Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language at MoMA
In our everyday life we never actually ‘think’ about the language. While for most the language is often invisible, some are more attracted to its visible form – the letters.
Significantly, graphic designers sometimes get lost in this tangible form of basic human expression, often considering the visible part as an abstract form, thus ignoring its meaning. But they are not the only ones who work with material qualities of language. Since Apollinaire and concrete poetry movement, artist and poets have been handling language as a physical structure.
It is exactly this kind of approach that MoMA is trying to investigate in its latest exhibition entitled “Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language”. The curator Laura Hoptman has decided to take an insight into material qualities of language explored by artist working with a wide range of media.
The exhibition provides both a historical look (even though some of the artist could still be considered contemporary) through the works of Carl Andre, Marcel Broodthaers, Henri Chopin, Marcel Duchamp, Ian Hamilton Finlay, John Giorno, Kitasono Katue, Ferdinand Kriwet, Liliane Lijn, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Bruce Nauman, Lawrence Weiner and others.
While these modernist experiments are being presented through a timeline, in order to get a broader historical view of the phenomenon and tell the story of concrete language in visual art, the contemporary part of the exhibition focuses on the new ways of investigating the concrete language phenomenon. Hence, the ratios has become not only a poet but also writer, graphic designer, performer and publisher working with a contemporary mix of the available media.
Thus, the fact that among the impressive list of contemporary artist we can find designers like Experimental Jetset, isn’t a pure coincidence. Since graphic design has become an evolving collaborative approach, more than a defined discipline, this exhibition sheds some light on these kind of practices, that both open the discipline to contaminations from other fields as well as free it from the duties of (commercial) communication.
The exhibition, opening the 6th of May and running until 27th of August, will be accompanied by a catalogue curated by Stuart Bailey and David Reinfurt from Dexter Sinister. If you actually manage to miss the exhibition, you must stay tuned for their Bulletins of the Serving Library where concrete language goes digital.
