Words Don’t Come Easy: Hilton Als on Language and Silence in the Visual Arts
From Terry Smith
The power language has to make everything look the same, which is most glaringly evident in the dictionary and which makes the personification of time possible: something no less remarkable than would have been making divinities of the logical constants. — Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1931.
How might this read if seeing was the subject? Today, almost a century later, we might highlight the power that our immersion in too many visual images has to make everything look the same, which is glaringly evident in spectacle culture and which, by immersing us all in this imposed subjectification, makes the objectification of time impossible. We might even say the same about most museum displays, art history survey books, and many temporary exhibitions, where the narrative of Art History is taken for granted, or is too obvious. But not all. Some exhibitions evoke modes of seeing that bring out the power of visual images to make everything look different, and thus make the personification of time possible. Some may even turn the logical constants into beguiling mysteries.
The Writing’s on the Wall: Language and Silence in the Visual Arts might be one such exhibition. Showing at the Hill Art Foundation, in the Chelsea art district, from December 12, 2024 to March 29, 2025, it is curated by writer Hilton Als, prize winning author, and long-time staff writer and arts critic for The New Yorker. Works from the Hill Foundation collection are augmented by many loans. A few masterworks by famous artists appear among a majority of smaller yet purposeful works by well-known artists, and a few by those less known. The quantitative quality question (otherwise known as connoisseurship) is, however, the least interesting aspect of the exhibition.
Much more interesting is what Als has to tell us (in fact, show us—this is an exhibition) about how works of visual art use language (writing in general and literature in particular) to show us aspects of our being in the world. In the elegantly produced exhibition brochure, Als’s essay, “The Poetics of Silence,” opens with this pairing. He contrasts being as a relatively passive state—“You know what being is. It happens to you all the time”—with the “active contemplation” entailed by the use of language. Yet, “When we think about visual culture or production, words aren’t the first things that come to mind. What does is the thing itself.” Its silent autonomy. Its presence, self-contained yet resonant. His curatorial premise follows: “I wanted to show what silence looked like—at least to me—and what words looked like to artists.”
The “at least to me” caveat signals that a highly personal perspective is on offer, its strengths and limits acknowledged in advance. “What words looked like to artists,” however, is an objective claim, an art historical one if he has in mind the artists in this exhibition, or a claim about the nature of art, if he takes these artists to represent visual artists in general.
During a conversation in 2011, Boris Groys highlighted “a very general point about the nature of art exhibitions,” arguing that there are “basically two types, each asking to be seen in a very different way”: “One shows us a fragment of a traditional narrative about the history of art, while the other reveals a subjective act of selection on the part of the organizer. Everything we have to say about curating works of art into exhibitions flows from this distinction.” Whatever we might think about the absolute character, or the generality, of this distinction, there is no doubt on which side of the ledger The Writing’s on the Wall falls. Als is explicit about this when he gratefully acknowledges the hands-off mentorship of two of his art history professors at Columbia during the 1980s: Kenneth Silver and Molly Nesbit. They helped him see that while writing and art— especially that about “fracture, loss and subversion”—were for him, academic art history was not.
Writing as someone who did take the art history option, including that alert to my experiences of fracture, loss and subversion, I will try to honor Als’s literary, and visual, erudition as he pursues his pathway in this exhibition. While his approach resounds with personal experience, it also reveals aspects of the unfolding of several histories— above all, those of writing, artmaking, and theater in New York since the 1950s.
The power language has to make everything look the same, which is most glaringly evident in the dictionary and which makes the personification of time possible: something no less remarkable than would have been making divinities of the logical constants. — Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1931.
How might this read if seeing was the subject? Today, almost a century later, we might highlight the power that our immersion in too many visual images has to make everything look the same, which is glaringly evident in spectacle culture and which, by immersing us all in this imposed subjectification, makes the objectification of time impossible. We might even say the same about most museum displays, art history survey books, and many temporary exhibitions, where the narrative of Art History is taken for granted, or is too obvious. But not all. Some exhibitions evoke modes of seeing that bring out the power of visual images to make everything look different, and thus make the personification of time possible. Some may even turn the logical constants into beguiling mysteries.
The Writing’s on the Wall: Language and Silence in the Visual Arts might be one such exhibition. Showing at the Hill Art Foundation, in the Chelsea art district, from December 12, 2024 to March 29, 2025, it is curated by writer Hilton Als, prize winning author, and long-time staff writer and arts critic for The New Yorker. Works from the Hill Foundation collection are augmented by many loans. A few masterworks by famous artists appear among a majority of smaller yet purposeful works by well-known artists, and a few by those less known. The quantitative quality question (otherwise known as connoisseurship) is, however, the least interesting aspect of the exhibition.
Much more interesting is what Als has to tell us (in fact, show us—this is an exhibition) about how works of visual art use language (writing in general and literature in particular) to show us aspects of our being in the world. In the elegantly produced exhibition brochure, Als’s essay, “The Poetics of Silence,” opens with this pairing. He contrasts being as a relatively passive state—“You know what being is. It happens to you all the time”—with the “active contemplation” entailed by the use of language. Yet, “When we think about visual culture or production, words aren’t the first things that come to mind. What does is the thing itself.” Its silent autonomy. Its presence, self-contained yet resonant. His curatorial premise follows: “I wanted to show what silence looked like—at least to me—and what words looked like to artists.”
The “at least to me” caveat signals that a highly personal perspective is on offer, its strengths and limits acknowledged in advance. “What words looked like to artists,” however, is an objective claim, an art historical one if he has in mind the artists in this exhibition, or a claim about the nature of art, if he takes these artists to represent visual artists in general.
During a conversation in 2011, Boris Groys highlighted “a very general point about the nature of art exhibitions,” arguing that there are “basically two types, each asking to be seen in a very different way”: “One shows us a fragment of a traditional narrative about the history of art, while the other reveals a subjective act of selection on the part of the organizer. Everything we have to say about curating works of art into exhibitions flows from this distinction.” Whatever we might think about the absolute character, or the generality, of this distinction, there is no doubt on which side of the ledger The Writing’s on the Wall falls. Als is explicit about this when he gratefully acknowledges the hands-off mentorship of two of his art history professors at Columbia during the 1980s: Kenneth Silver and Molly Nesbit. They helped him see that while writing and art— especially that about “fracture, loss and subversion”—were for him, academic art history was not.
Writing as someone who did take the art history option, including that alert to my experiences of fracture, loss and subversion, I will try to honor Als’s literary, and visual, erudition as he pursues his pathway in this exhibition. While his approach resounds with personal experience, it also reveals aspects of the unfolding of several histories— above all, those of writing, artmaking, and theater in New York since the 1950s.
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