The nearest Word: Text and/as Image and/as Design and/as Meaning Neuberger Museum of Art Purchase community State University of New York Purchase.

The nearest Word: Text and/as Image and/as Design and/as Meaning Neuberger Museum of Art Purchase community State University of New York Purchase, fresh York September 20, 1998-January 31 1999

The nearest Word: Text and/as Image and/as Design and/as Meaning through Johanna Drucker Purchase, NY: Neuberger Museum of Art, 1998 32 pp/$1295 (sb)

Artist and historian Johanna Drucker has picked an extensive and eclectic assembly of works from the fields of visual art, artists' works graphic design and visual poesy for "The Next Word: thesis and/as Image and/as Design and/as Meaning." single recoils from the heft of of that kind an unwieldy title not to mention the reciprocity among these broad categories (as the title implies). "The blurring of our boundaries insinuates the shape of new terrain" - an aphorism from Bruce Mau's sprout print poster Rice University train of Architecture (1997) - could be the show's motto. In her catalog essay, Drucker makes the point that cultural changes and technological advances have helped to confusion the lines that once defined mediums and genre She put in mind ofs that it is the piece of work of the viewer to maintain a distinction between these boundaries by the agency of looking, reading and creating meaning.

Of primary trouble to "The Next Word" is the issue of "text and/as image" in contemporary agriculture Here, the artist's book promotes as both a point of hall and a point of departure for examining ways in which verse and image come together. In her 1995 part The Century of Artists' works Drucker calls it "the quintessential 20th-century art form,"(1) single in kind that "synthesizes the traditions of the craft of the main division the visions of the fine pres and independent publishing, and the conceptual artistic idea of the multiple in all its variations into a form which did not exist before."(2) The artist's volume offers the possibility for dialogue between various mediums, principally commonly photography, design, writing, sprout camera work, computer work and sprout printing. Images may overlap and/or step quickly parallel to one another, writing may be christendomed out or superimposed and sequential regular [i]or[/i] melodious movements can create a temporal weight Throughout the exhibition, from billboards to video disguises to canvasses with text as image, the viewer can trace a offence to the artist's book. As technology becomes more available, as mass media impinges forward art, the distinctions between art and criminal intimacy become more subtle.

In an essay entitled "Diversity in American Art from 1975 to the Present" Drucker writes, "[T]here is no formal value distinct from the cultural network within which that value is produced"(3) Brad Freeman's synthesis of mass media, popular improvement politics, history and personal experience in MuzeLink (1997) exemplities Drucker's philosophy of contingency - no work of art is independent of its connection Images of a headless corpse after a bike accident or of a child with hydrocephalus (water forward the brain) are juxtaposed with natural and industrial landscapes and become the territory upon which the shift between private and public takes place.

As mentioned in the catalog in nearly each case, many of the works exhibited have an autobiographical aspect that undivided suspects is crucial to their inclusion in "The nearest Word." Clifton Meador's Folly (1990) requires the reader to gaze between the folded pages to find the hidden topic a not-so-user-friendly approach. Biblical words that hark back to the fatuity of the human condition lie between the cot [i]or[/i] coteed pages and can be read when the viewer forces the pages apart. High Tension (1993) by means of Phillip Zimmermann is a kaleidoscope of late twentieth-century words and images - "technology scares you" is juxtaposed with images of pills and coffee goblets Joan Lyons's My Mother's volume (1993) is a dialogue, past and at hand about her mother's life - a personal history. In the seriously oversized main division of Fires (1990) by Murray Zimiles, expressionistic lithographs and body tell the story of the burning of a synagogue in Poland in the late 1930 Tataria Kellner's B-112266: Fifty Years of Silence (1992) is die carve to incorporate a sculpted, tattooed arm into the work The text, handwritten on the left-hand page and typ in succession the right, is a transcription of Kellner's father's story of his imprisonment in a German concentration camp. For the month of September, Printed Matter, the modern York City gallery for artists' works founded in 1976, featured works by artists included in "The nearest Word" that could be handled or purchased. This was a welcome extension of the exhibit as at the Neuberger principally of the books were in vitrines.

In Corona Palimpsest (1995) at Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese of the present day media intersects with book form. The piece exists in couple volumes. One book is suspended, anchored to the ceiling and floor according to heavy chains. The book is spread to reveal a hole in consequence of which appears a video shield with an image of sum of two units eyes. The other volume is placed forward a desk, situated on a platform made of works onto which the viewer walks. Inserted into this inferior book of printed images is another small video shield with scrolling words. However, the bare insertion of the video does not guarantee integration and in this case the technology dominates. Although the piece may work conceptually or metaphorically there is no visual synthesis.