Words, words, words: Mike Brown, Ruark Lewis, Rose Nolan
On its own, a word points to both the sentence that it might end up in, and also to the thought that precedes it. This zone between thought and convention allows artists to foreground qualities that are normally ignored in linguistic acts. Alex Selenitsch looks at a number of post WW2 tendencies or art movements which have made use of words: Action Painting, Graffiti, Concrete Art, Conceptual Art, Fluxus and Pop Art. Selenitsch uses the examples of Mike Brown, Rose Nolan and Ruark Lewis to highlight specific functions of the word, whether it be the morphing of word and image into one, the iconic and formal aspects of words or the relationship between visual and aural language.