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Meditations on Text and Image
- “[T]he drawing/ starts with a jab and goes/ round and round larger and/ larger faster and faster/ like the children who swirl/ faster and faster–” (Louise Bourgeois).
- I, too, need to put something on a surface to get myself going. Many times, I’ve started with a line from my poem “First Martyr,” This world, always slow in its giving, which, in the end, gets concealed by layers of paint.
- “Why did you bother putting it there in the first place?”
- Like a ritual, perhaps. Like how people say grace before they dig in. It has more to do with faith than with what the words semantically contribute to the work itself.
- Once, I was invited to be part of a literary reading at Hauser & Wirth, Hong Kong, to coincide with a new Louise Bourgeois exhibition there. Upon entry, I was immediately fascinated by the anxiety and trouble unabashedly shown in her paintings and sculptures. In one of the paintings, two red hands are scratching downward on the sides of a canvas, leaving blood-like fingernail trails from top to bottom. In the center, the artist writes, “extreme tension!!”
- As a poet-turned-artist, I’ve been repeatedly advised to retain my language in the art I make. But there’s much to consider. How literal or figurative could the language be if it’s part of the artwork? How do I gauge the connotative balance between text and image? What does it say about me if I am to include texts by others (say, an Allen Ginsberg poem)? Or, worse, easy words that literally mean what they mean? Am I in the position to say “worse” only because I think doing that is lazy?
- I’m mesmerized by Louise Bourgeois’ word-spirals. Her language graphically winds, tightens, retreats, and compacts. In those spirals, her text becomes her image. There’s so much madness and pain in her handwriting. It’s the energy conveyed by her alphabets and the negative space in between that makes me feel.
- I mean, I like the boldness in Barbara Kruger’s declarative works: Your body is a battleground, Talk is cheap, I shop therefore I am. I mean, do I want my language to sound like advertising slogans that talk back to the materialistic and visual culture that has already been around for decades? Her language is context-specific, and works perfectly well with black-and-white photographs, but there’s simply no poetry in it once it’s extracted from the image.
- On the contrary, some of the slogan-like works by John Giorno are poetically done. I love the rich visual and tactile imagery, personification, and contrasts in NECKLACES OF WISTERIA BOWING TO MAGNOLIA MAMAS, SUNFLOWERS SNUGGLE THEIR HEADS ON MY LAP AND GAZE UP AT THE SKY, THE GODS WE KNOW WE ARE THE GODS WE KNOW WE WERE. That said, anyone with a fancy design app or an i-Pad pro could make a thousand of these overnight.
- If it’s correct to say Giorno’s language is more sophisticated than Kruger’s in terms of poetic treatment, I wonder if Giorno’s would still look accessible if it isn’t placed against a mono-colored background, or one with minimal treatment. His poetics can’t bear any distraction.
- I mean, viewers are fine with language, but can’t take in too much of it. They’re fine with language, so long as they understand it and see how it complements the image. I wonder how many of them are longing for (slightly) crafted language in art?
- Would Frank O’Hara’s collaborative “poem paintings” with Normal Bluhm still work without the spontaneous and impulsive splashes of paint, or if O’Hara’s words were ten times more ambiguous? If there’s an unwritten rule about just how ambiguous the language can be so that text-based artworks remain accessible and therefore buyable, does that explain the growing trend of using “easy language” but packaging it as poetic?
- I mean, I’m not repulsed by all easy language in text-based art. Christine Wang’s humor and activism is accessible and enjoyable. And Christopher Wool’s Apocalypse Now (1988) series is always captivating (especially the one that says SELL THE HOUSE SELL THE CAR SELL THE KIDS). If humor makes easy language passable (by my standard, but honestly who cares?), so does the pain and struggle in the (early) works of Glenn Ligon and Mark Bradford.
- David Shrigley has recently had his comeback and become auction-famous with his British humor in easy language, and the directness in what he draws. I spent around $4,000 at Art Basel, Hong Kong, for an exclusive print by him. On the print, the blue dog that looks directly at me is drawn as if by a child. There’re words around it: OLD DOG (top left) and I STILL LOVE YOU (right, on the side).
- My dog passed away around this time a year ago. Since then, I have told myself to keep looking for another dog named Bouncey in all rescues. That way I knew it would be him, reincarnated.
- Not sure if it’s humor or pain that made me buy the print. But a few days after I did it, an art-collecting friend told me he’d spent only half of what I paid for the same print, because it’s common for galleries to price their limited art prints at different tiers.
- Four weeks later, the print arrived, unframed. But I didn’t find myself missing my dog more than before. There’s still no dog named Bouncey.
- Then I flipped the pages of my book, looking for another phrase to start on a new surface.
Nicholas Wong is the author of Crevasse (Kaya Press, 2015), which won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, and Besiege Me (Noemi Press, 2021). He is also the recipient of the Australian Book Review’s Peter Porter Poetry Prize. His translations have recently appeared or will appear in Ninth Letter, The Georgia Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly,...