Playing with art & language: some personal memories

James Stuart explores the spatial and interactive aspects of text-based artworks, leaping off the page and into the textual practices of Peter Lyssiotis and Franz Ehmann. Lyssiotis is a writer and photomedia/collage artist and creates books that generally combine his own artworks and writings in collaborations with others. Among the most impressive of his projects is the recent A Gardener at Midnight: Journey into the Holy Lands, developed as part of a Creative Fellowship at the State Library of Victoria in 2003 which is of particular focus in this text. Brisbane-based/Australian-born Ehmann is concerned with the physical reading environment of the gallery and in turn deploys a multi-disciplinary approach to the physical space and temporal duration of his exhibitions. Via the works of these two practitioners Staurt here wishes to posit the very real sense of bodily and not just intellectual interaction with language that reading entails.

Jane Goodall explores the notion of text and the word as a kind of virus, something William Burroughs considers a parasitic organism, especially as is the case in contemporary visual and semantic culture. Words act as signifiers for semioticians, but their visual presence in art makes them work as spatial indicators, suggesting that they contain directions or instructions. Here Goodall poses the potential of words in revealing something else about themselves: a secret yearning not to give orders but rather to be oracles, channelling strange truths from who knows what sources. Artists discussed include: Suzann Victor, Susie Lingham, Joseph Ng, Tony Schwensen, Samuel Beckett, Cheo Chai-Hiang, Redza Piyadasa, Heather Ellyard, Barbara Campbell.

Melbourne public culture, curator/artist Elizabeth Gertsakis assembled a visual arts project around the life and work of early twentieth century Melbourne entrepreneur, sports and entertainment manager John Wren1871-1953. Artmaking, curating, presentation and display  in a broad not narrowly discipline-centric definition  are explored and unpicked. His world is, as Gertsakis argues, a constructed, directed one of effect and presentation within which Wren emerges as exemplar and victim in a process of image creation and narrative spinning that is central to social life in a media age.

2006 marked the 6th Gwangju Biennale: Fever Variations in South Korea. Stephanie Britton sets the scene for what she describes as having been generous and daring, though not grand or pretentious and never (that kiss of death) magisterial. This event saw a definite shift from an international focus to look more intently at Asian preoccupations of the recent past as played out in the minds and hands of artists. Some of the simple headings at the recent Biennale were Myth and Fantasy; Nature and Body; Trace of Mind; Past in Present, as a way to initiate dialogue and illuminate the stories of how Asian artists began to work within an international context. Some of the artists showcased were Xu Bing (China), Kim Jong-ku (Korea), Miwa Yanagi (Japan) and Lee Sookyung (Korea).

In the broadest terms calligraphy can be seen as a prescriptive form of drawing and in this liberated sense an artist is free to investigate its role as both message and ornament. This article looks at the nature of Islamic calligraphy via the works of two very different artists working in Australia today  Iranian born Hossein Valamanesh and Naeem Rana of Pakistan. With the significance of language and the written word in Islamic culture it is hardly surprising that visual artists have in recent decades turned to it as the source of cultural and political potency.

This article looks at the recent works of New Zealand artists Michael Parekowhai, John Pule and John Reynolds to explore notions of identity through text and image relations. Parekowhais sculptural piece The Indefinite Article spells out I AM HE in an ironic critique of Colin McCahon and goes further through wordplay to cement a link between the word, identity and the complexities of translation. Reynolds Cloud comprised of nearly 7,000 white canvases transcribed with words from Harry Orsmans Oxford Dictionary of New Zealand English and acts to illuminate New Zealands separate identity and regional diversity within a worldwide community of English speakers. Stories of migration, of dispossession, of alienation characterise the work of John Pule. Similar to Parekowhai and Reynolds, Pule deploys words to multiply meanings and confound interpretation or translation.