddit guy

[baker-chan-senpai]

dumb doodles

merry christmas, people

[charlesoberonn]

This is like telling a skater that they'd go faster if they used a car instead.