The Art of Words

Cat Glennon’s piece in Western Exhibitions' exhibit “People Don’t Like to Read Art” says it all. “You don’t need to read into it, you just need to read it,” and that is precisely what Scott Speh, Owner and Director of the Chicago gallery wants you to do.

You are encouraged to examine, and page through the pieces featured.

“I think people in general when they go to galleries and museums only spend three to five seconds in front of a piece,” Speh said.

“Reading especially slows that process down,” he added.

It took five minutes just to read one-half of Simon Evans' four-sided three-dimensional pyramid made out of paper from a legal pad.

Speh said he wanted to put together an exhibit that shows that there are strains of art that deal with time and narrative in a textual manner.

He said he sought out similar artists working with text from around the nation, some local, and some even as far as Berlin.

The show features text in many forms of media: braille, to-do lists written on vinyl directly applied to the gallery walls, video, a hand-painted book, and even framed book pages from a fictional biography of the artwork of Nicholas Frank written by himself.

Frank said he began as a writer. “It’s always been a huge component of my curating, and I’ve read a lot about art, so I tend to see a pretty close relationship between the way people talk about art and the art itself,” Frank said.

“[I see] those things as complementary rather than outside of each other. Even as an artist making work that doesn’t directly deal with language, I would still process what I’m doing in terms of language on some level,” he added.

In the exhibit words are ubiquitous. The pieces appear tedious and intricate, like the repeated swirls of the word bliss done by Meg Hitchcock using individual letters cut from the Koran.

Some include drafts with erasure marks and crossed out words. The revisions become part of the piece, like the diagrams of de Kooning’s Bell System done by Deb Sokolow.

It could take hours, a day even, to read everything in the exhibit. You become enthralled like you would curled up with a good book.

The exhibit did feature a good book—Jack Kerouac’s classic, “On The Road.” You think it’s just a book, an homage to great literature in an exhibit about words, but when I asked Speh what the significance of it was he responded, “did you look through it?”

Placed throughout the book were Post-Its written by Rebecca Blakley illustrating her thoughts while reading and documenting her own journey on the road inspired by Kerouac’s words.

All of the works featured in the exhibit speak volumes. You can’t help but read it whether you’d like to or not.

“I like art to be about something,” Speh said. “I’m very interested in artists who comment on their world and talk about their place in it and what’s going on in a contemporary society.”

The exhibit is now over, but check out more pictures of the pieces featured in "People Don't Like to Read Art" on the amfm facebook page!

*(all photos taken by Ciera Mckissick)