I’ve been asked to say a few words about this exhibition, The Writing’s on the Wall: Language and Silence in the Visual Arts, but I don’t want to.
Part of the experience I hope to evoke here draws a line between language, which is to say active contemplation, and being, which requires nothing more than your presence first and language second (or third). You know what being is. It happens to you all the time. You may be in a museum, or a public park, or sitting dully in your house, with “nothing” on your mind, and then there you are—a kind of walking phenomenology, language-free, but not feeling. In fact, you are suffused with feeling. Your feet are on the ground, and your body, released from the chatter of the everyday, is porous to the surrounding world with its various silences—a world where everything and nothing speaks to you. The clouds; some pictures on a white wall; a beautiful, hitherto-unknown sculpture reaching for eternity; that blank wall standing between you and the wonders of a garden that manages to grow right here in the middle of Manhattan—they all became part of your being, the self that is always on the verge of discovery, if only you can listen to its silences.
Silence says so much, if you listen. (From Marianne Moore’s 1924 poem “Silence”: “The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; not in silence, but restraint.”) And since I have been a writer all my life, it’s a relief not to think in words sometimes, and to look at pictures, which do not so much deny verbalization but are without language, only the experience of here and now. Sometimes being simply means that we are somewhere, and we are porous to contemplation. When we think about visual culture or production, words aren’t the first things that come to mind. What does is the thing itself. And for this exhibition, I wanted to show what silence looked like—at least to me—and what words looked like to artists. The struggle to speak, to say, to reveal language or an attempt at language—communication—in a visual medium that has a complicated relationship to speech.
That’s one reason Cy Twombly is here. He is one of the great disseminators and unpackers of language, of sound. In some pieces, such as Untitled (1970), the artist conveys the sense we have when language isn’t yet working, when it is deciding what it will be before it becomes words. Elsewhere in the great artist’s oeuvre, such as 1978’s Venus and Adonis, Twombly takes the names of mythic characters to create a surfeit of feeling on the canvas, a bursting of love born out of history: Venus, the goddess of love, meets Adonis, the mortal lover of the goddesses Aphrodite and Persephone, and in antiquity, the ideal when it came to male beauty. But we don’t see them—we see the words and we conjure up the images, while Twombly, much like the work he does in 1970’s Untitled, provides a visual plane for us to traverse, to find our thoughts in, and to see—if we want to—Venus and Adonis.
And if we call Twombly a sound artist, might we compare him to, say, Wagner in his sweep and wrestling with language? And then Jennie C. Jones is our Mozart, delicate but nimble, a maker of surfaces that are deep in their implications about sound and what it looks like? She shows us what the rhythms of the soul leave behind—EKGs of rhythm followed by silence, or surrounded by it. Indeed, in Jones’s work, the sounds wouldn’t look as dramatic if they didn’t rest in silence.
I’ve been asked to say a few words about this exhibition, The Writing’s on the Wall: Language and Silence in the Visual Arts, but I don’t want to.
Part of the experience I hope to evoke here draws a line between language, which is to say active contemplation, and being, which requires nothing more than your presence first and language second (or third). You know what being is. It happens to you all the time. You may be in a museum, or a public park, or sitting dully in your house, with “nothing” on your mind, and then there you are—a kind of walking phenomenology, language-free, but not feeling. In fact, you are suffused with feeling. Your feet are on the ground, and your body, released from the chatter of the everyday, is porous to the surrounding world with its various silences—a world where everything and nothing speaks to you. The clouds; some pictures on a white wall; a beautiful, hitherto-unknown sculpture reaching for eternity; that blank wall standing between you and the wonders of a garden that manages to grow right here in the middle of Manhattan—they all became part of your being, the self that is always on the verge of discovery, if only you can listen to its silences.
Silence says so much, if you listen. (From Marianne Moore’s 1924 poem “Silence”: “The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; not in silence, but restraint.”) And since I have been a writer all my life, it’s a relief not to think in words sometimes, and to look at pictures, which do not so much deny verbalization but are without language, only the experience of here and now. Sometimes being simply means that we are somewhere, and we are porous to contemplation. When we think about visual culture or production, words aren’t the first things that come to mind. What does is the thing itself. And for this exhibition, I wanted to show what silence looked like—at least to me—and what words looked like to artists. The struggle to speak, to say, to reveal language or an attempt at language—communication—in a visual medium that has a complicated relationship to speech.
That’s one reason Cy Twombly is here. He is one of the great disseminators and unpackers of language, of sound. In some pieces, such as Untitled (1970), the artist conveys the sense we have when language isn’t yet working, when it is deciding what it will be before it becomes words. Elsewhere in the great artist’s oeuvre, such as 1978’s Venus and Adonis, Twombly takes the names of mythic characters to create a surfeit of feeling on the canvas, a bursting of love born out of history: Venus, the goddess of love, meets Adonis, the mortal lover of the goddesses Aphrodite and Persephone, and in antiquity, the ideal when it came to male beauty. But we don’t see them—we see the words and we conjure up the images, while Twombly, much like the work he does in 1970’s Untitled, provides a visual plane for us to traverse, to find our thoughts in, and to see—if we want to—Venus and Adonis.
And if we call Twombly a sound artist, might we compare him to, say, Wagner in his sweep and wrestling with language? And then Jennie C. Jones is our Mozart, delicate but nimble, a maker of surfaces that are deep in their implications about sound and what it looks like? She shows us what the rhythms of the soul leave behind—EKGs of rhythm followed by silence, or surrounded by it. Indeed, in Jones’s work, the sounds wouldn’t look as dramatic if they didn’t rest in silence.
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