seeing language
O=V=E=R=T=I=M=E
In 1972, when I was a second-year art student aged twenty-one, I produced a painting titled One red stripe, one yellow stripe, one blue stripe. Acrylic on canvas, almost square in its dimensions, plus or
minus five feet by five feet. Across the three bars of ‘primary’ colour were inscribed the words of the title, with each of the three phrases super-imposed on the colour band it refers to. I had no idea what had compelled me to produce such a reductive painting, especially one which
used redundant language. Maybe the language was a kind of ghosting, the opposite of being ‘lost for words’?[i] In the event, the painting felt something of a failure to me; I destroyed it. All that remains (another afterimage?) is the rather degraded slide [above] and – more recently in time – a desire to resuscitate the work.
In retrospect, it contains the DNA of much of the practice that has unfolded for me over five decades since, something I designate as reaching-beyond-language. Was it my first im/mature painting? Three coloured bars and four white bars of equal dimension, totalling seven, a number that has come to represent what I term meta–language. The three primaries refer to the building blocks of colour, from which all other colours emanate: a ground zero for the beginnings of European abstract painting in the seminal figure of Piet Mondrian. In all respects, this work was a precocious and precious harbinger of things to come. To say: painting speaks me, language speaks us.
Without wanting to pathologize matters – I am dyslexic.[ii] This difficulty, gradually converging into an advantage, has become central to my being as an artist. I have a sort of number 8 wire theory which unpacks as follows: the closer a sense faculty is, in everyday use, the more likely it is to be under-exercised or taken-for-granted. Vision is the obvious case in point. I rely heavily on visual shaping in my paintings, it speaks to me at the speed of light, much faster than words. Seeing and seer are at the same time one and yet critical in different ways. Oddly, as a dyslexic, my fear of words (FOW) has led to a love of words (spellcheck aids me, although I push it into a state of ennui/aporia with monotonous regularity).
Reflecting on that young art student trying to find a way, I realise he found the language positions adopted by local canonical figures confusing and contradictory. Hotere said somewhere if he could talk about the painting then he would not need to paint it. His FOW around painting contrasts with McCahon’s predilection. The latter’s statement about needing words is often taken out of context – yet he did need words in rather special and different ways (see catalogue, Survey exhibition, Auckland City Art Gallery, 1972). Colin understood the particular power words possess and, like me, he had no FOW. Curiously, another survey in the same year featured Milan Murkusich. His ‘Statement by the artist’ in the catalogue occupies some 13 lines compared to Colin’s four hundred plus: a self-aligning with Wittgenstein’s famous claim, ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’ (Proposition 7, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1921/2). How does a young artist navigate the complicated, turbid waters of inheritance and precedence?
In my view, finding a course through to the farther shore requires continual personal and artistic revaluation in the project of painting. Some Values around (my) Painting, a manifesto I wrote in 1981 and published two years later, was my attempt to move through the choppy haze and establish a form of expression that did not dodge or evacuate active contemplation and deep meaning.[iii] In large part a response to the fresh voice and observations of Wystan Curnow in his ‘High Culture in a Small Province’ essay (1973), I wanted neither the heavy cargo of the local language of regionalism nor the nominalism of international pure opacity. I wanted vital artwork with real intellectual heft. The key thing that remains with me from this early piece, now approaching a half-century in age, is its adherence to a valuing of visual language that moves faster than words (read: embodied knowledge). I wanted communication that was audience assuming and functional outside of the cargo of correctness that semantics assumes or necessitates in order to discharge its own function, as we see more recently incorporated into AI.
notes
[i] Perhaps the relationship in the painting between shape, colour and vocabulary functions like an afterimage, in which a visual illusion continues to appear in one’s visual memory after direct exposure to the original image has ceased. [ii] Seeing and saying, knowledge and language, are deeply embedded in what Jean Paul Satre and Simon de Beauvoir refer to as [my] facticity. [iii] Although I am unsure if it still available, the piece was originally published in the catalogue for a national touring exhibition Seven Painters the Eighties, Sarjeant Gallery, Whanganui.
stephen bambury
o
o
notes for a method of painting (2019)
My machine paints vectors (images made of lines) not bitmaps (images made of pixels).
A software application is written to read the tonal values of each cell on a grid, where a grid means a bitmap image, an image made of pixels, a .jpg or a .png.
The application parses the value of each cell and makes a new grid comprised not of pixels but of small lines called vectors (an array of vectors).
These lines or strokes number 22 and are copied from the Cossard Stenographic alphabet:
Here is my vector based version of the Cossard Stenographic alphabet in .svg (Scalable Vector Graphics) format. Note: each stroke that will comprise the painting is also actually a letter in stenographic format, so the paintings are a kind of writing:
This collection of strokes constitutes a ‘library’ that the application uses to translate a series of pixel values into a series of strokes. In the past I’ve kept the library black and the paintings monochrome.
What I’ve done in 2020 is allocate colour to each stroke, about four letters for each colour.
These colours are copied from the palette Henri Matisse used in his La Japonaise Woman beside the Water, Collioure, 1905. This particular Matisse is important because it’s beautiful and because the colours are kept relatively separate and unmixed with others on the ground. The seven colours are designated in hexadecimal colour codes which the application will use to parse specific strokes in the library as certain colours.[1]
A bitmap image (below left) is interpreted with the application. This is a GAN an image made by a Generative Adversarial Network. The way the colour values are set up in the application creates a kind of ‘false colour’ version in a vector based array of strokes (below right).
The next stage is to separate the array of strokes into seven different layers. Oil colour is mixed to approximate Matisse’s seven-part palette and each layer is painted separately with each colour by the machine. In the image below, the red layer is painted, the image shows mostly ‘b’ strokes:
note
[1] <!– / Palette: Henri Matisse, La Japonaise: Woman beside the Water, Collioure, summer 1905
simon ingram
o
kim pieters
o
the bully pulpit: visual language; a personal take
I open Word to start writing this piece & am greeted by ‘Select the icon or press Alt + i to draft with Copilot’. Promises to be faster than a drunken ostrich & about as useful. You can take on the porn industry with AI, you can use it to write a sequel to War & Peace, but can you get it to produce visual language? I’m guessing probably; but I’m also guessing it might take some time to get the methodology down pat. & would it be worth it since it is no longer uniquely yours?
Stephen Bambury states in O=V=E=R=T=I=M=E: 'Painting speaks me, language speaks us'. I take his point, but I would substitute me for us, though not vice versa. The artist's voice, be it visual or verbal, is always intended to be of their own making. We might write / paint / dance / compose using common tools but our hope is that we use them in uncommon ways. We also hope that we can find an (appreciative) audience.
Somewhere I have written that the poem shapes itself, that how it looks is as important in conveying what it says as the words themselves. In essence, what I am trying to do is utilize language visually. Sometimes that might be deliberately shaped as in one of my Magritte poems:
sometimes the visual aspect may contradict the text:
sometimes it may unfold silently:
or move all by itself:
Given that
you can determine
the length of
any side of a
right-angled triangle
by the fact that the
square on the hypotenuse
is equal to
the sum of the squares
on the other
two sides
& calculate
the area
under a curve
by integration provided
the equation
of the line that the
curve follows
is known
or be tested to see
if you are pre-disposed
to diabetes or m.s.
or even cancer
by the make-up of
particular genes &
the use of
instantaneous
sequencing machines
why can’t I
by assigning weights
to all those things
I love or hate or
am indifferent to
arrive at a formula
that can easily
determine who
I am & what is pre-
destined for me?
|
or maybe offered up as a mélange that is left to the reader / viewer to interpret or deconstruct — &/or reconstruct — for themselves.
The above poem can also be characterized as visual poetry, but vispo — although the words visual & language are often used, albeit individually, in describing it — is, to quote Nico Vassilakis, ‘A modern vispoem is a response to language, an outburst that challenges what language is and how it effects us’.[1]
A painting should not need to be explained by its creator. Process perhaps, but not outcome. Although, saying that, I am aware that there are some painters whose commentary on their work can add layers to the viewer’s appreciation. Nor should a poem need to be explained; & appreciation of it can be enhanced by how it presents itself on the page or the screen, how the visual interacts with the verbal & vice versa.
Finally, a disclaimer. AI was not used in the production of this document.
note
[1] B O D Y | What Is Vispo? An Interview With Nico Vassilakis. Retrieved 5 Nov 2024.
mark young
o
wording images (1976)
In August and September I was in Philadelphia, visiting old University of Pennsylvania friends — I had studied for my PhD in English there ten years earlier. One morning having coffee on campus in the Houston Hall café, I saw someone I imagined I recognised. How likely is that? Nostalgia playing tricks? But then I heard her voice. Dana Goodgal (1947-1999) — that was her name. It turned out she’d been an undergraduate student of English at Penn and we’d met then. Now she was working on her Art History dissertation.
Her subject was the Camerino d’Alabastro. or alabaster studio, in the palace of the Duke of Ferrara, Alonso I D’Este, and the three large Titians plus a Bellini ‘corrected’, by Titian he’d commissioned for it. Like Bacchus and Ariadne they all picture baccannals, wild parties ‘honouring’ the God Bacchus. We are talking 1529 here. Titian was younger than me at that time. Although he knew no Latin or Greek, the paintings are nevertheless deeply literary, ‘worded’ in that way, indeed incomprehensible if, like me, you knew nothing of their sources: the poems of Catullus, Ovid and others. I had little or no art history, or classical literature, so her research which she told me all about was new knowledge to me.1
Dana’s supervisor was the famous Leo Steinberg (1920-2011), a new hire and quite a coup for Penn, who was however pestering her for her favours. She was auditing his first course, a seminar on Picasso, Joyce and de Saussure. Soon as I heard that I said, can I come too? The key texts were all from the second decade of last century: Cours de linguistique generale, a collection of lectures by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure published in 1916. Joyce’s novel Ulysses, (in serial form 1918-20), and Picasso’s cubist works, particularly his papier colles from 1912. My notes show I attended two sessions at least — September 15 and 29. He was lucid and intense. As my first exposure to close semiotic interpretations of Picasso’s collages, and to semiotics as a modernist project, they were a revelation. News to me.
And we were among a select few. Yve-Alain Bois wrote later: ‘Unfortunately, Leo Steinberg’s lecture on the parallel between Saussure and Picasso’s cubism has remained unpublished. It was first delivered in March 1976 at the American Academy in Rome, two months later at the Grand Palais in Paris, and each time in a revised version in various institutions in America — culminating in a Guggenheim Museum address in 1985'.2 Including his Penn seminar!
The challenge those interpretations, and those of Rosalind Krauss who had told Steinberg about Saussure, posed to the received wisdom on Cubism was, in her words, ‘momentous,’ for it proposed ‘a change not within the system of illusion from one type to another, but a conversion from one whole representational system, roughly called iconic, to another, roughly called symbolic’.… ‘If semiology refuses the copy notion of representation (the sign as a copy of a prior model or referent), it’s because of a conviction that it is the signifying medium itself — language, the sign, verbal or iconic — that constructs the representation, constructing it simultaneously, of course, as meaningful'.3
Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler, Picasso’s dealer had referred to the pasted paper and charcoal drawings like Violin (after December 3, 1912), remixes of the signifying medium itself, as ‘scripts’, and ‘writing’. However, the claim they brought to its knees the iconic tradition, with Titian and his fellow Old Masters at its head, remained largely uncomprehended. Not until they were ‘worded’ by the semiotic-savvy Leo Steinberg, Rosalind Krauss and Yve Alain-Bois, half a century later.
notes
- See Dana Goodgal, ‘The Camerino of Alfonso 1 D’Este’, Art History1,(1978), 162-3 and 168-172. Also Thomas Puttfraken, ‘Reconstructing Titian’, Art History 26, 5, (2003), 756-761. ↩︎
- See his Painting as Model, 1990, MIT Press, 290. ↩︎
- Rosalind Krauss, ‘The Motivation of the sign, ‘ in Picasso and Braque, A Symposium, Museum of Modern Art, 1989, 264, 302. ↩︎
wystan curnow