Words, and fragments thereof, have been sneaking onto local gallery walls of late. Earlier this year, a large and “wordy” exhibition at UCSB’s AD&A Museum filled walls and floors with Public Texts: A Californian Visual Language . One of the pieces in the Santa Barbara Museum of Art’s In the Making: Contemporary Art at SBMA was a Jenny Holzer, for whom texts have been a primary art material. Now, over at Sullivan Goss, here comes another plunge into the phenom of art involving texts, reconfigured meanings, letter-philia, with an aptly tangled, layered, and witty show title, TL;DR: TEXT / ART (Too Long; Didn’t Read / Too Long; Don’t Read) . The show deviates from the traditionally more, well, traditional fare proffered by this major gallery, culling together a loose survey of artworks in which words matter. And so does the very shape and objective appearance of said words and letters.
Text and deconstructions of the same have worked their way into art, especially in the modern era, as a natural source of thought and semantics beyond the abstracting tendencies of the visual arts. There have been salient examples of word-, letter-, or number-based art, including the everyday tapping world of cubism and assemblage, in Charles Demuth’s iconic 1928 painting “I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold,” and any number of works by wordsmith-prankster Ed Ruscha.
This show rightfully lends wall space to both the prominent artists Holzer and Ruscha. Holzer’s set of sly aphorisms on peaceful wood-textured postcards, in the series called Truism Postcards, includes one used on the show’s announcement card, “WORDS TEND TO BE INADEQUATE.” Other pithy pearls of loaded Holzer-esque wisdom: “YOU ARE GUILELESS IN YOUR DREAMS” and “ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE.”
