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.”
Ruscha’s entry in the show whispers like a wallflower amid the generally louder neighboring art. His lithograph “Some Los Angeles Apartments” is a lightly drawn image of a floating book bearing that title, a celebrated Ruscha book now transformed into a flotation device in the composition.
Francis Criss’s 1930-vintage “Still Life” taps into the zone between cubist recontextualizing of space and facets, with a word tucked into the mix, while Thomas Akawie reminds us of Demuth’s “five” obsession with “8 Ball TV Landscape,” a pattern-ized semi-abstraction all about the number eight, gone tipsy and echoic.
Other witty and playfully deconstructionist tactics enter the expressive fold in the case of Tracey Harris’s “Ignorant Bliss,” a painting of a bookshelf winkingly imprinted with such titles as Batshit Passionate and Victimized by My Martyr Complex. Amos Kennedy’s set of quotation-bearing posters includes a Paul Robeson quote about the nature of art itself: “Artists are the gatekeepers of truth. We are civilization’s radical voice.” Another poster makes a punchier point: “BE NICE OR LEAVE,” words of wisdom emphasized in all caps.
One illuminating upshot of the TL;DR show is its showcasing of artists with local connections, for whom the word world has been integral to their aesthetics. Former Santa Barbaran Nancy Gifford has channeled her interest in poetry and bibliophilia into conceptual art, represented by “Fall, Falling, Felt,” a triptych framing those three words in almost visual onomatopoeic form, and At a Loss for Words (Hieroglyphic Series), a series of tiny chalkboards with shapes and fragmented forms subbing for linguistic markers as we know them.
Bookish artist Linda Ekstrom, who had a fascinating exhibit at the Westmont Museum of Art last year, shows “Mystic: Simone de Beauvais.” This is a prime example of the artist’s artistic vision involving meticulous cut-up lines of text and a certain mystical mash-up atmosphere.
Patricia Chidlaw, long one of Santa Barbara’s favorite painters and a post-Hopper-esque poetic realist, expertly toys with art about vintage urban kitsch in “The End.” Here, a crisply lit painting of a corner liquor store is layered with shadows of the title on the façade, like an omen from above (or below).
The kitsch parade continues with Dave Lefner’s boisterous yet minimalist painting “Holiday Motel,” its garish neon signage packed into a diptych form that appears to be in-your-face in a friendly way.
In this intriguing show, as with other word-art sightings around town, our art appreciation and discernment faculties are forced to consider the work from more than just a visual or art-worldly angle. There is a vocabulary lesson in progress, having to do with the endlessly varied interpretations of adventures in the space where art and words meet and learn to get along.