PLURAL SPEECH

Xu Bing
James Elaine
Vivienne Koorland
Lee Mingwei
Osvaldo Romberg

Curated by Dominique Nahas

3 December – 6 February 1999

“Plural Speech” unites the work of five artists who communicate with singularity and purpose on the structure of the self-experienced through thought, memory and the structure of everyday experience. Using words or text in their installations and individual artworks, these artists attempt to communicate an almost incommunicable irruption occurring between the senses of deprivation and rootlessness and between those of longing and fulfillment.

Using language-infused artwork as the bridge between the public and the private spheres, the task of the artists in “Plural Speech”, to use Maurice Blanchot’s words in “The Infinite Conversation”, is “to respond to this speech that surpasses [our] hearing, to respond to it without having really understood it, and to respond to it in repeating it, in making it speak… To name the possible, to respond to the impossible. I remember that we had designated in this way the two centers of gravity of all language.”

PRESS

Show: Plural Speech
Publication: Art Matters
Writer: Judith Barbour Osborne
Date: 03.01.99
Title: White Box Show Questions Power of Language

“We take verbal communication for granted; we trust it. We allow it to lull us into thinking that we know. The five artists in Plural Speech at the White Box Gallery offer us experiences involving words that give pause to that knowing. I viewed the exhibition in the gallery by the same name in New York City prior to its traveling to Philadelphia.
The sounds of people talking lure us into a room created by Chinese born artist Xu Bing, who emigrated to the United States in 1989. In the installation “Tower Babel Records,” the artist has drawn details of a room (desk, plants, books, computer) onto the walls where one might expect to see the actual objects. The only real object is a television screen on which a series of people animatedly repeat the same words in auditions for a television commercial. The verbal repetition numbs us to the already dubious content of the words. Attention then falls on the very real personality speaking them and the discrepancies between the words and the intention behind them.
Outside the room another artist also points to what stands where words cease to be. Mold, mosses and vines sprout from decaying books lying open and lined up on shelves. James Elaine, whose “Objects from the Dying Salon” was first presented at the Thread Waxing Space in New York City in 1995, has set up a dialog between objects of nature and the language system we have developed to understand the world out of which language iteself, through us, has sprouted.
Philadelphia-based Argentine-Israeli artist Osvaldo Romberg’s life-sized “Every man and Every woman” made of sheets of acetate, run from a transparent theater lined with a broad assortment of texts drawn from art and art historical sources. Within each text Romberg has identified and highlighted aphorisms—intellectual constructions within intellectual constructions. It is these found soundbites that Mr. and Mrs. E take with them as they charge out of the cave of cultural history, never fully leaving.
South African artist Vivienne Koorland has written and drawn on a number of old book covers in antique frames. Each piece speaks to something deep in our memory. We normally listen with our ears. In this case, however, what in us is doing the listening, what in us hears what recognizes?
Lee Mingwei, who spent summers as a child in a Chan monastery in Taiwan, uses language to redirect out attention to the word-free perception of fully lived experiences. “100 Days with Lily” is a series of photographs superimposed with words. Both the images and the text record his mundane activities accompanied by the plant. “Day 20: Reading with lily. Day 21: Eating with lily.” In its repetition, the word “with” becomes a doorway that opens to the sensation of relationship in the fullness of a moment.
Now do you think you have an idea of what this show is about? Are you going to trust these words? The only way to test this communication is to see for yourself.

“Plural Speech”, curated by Dominique Nahas, is at the White Box Gallery in Philadelphia (1315 Cherry Street, 4th floor) from March 5 through April 24 with the opening reception on Friday, March 5, 5-8pm.

Show: Plural Speech
Publication: NY Arts
Writer: Bourbon
Date: 01.01.99

“Plural Speech” curated by Dominique Nahas through February 6th.

Nahas has conceptually linked the work in the show via notions of a language-art that communicated private ideas into a public realm. Further, the ideas suggested in “Plural Speech” are meant as a kind of preternatural guttural talk that is incomprehensible, yet significant. On display are works that use the written word and other knowledge constructs, such as maps, to elucidate the limits and strengths of language. The show emphasizes that area where things become phatic— that is— meaningless, but meant to establish a social connection. Of course this goal necessarily accentuates the idiosyncratic nature o art. For one person’s meaningful ludic speech is another person’s meaninglessness.

Show: Plural Speech
Publication: Review
Writer: Steve Mumford
Date: 02.01.99
Title: Plural Speech

In fact, reading, in the sense of consuming, is far from playing with the text. “Playing” must be understood here in a small polysemy: the text plays (like a door, like a machine with “play”) and the reader plays twice over, playing in the Text as one plays in a game, looking for a practice which reproduces it, but, in order that the practice not be reduced to a passive inner mimesis (the Text is precisely that which resists such a reduction), also playing the Text in the musical sense of the term.
— Roland Barthes, from From Work to Text, Revue d’Esthetique 3 (1971), Translated by Stephen Heath.

Barthes’ dense and charmingly confusing essay circles and hovers over the idea of the text as a collaborative field. This field, according to Barthes, calls for the readers’ intervention and collaboration within its matrix of assertions and interpretations much as an impromptu jam session parts for an added player.
The madcap intellectual antics of Barthes, Derrida, Foucault & Co. took a decade or two to really find purchase among American artists; their theories on text, language, and the mechanics of power strongly resonated for intellectuals on this side of the pond during the Reagan-Bush years. While the deconstructionist furor of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s has rather abated, the essential ideas remain compelling, particularly in terms of how we regard texts, or even books generally, as signifiers of “neutral” information. This is in evidence in this bright and entertaining group exhibition curated by Dominique Nahas, featuring works by Xu Bing, James Elaine, Vivienne Koorland, Lee Mingwei, and Osvaldo Romberg. Each uses passages of text (spoken, in the case of Bing) which have been playfully incorporated into strikingly unpedantic and visually satisfying works.
Greeting the viewer upon entry is Osvaldo Romberg’s sprawling installation, Homotextualis, 1998 (as in man, not gay). With his characteristic panache and bombast, Romberg has constructed a towering half-dome of photo offset images culled from art history textbooks, affixed to a balsa wood armature. This looms over a pair of full-size running humanoids, one male, one female, fashioned from rolls of acetate, tin-man style. This humorous, translucent Adam and Eve appear to be dashing from the wave of art historical quotations poised to engulf them. The quotations are massed and collaged in amusing juxtapositions: Chinese terra-cotta horsemen jockey with staid Greek pottery figures, Frida Kahlo’s symbolically vivisected self-portrait is suspended over Rubens’ unselfconsciously frolicking Graces. Interspersed are literal quotations, excerpts from some insipid history text from which Romberg has highlighted individual words to create new sentences with patently subversive meanings: “Go by taste, risk redundancy”, or, more cleverly: “German influence is well-known for authoring epitaphs”.
Another set of figures loll against the wall near by, their genders indicated by narrow conical phalluses or simple holes. Romberg’s ominous aphorisms reoccur on their bodies, printed on small acetate strips stuck on like Band-Aids.
I can’t say precisely what all this means; however, the crazy quilt of deconstructed signifiers surely resist becoming didactic through sheer visual invention, earnestness constantly subverted by the artist’s aggressive urge to play.
Somewhat more sober in aspect is James Elaine’s installation Library from the Dying Salon, 1998. A narrow bookshelf reaching almost to the ceiling is crammed with vintage hard cover books of the old white-male variety— from Somerset Maugham and Irving Stone to the Popular Mechanics Do-it-Yourself Encyclopedia. Rounding the bookshelf’s corner, one discovers broad-leafed plants growing from between the books’ pages, tendrils snaking down the sides. It’s an amusing and fanciful notion, although frankly, the plants looked a little starved for nutrition. (Perhaps an edition of Toni Morrison’s Beloved would have helped?)
The theme of vintage books is picked up again in Vivienne Koorland’s works, a series of antique book covers on which the artist has drawn or painted, then framed in gorgeous antique English picture frames. Some of Koorland’s alterations are simple repetitions of letters, resembling moldering primers of some long-dead school child. Others, more ominous, depict maps describing long-ago battlefields. “Winter Battle: Champagne”, 1994 presents a simple line of a river with small numeric notations and arrows connoting battle campaigns. It’s presented in a beautiful, heavy drab-desert frame decorated with small Germanic heraldic oak-leaf garlands, chilling in their delicate military pageantry.
If there’s a weakness in Koorland’s work, it’s that the overall effect is rather ABC Carpet, bearing the look of high-end distressed furniture. Koorland’s subtly harrowing content helps to ameliorate his complaint, but you have to look closely to observe it.
Distinctly less tasteful is Xu Bing’s Tower Babel Records, 1998, a small sheet rock house just large enough to enter. Inside, one finds oneself in a simulated petit-bourgeois living room, the furnishings drawn in oil stick directly on the walls in a simple linear style with Cezannesque crosshatching. The fluffed pillows, fat cat, plants and window with a view can’t compete, however, with the real television set mounted into the wall on which is playing a long loop of out-takes of an imagined commercial for Tower Records. A procession of unlikely if not unphotogenic would-be pitchers (employees from Tower Records stores around the world) intone, drawl, or enthusiastically rehearse the following absurd phrase: “You need diversity, dissimilarity, selection; Tower Records - it’s a spice of life thing. Tower Records - it’s a global thing.”
This banal piece of global-capitalist gibberish speaks for itself, but the individual variations of delivery combined with the odd conviction of the speakers is quite funny.
Lee Mingwei completes the ensemble with “100 Days with Lily #3”, 1995, an installation featuring text (rolling past the viewer on a projected video, and printed over some rather bland photographs) documenting sample activities with the aforementioned Lily: Day 47, 13:06 Sewing with Lily, Day 35, 19:39 Masturbating with Lily.
Mingwei’s work highlights, it seems to me, the greatest risks of this kind of text installation—that it feels awfully familiar, harking back to the old Fluxus avant-garde and their hippie tendencies aimed at rolling back the restrictions of the 50s moral boundaries and notions of decorum generally. This approach seems a bit quaint in a time when Congress itself is debating these issues publicly in the form of President Clinton’s escapades. The inherent quandary for contemporary artists dealing with texts (texts as supposedly neutral voices of power) is not to come off as overtly political or hectoring, a stance which presupposes an obsolete political dialect.
In a recent Artists Talk on Art panel discussion, the exhibition’s curator, Dominique Nahas, asserted that humor is an intrinsic element of much contemporary art. Indeed, it’s the light, witty, visual humor found in much of the work in Plural Speech that makes this exhibition so worthwhile. Romberg’s and Bing’s installations in particular crackle with energy and, in a way, seem to defy collectibility; each element of their ambitious and careful constructions seems needed yet somehow spontaneous, and reactive to the space in which it was built. They are entertaining, which, I think, is high praise in today’s art world.

Show: Plural Speech
Publication: Time Out
Writer: Robert Mahoney
Date: 12.21.99
Title: Plural Speech

This elegant group show, curated by Dominique Nahas, features five artists who use words, but in a particular way. All of the works employ text to articulate a sense of alienation or cultural despair, or any condition where words sometimes seem to fail.
Vivienne Koorland and James Elaine use old books—both as materials and as symbols, perhaps, of the kind of canonical knowledge that has come under assault lately. Koorland draws real and imaginary battle maps on old, worn volumes. These works suggest that history is an accident, the result of a direction not taken or a strategy that failed. Elaine’s Library from the Dying Salon features very old books that were placed outdoors by the artist - sometimes for years. Here, words have faded away under the onslaught of bugs and mildew. In another corner of Library, bean sprouts encroach on a very tall bookcase stuffed with thrift-shop encyclopedias. With Library, Elaine offers a mute testament to the power of nature over culture.
You could call Osvaldo Romberg’s Homotextualis a cybernetic marionette theater of cultural history: Clear acetate sheets bearing quotations and art-historical masterpieces form a proscenium for puppet like figures that are also made with clear plastic—and are likewise festooned with words and images. Transparent in both the literal and figurative sense, Homotextualis expresses Romberg’s pessimism about the West’s ability as a culture to sustain its great artistic heritage.
The funniest piece in the show is Xu Bing’s Tower Babel Records, a room with walls covered by a life-size drawing of someone’s study. There’s a chair, a desk, a computer—even a cat. All is quiet and contemplative, except for one sore spot: an actual TV monitor showing actors auditioning for a Tower Books commercial. While I’m personally not convinced that art is any less susceptible to meaningless babble than television, Babel is a living rendition of a contemporary dilemma—get to work, or watch TV?

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