I have used words in a number of works. Sometimes this is pragmatic – it is a way to provide contextual or narrative information which I hope inflects or enriches another form. In other cases it is a more deep-seated choice – the art work privileges the word over the image, in a way that in part takes shape against the way a certain kind of image dominates our culture, and in part takes its cue from various antecedents in recent art-making (Ian Burn and Mel Ramsden, Jenny Holzer’s LEDs, the films of Claude Lanzmann, to name a few), and from many more antecedents beyond, in art history, politics and theology. Untitled wall drawing is a work which privileges the word in this way. It is an attempt to address how words bear memory: the slowness of words (as they accumulate in us as we accumulate their meanings), their economy (the capacity of words to describe across vast stretches of time and space), and a kind of withdrawal (where words would describe a dispassionate even bureaucratic relation to the world they name). Mostly, though, the words in this Untitled Wall Drawing were conceived through drawing, and more specifically through their shared constituent element, the line. The work evolved through drawing, the way drawings mark duration, and in the attempt to give a form to something that cannot be shown
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