POSTSCRIPT: WRITING AFTER CONCEPTUAL ART
Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, October 12, 2012–February 3, 2013
Co-curated by Andrea Andersson and Nora Burnett Abrams
The show will feature a real Pianola playing UN COUP DE DÉS JAMAIS NABOLIRA LE HASARD (MUSIQUE)
A big thank you goes to Dick Kroeckel, member of AMICA (Automatic Musical Instrument Collectors' Association) for lending his Pianola for the whole duration of the show.
Postscript explores the intersection of conceptual writing and contemporary
art, presenting a collection of text-based works that reflect on the form and
function of language at the beginning of the 21st century.
The exhibition
itself serves as postscript to the seminal language shows held at the Dwan
Gallery between 1967 and 1970 in New York City. With his title for the first
show, “Language to be Looked at and/or Things to be Read,” Robert Smithson
articulated a deep-rooted equivocation about the purpose of language in
conceptual art. Postscript revisits this foundational ambivalence, presenting
recent works alongside a selection of historical examples to consider the
differences between reading and looking at, hearing and listening – to
language.
About the Exhibition
The works in Postscript propose that the legacy of conceptual art lies not in
dematerialized art objects but rather in rematerialized language. Literature,
from the poetry of Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein to the prose of Samuel
Beckett and Alain Robbe-Grillet, served as inspiration for many conceptual
artists of the 1960s and figured alongside artist-writings in period-defining
journals including 0 to 9 and Aspen. Artists like Dan Graham and Carl Andre
wrote poetry, Robert Smithson penned fictocritical prose and Sol LeWitt
distinguished between sentences and paragraphs in his manifestos. Yet, while
text-based work proliferated in early conceptual art, the term “conceptual
writing,” only entered popular discourse with Craig Dworkin’s 2003
Anthology of Conceptual Writing on the avant-garde archive Ubuweb. Culling
historical works by artists, writers, and composers, Dworkin assembled a
collection of texts that demonstrated, in his own words, that “a work of art
might look indistinguishable from a poem.” If conceptual art of the 1960s
challenged how art is made, then conceptual writing in the 21st century
challenges how language is read.
Postscript calls attention to the parallel processes by which artists and
writers marshal language in contemporary work. Both use similar linguistic
strategies and procedures such as translation, repetition, quotation, and
appropriation, extending Smithson’s earlier proposition to explore,
specifically, how information is processed, absorbed, and made meaningful in
our information-saturated, contemporary environment. Postscript corrals work
by artists and writers to examine the differences between language as object
and language as vehicle for information, memory and narrative. Presenting a
range of media from painting to performance, sculpture, digital art and works
on paper, Postscript reflects not only on the abundance of writing in
contemporary culture, but also on the variety of sources through which it is
transmitted. Copying and cutting, sampling and reframing are the common
practices of artists and conceptual writers, bloggers and socialnetworkers
alike. Ultimately, Postscript attests to the contiguous concerns of artists
and writers from the breakthrough experiments in language of the 1960s to
contemporary negotiations between print and digital culture.
Artists and writers featured in the exhibition include: Mark Amerika & Chad Mossholder, Carl Andre, Fiona Banner, Erica Baum, Derek Beaulieu, Caroline Bergvall, Jen Bervin, Jimbo Blachly & Lytle Shaw, Christian Bök, Marcel Broodthaers, Pavel Buchler, Luis Camnitzer, Ricardo Cuevas, Tim Davis & Robert Fitterman, Monica de la Torre, Craig Dworkin, Tim Etchells, Ryan Gander, Michelle Gay, Kenneth Goldsmith, Dan Graham, Alexandra Grant, James Hoff, Seth Kim-Cohen, Sol LeWitt, Glenn Ligon, Tan Lin, Gareth Long, Michael Maranda, Helen Mirra, Jonathan Monk, Simon Morris, João Onofre, Michalis Pichler, Paolo Piscitelli, Vanessa Place, Kristina Lee Podesva, Seth Price, Kay Rosen, Joe Scanlan, Dexter Sinister, Frances Stark, Joel Swanson, Nick Thurston, Triple Canopy, Andy Warhol, Darren Wershler, and Eric Zboya.
Postscript will be accompanied by a major catalogue presenting both scholarly
essays and contributions by select writers and artists featured in the
exhibition. Contributors to date include Craig Dworkin, Kenneth Goldsmith,
Patrick Greaney and Marjorie Perloff, among others.
About the Curators
Andrea Andersson teaches at Barnard College in New York, where she works on
the history of the avant-garde with a focus on the relationship between
innovative writing and visual art. She is currently developing an exhibition
on New York’s Anarchitecture group of the 1970s and a collaborative series
on structuralist films and conceptual writing. She is a graduate of Stanford
University and completed her dissertation on poetry and conceptual art at
Columbia University.
Nora Burnett Abrams is Associate Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art
Denver where she has organized solo exhibitions of Isca Greenfield-Sanders,
Dario Robleto, Allison Smith and cocurated the forthcoming Another Victory
Over the Sun. She has contributed to several publications at the Grey Art
Gallery at NYU and MCA Denver. She is a graduate of Stanford University and is
finishing her PhD at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University.