John Baldessari, Learn to Read poster 2003
Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York / Paris © John Baldessari
John Baldessari's 1960s poster girl, a visual trigger and now advertorial for this conceptually tight show at Tate Modern's Level 2 Gallery, beams coquettishly over the top of a James Joyce biography. The girl's smile suggests this might not be her usual reading matter, but that she really couldn't care less what anyone thinks - being young, beautiful and with rarely time for such an activity. The poster, printed with the instruction and title of the show 'Learn to Read', neatly reflects our assumptions about the relationship between image and text - in this case to assign a social stereotype - with a dated but nevertheless disarming humour that drives an expansive dialectic through contemporary art's use of the written word to deconstruct and reconfigure meaning.
The works by the 29 international artists selected are all about the process of looking beyond the first reading of any information we are presented with. 'Text' in this context is as likely to misinform as instruct, likely to exist as a physically negotiable mass as hand-written or printed conceptual prompt. The art historical references that emerge from this complex mass of data date back as far as Cubist collages or the influential wordplay associated with Dada and Surrealism. The inclusion of works by American 1960s Conceptual art figures such as info-bard Baldessari and minimal interventionist Robert Barry (who has designed a new vinyl window piece for the project) connect with and help to contextualise works by emerging and established artists.
The pace at which the works have been made and can be processed appears to have played a significant role in the design of the exhibition, especially given the volume of works on display. The curatorial metronome is rarely steady - building slowly in visual complexity after the immediate impact of some of the opening works, to shift unpredictably between densely executed/doctored drawings, to more throwaway, but often sharply critical one-liners in a variety of media and bold sculptures that subvert preconceptions of found and readymade objects.
Peter Coffin
Peter Coffin's twisted linear mass of neon tubing at the exhibition entrance/exit paves the way for sculptural things to come. The showy come-hither aesthetic of the piece is offset by the pseudo art evangelism of its title: 'Line after Bruce Nauman's The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths' and Bethan Huws's church/theatre notice board overhead, which reads: "What's the point of giving you any more artworks when you don't understand the ones you've got?"
Bethan Huws
Further inside, another of Huws's 'word virtrines' simultaneously reads 'GOOD' and (with the first 'o' positioned higher than the second) 'O GOD'. This tiny shift between poetic revision and light-hearted comment sits perfectly with Graham Gillmore's 'Vull and Noid': a nearby drippy enamel homage to the material seduction of paint and the textual legacy of Pop artists such as Jasper Johns.
Vittorio Santoro
Similarly, at first spec, Swiss artist Vittorio Santoro's pencil drawings of philosophical, diaristic reflections appear easily consumable, for the words are very familiar. It's not until quite close at hand that the means of their manufacture becomes clear. For one particular untitled series Santoro has chosen the sentences described but has charged others to make them. As images, the individual sentences - often drawn over and over on each page - have a repetitive, oscillatory visual quality that literally and conceptually disrupts their reading. The plaintive plea of 'How can I make it right', split into two sections as if divided by an invisible mirror, becomes all the more disturbing and significant when you witness the many surface smudges indicating the toil involved.
Kris Martin
This sense of labour and containment is key to Belgian-born Kris Martin's 'Idiot' manuscript: a handwritten version of Dostoyevsky's The Idiot that Martin has divided in half and secured within a Perspex topped plinth, expecting us to believe (or not) that it has been copied in its entirety. Mexican artist Mario Garcia Torres, meanwhile, has provided just a single sentence ('Until it makes sense') projected jerkily into a corner of the gallery. As a moving image it travels a very short distance, but as an ideological state acutely describes the absurdity of the artistic act. In contrast, one could spend hours poring over Simon Evans's equally absurd fag-burned map and still be none the wiser about his curious associative categorisation. In one tiny section of the piece, for example, arrows extend in different directions from the scorched 'Cousin's Hole', to 'The Bum of an Ironing Board' and 'Tribal Mint'.
David Shrigley
Following their part in a recent installation at London's Haunch of Venison, Philippe Parreno's speech-bubble helium balloons are easily recognisable clustered tightly in a far corner at the back of the space. The former black, brooding sky of silenced words has given way to a small, pensive grey cloud that could signify a virtual shift in something as slight as an overheard conversation or as significant as a change in political direction, given that the work was originally used in a French Trade Union strike. Hovering over David Shrigley's individually captioned, prosaically titled 'Photographs with text', the dense forms appear almost to defy gravity, like a very dour critique of Jeff Koons's recent series of 'inflatables'. Shrigley's anti-statements on the human condition, though, might have been made for this context were they not dated 2004: 'Some people' are the bronze figures of an unspecified piece of sculptural relief, while 'Some ropes' are the monkey playthings dangling from a cage.
Rebecca Geldard
Learn to Read
Until 2 September
Tate Modern
Bankside
London SE1 9TG
T: +44 (0)207 887 8888
Rebecca Geldard |
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Rebecca Geldard is a freelance writer and critic living in London. 
