Visual voices - the use of writing in the works of artists Sean Landers, Kenneth Goldsmith, Joseph Grigely

Art in America, April, 1996 by Raphael Rubinstein

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Michelangelo's sonnets, Gauguin's Noa Noa, de Chirico's novel Hebdomeros--there's nothing new about the artist as author. What is new, or fairly so, is that our definition of the art work has opened up sufficiently to admit a book or manuscript into the artist's oeuvre, rather than marginalizing it as documentation or divertissement. (It was partly in response to this change that the term "artist's book" was coined, although artists' books tend to be more visual than the writerly works under consideration here.) There now seems nothing unusual in including Borofsky's Thought Book, notes he wrote down between 1967 and 1970, among his oeuvre of paintings and sculptures. Similarly Daniel Spoerri's marvelous An Anecdoted Topography of Chance (which has just been reissued by Atlas Press in a new, updated edition) is clearly a continuation by other means of the artist's tableaux pieges. A similar link can be found in Carl Andre's poems--typed out by the artist in geometric shapes--or William Anastasi's Du Jarry/Me Innerman Monophone, in which the veteran Conceptualist devotes 1,200 pages--written in four coded colors of ballpoint pen and exhibited on the walls of a gallery [see A.i.A., April '94]--to speculations about the influence of Alfred Jarry on the art and literature of the 20th century.

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Three recent books by visual artists provide the occasion of this article--one published, two still in manuscript: Sean Landers's volume titled [sic], Kenneth Goldsmith's "No. 111 2.7.93--7.22.95" and Joseph Grigely's "Conversations with the Hearing." It's a diverse trio of works, created by three very different artists. Landers is a painter, sculptor and video artist who has achieved international attention (and notoriety) in the last few years, chiefly for his text-filled paintings which recount his struggles in the art world and in his personal life. Through his work, Landers presents himself, pretty convincingly, as an artist whose ambition far outstrips his talent. The figure he reveals is a caricature of an adolescent from the American suburbs. His most profound thoughts, which he is quick to share, come while listening to rock-'n'-roll songs; he dwells on those twin preoccupations of the teenage male, penis size and masturbation; his spelling, grammar and thought process suggest too many drugs and too little studying. Landers particularizes this generic persona with frequent references to his Catholic, Irish-American background. It is unclear how much of this is an assumed persona (no graduate of Yale would spell so badly, one hopes).(1) What is clear is that Landers's extravaganza of dysfunction and dumbness appeals to something in the art world. No doubt he speaks to the "slacker" generation, but his appeal also derives from his crude embodiment of two archetypes: the Warholian figure of the faux-naif artist who confesses what the rest of us are too embarrassed to reveal, and the Pollock-like image of the artist as inarticulate, elemental force.

Like Landers, Kenneth Goldsmith had been making text-driven visual art for several years prior to channeling his obsession with language into a manuscript. Goldsmith's works, which exercise the artist's need to materially record and order the language that surrounds him, have included book-shaped, freestanding plywood sculptures; graphite drawings of overlapped sets of rhyming two-word phrases; and 8-by-12-foot silkscreens of long columns of printed texts, framed and leaning against gallery walls. The texts are composed of fragments from a multitude of sources, arranged in a rhythmic order. (During a 1994 gallery show, Goldsmith highlighted the aural aspect of his work by inviting friends and colleagues to read aloud from the installed silkscreens.) While cognizant of the text-based art of Conceptualists like Joseph Kosuth, Goldsmith looks as much or more to experimental writers, from James Joyce to Jackson Mac Low, and composers such as John Cage and Philip Glass. Recently, Goldsmith has begun allowing images into his work, in a series of diaristic collages dealing with counterculture figures of the 1960s.

Joseph Grigely's work is permeated with writing of many kinds, in many hands. His installations, on walls and paper-littered desks and tables, combine messages scribbled on all manner of scraps of paper. Alongside each of these handwritten documents is a typeset text, in a simple black frame, with Grigely's commentary on the occasion and significance of the handwritten note. Grigely accumulates the raw material of his work largely by reason of his deafness (the result of a childhood accident). Although able to read lips, Grigely often must ask his interlocutors to write down words and, especially, names that he is unable to visually decipher. As one soon realizes in looking at Grigely's work and reading his eloquent commentaries, their subject is not so much the artist's deafness but the complexities of language and the larger structures it uncovers and conceals.(2)