Ecstatic Alphabets

Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of writers, performers, and graphic des Language is a group exhibition on view igners transform letters, words, and at The Museum of Modern Art, New phrases into patterns, sounds, moving York, from May 6 to August 27, 2012. images, and objects from everyday life, It brings together forty-four modern celebrating the synesthetic qualities and contemporary artists and artists’ of language rather than reducing it groups working in all mediums including to pure form. Animated, atomized, painting, sculpture, film, video, audio, transliterated into phonemes, blown up spoken word, and design, all of whom to enormous proportions, or reduced to concentrate on the material qualities of systems of scratches, this language is written and spoken language—visual, meant to be seen or experienced but aural, and beyond. not read. As in earlier experiments, there is an abiding connection to poetry The works in the show belong to a in many of these recent works, adding distinguished history of poem/objects an ecstatic element to art that might and concrete-language experiments at first seem to display an alphabetic that dates to the beginnings of modern- plainness or even an inchoate quality. ism, and includes both the Dada and the Futurist moments, the recrudescence The exhibition is divided into two sect- of Neo-Dada in the late 1950s, and the ions, the first featuring an abbreviated literary movements of concrete and timeline of twentieth-century artworks sound poetry in Europe, Latin America, that treat language concretely, that is, and the United States. Although artists as a material. Most of the works in this were experimenting with language (and section use the platform of the page for poets with visual art) at the beginning their experiments. The second section of the twentieth century, it was only presents recent contemporary works in the 1950s that the idea of a kind of and projects in which a similar interest poetry/visual art hybrid was introduced, in language as a flexible and powerful first in Brazil and later internationally. artmaking material can be discerned, Like the painters and sculptors of the although the results are very different. same period who explored abstract The artists in the contemporary section forms with the goal of arriving at a non- have for the most part done away with metaphoric artwork that was itself and the page and returned language to nothing else, artists and poets working the world. concretely with words in the late 1950s and ’60s endeavored to use language The most conventional and familiar as a medium like paint, dissecting and materialization of language is the book, rearranging letters, words, and phrases which the exhibition acknowledges to create works of art whose form through the publication in which this and content were meant to be one and text is contained. This book—a volume the same. in the continuing series Bulletins of the Serving Library, published The contemporary works in Ecstatic by Dexter Sinister—is that artist team’s Alphabets in many ways continue the contribution to the exhibition and is research into the relationship between available for sale in the bookshop visual art and language begun by work of The Museum of Modern Art and from the previous century, but now through the distribution channels of language is more boldly severed from The Serving Library. the page and from language’s received meanings, received forms, and in some Laura Hoptman Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture cases its duties of communication. The Museum of Modern Art Moving freely among disciplines and mediums, artists who are also poets,