Louder than Words features artists who privilege silence, non-

linguistic sounds, symbols, or gestures over words as tools of

communication. Some, who work within the imposed condition

of deafness, reveal the gaps inherent in communication—what is

missing, misunderstood, intentionally ignored, or entirely invented.

Emphasis on actions over words reveals an opportunity for silent

protest, suggesting the possibility of fearlessness in nonverbal

expressions. In other artworks, sounds and words are muted,

restricted, and undermined. The loss of information is then made

palpable, drawing attention to questions of artistic intention and

what this absence may mean socially or politically.

This exhibition’s focus on nonverbal forms of communication

creates a conundrum when considering how to provide information

about the artists and their work. The educational aspect of

exhibitions is generally accomplished through label copy, guided

tours, and brochures or catalog texts. These efforts all depend on

the written or spoken word, so it is important in this context to

consider other approaches for Louder than Words. These

alternatives include the following:

The label copy has been removed from its customary place on

the wall and is instead included in this free brochure available to

interested viewers.

In addition to verbally-guided exhibition tours, the ZMA will

offer guided experiential tours created by Teaching Artist/

Choreographer Nicole Livieratos. Based on movement, this

method builds bodily connections as a way to understand the

artwork on view. These tours minimize talking to privilege action

as a form of engagement.

Teresa Bramlette Reeves, Curator

Introduction

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Louder Than Words: A Few Words About Words, Their Absence, Their Substitutes, Their Contents, and Their Discontents BY JERRY CULLUM

“ The gesture—we should like to say—tries to portray, but cannot do it.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 434

Over the course of the past century, a huge number of words were written and spoken about the many aspects of silence—and part of Louder Than Words illustrates how much can be accomplished by listening to the world and looking without speaking. But human silence exists in a context that has already been made by long periods of talking to ourselves and to one another. And that is why this essay about a multi-media exhibition called Louder Than Words is mostly about words and how we use them, or choose sometimes not to use them.

We—and that little word “we” already involves us in the politics of words and the slippage of definition that is one part of this show about language and silence—have been engaged, for a very long time now, in a fundamental reassessment of how human beings form a sense of meaning, and how human beings communicate meaning. It’s hard enough to find the exact meaning of “meaning” as it is actually used as a word—we have historically insisted that words have defined meanings, and that when we combine words in the correct order, the meaning they communicate is absolutely clear and directly related to a state of affairs in the world. That state of affairs includes an emotional intuition that “the world makes sense”—this is what we call “having a sense of meaning,” that the world itself is “meaningful” in a deeper, a more profound sense than the shallow assertion that a grammatically

correct sentence related to some part of the world is “meaningful.”

Starting almost exactly a hundred years ago, philosophers thought it was important to nail down the meaning of “meaning” in language. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus ruled out all sorts of statements as meaningful language—but, significantly, he consigned the topics to which these statements referred to a condition he called “mystical” because it showed itself rather than being something that could be stated in logical propositions. Ethics and aesthetics were two topics that demonstrated their truths in wordless, concrete contexts such as action and objects of art.

Wittgenstein later decided that language could adapt itself to communicate meaningfully about what it meant to act ethically or to have an aesthetic experience. But he was onto something more than he had realized—we start making meaning long before we decide how to put meaning into words.

And that’s part of what Louder Than Words is about—some of the work in this exhibition deals with making us pay attention to the context of the wordless conditions around us (John Cage was a master of the art of doing this). On the other hand, we make sense of many of these wordless conditions by fitting them into the stories we constantly tell ourselves inside our heads—the

interior monologue we carry on in which we express our opinions about the world to ourselves—then converting those stories into narratives we can communicate to other people.

Or is that really how it works? How do persons born profoundly deaf form their opinions about the world, or rather, how do they express these inner thoughts to themselves as well as to others? This is another question Louder Than Words asks, and it’s a show-stopping one. One artist in this exhibition, Christine Sun Kim, addresses how her mediated relationship with the sounds of the world that she cannot hear is metaphorically related to the power taken away from persons not privileged with direct access—there are more ways than one of being forced into silence. Terry Adkins expresses this same sociopolitical relationship in a sculpture—the wavelength of a hawk’s song is translated into a three-dimensional representation that relates to language and meaning through a three-step spin that may leave some viewers a little dizzy from the effort of interpretation. [Read the non-wall wall text else-where in this document.]

The case of another artist, James Castle, who knew the gesture-language of American Sign Language, but who may have been otherwise illiterate, makes us think about the relationship between the written and spoken word, or in this case the gestural word that communicates something specific about the world. We think gestures are direct communication until we first learn that different cultures may interpret the same gesture in completely different ways; e.g. some Slavic peoples shake their heads side to side to signify “yes” and nod them up and down to signify “no.” Even within Sign Language there are three major forms as well as variations between regions and cultural groups.

Words also communicate, to some degree, by rhythm, roughness or smoothness of sound, and silences between spoken phrases. Silences can be more eloquent than speech, under the right circumstances. But “the right circumstances” are always open to question, and the relationship between words and their meanings is so unstable that there is a name for the exceptional, infrequent situation in which the sound of a word resembles the condition it is meant to describe—onomatopoeia.

Poets play with what some call “pretty noise,” the purely aural aspects of language, in producing memorable lines of verse, but there was a time in the early twentieth-century when producing words that were nothing but noise was a conscious political act—a wordless declaration that language itself had become so corrupted by the public figures using it that only nonsense would do as a response. But note that this kind of babble only worked after people “got the message”—were able to articulate to themselves in meaningful words what it was that these provocateurs were trying to accomplish.

Books that subvert the conventions of words on the page have also been ways of expressing discontent with how language communicates and what it fails to say, or says deceptively. In forms ranging from texts partly obscured or rearranged to pictorial narratives that dispense with words entirely, experimental books have existed in an interzone between literature and visual art that calls into question the methods by which both genres typically produce meaning.

Language, stretched in this way, becomes trippily psychedelic. Already in the late Middle Ages, Dante twisted ordinary language in dizzying fashion as he tried to describe an undescribable Paradise in the Divine Comedy. Regarding this effort to expand the ordinary meaning of words to include the extraordinary, George Steiner writes in “Silence and the Poet” (an essay in his larger book Language and Silence): “Where the word of the poet ceases, a great light begins. …Language is deliberately extended to the limit case.” As Wittgenstein famously almost said, “The limits of my language are the limits of my world.” {Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 5.6] The quote is a mis-quotation; the verb in the original German is “bedeuten,” not “sein,” and instead of the one thing “being” the limits of the other, the limits of language “signify,” or “mean” the limits of my world—so we’ve come full circle again, to what Wittgenstein and Dante both called the “mystical,” but they meant it in very different senses. That, however, is a topic for another essay, and another exhibition.

Louder Than Words, in other words, is dancing around or leaping around—I use or subvert the metaphor advisedly— a substantial number of issues that have long perplexed the philosophical and political worlds of Europe, the Americas, and the cultures influenced by them, and the dance is not necessarily an easy one to follow. It’s best to get the hang of performing the steps little by little. Whole books have been written about the relationship between written and spoken language, and almost as many about the relationship between speech and silence—for some years after the Second World War, the paradoxical language of such writers as Samuel Beckett led critics to talk or write about a “literature of silence.” Something like an equal number of books have been written about the relationship between concept-laden language and wordless performance, or symbolic acts versus acts that are directly meaningful in themselves. But as we’ve seen—or I have anyway—in the course of this little introductory essay, it isn’t only actions (as in the maxim that birthed this exhibition’s title) that speak louder than words. Silence, and the sounds of the world itself, including the outwardly silent sounds of ourselves thinking, can do the same.

The Atlanta art critic and essayist Jerry Cullum once thought a great deal about these topics many years ago in graduate school. He extends thanks to Teresa Bramlette Reeves for giving him the opportunity to rethink them in terms appropriate to the early twenty-first century.

“ Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 7

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Deaf for the majority of his life, Grigley has long used writing as his primary tool of communication. He invites people who wish to converse with him to write a quick note on whatever is handy and then he responds. In the early 1990s,

he began to save these exchanges and use them as the basis for a series of installations collectively entitled “Conversations with the Hearing.”

The work in this exhibition, What Did I Say? is an extension of this practice, and reflects both a conversational mode and Grigley’s interest in archiving information. Displaying these written exchanges as art lends a level of importance to what would otherwise be a relatively normal, minor event. He compares his approach to painting a still-life—the elevation of a bowl of fruit to fine art.

[The genre of still-life is what] Norman Bryson calls “rhopography”—the throwaway bits of everyday life. The notion is derived from the Greek rhopos, meaning trivial objects, odds and ends, the sorts of mundane things that, in composing a still-life painting, compose our lives as human beings. Everyday language is about as mundane as we can get. Imagine if every word we spoke took on material form—every simple ordinary word. Can you imagine domestic interiors? Tables covered with words, drawers full of sentences, pillows piled with whispers. The “Conversations with the Hearing” work to accomplish something like that—the materialization of everyday life.2

Grigley’s work can also be considered as a visualization of sound. Rather than hearing a conversation, visitors see it. But this conversation is incomplete. The artist writes that in the “conversations” he has with hearing people, his “voice is missing, the nods and gestures are missing, the little lip-read bits are missing. What’s left is just this mass of fragments.”3

Though clearly based on words, this installation addresses gaps in communication and the sense of desire or longing that accompanies this loss.

2 Joseph Grigley quoted in “Joseph Grigley’s Art of Conversation,” Artforum.com; https://www.artforum.com/index.php?pn= interview&id=1532.

3 Ibid.

Untitled (PURSE ! DISCUSSES), n.d. Found paper, soot, color of unknown origin

Untitled (pictograph), n.d. Found paper, color of unknown origin

Untitled (pictograph), n.d. Found paper, color of unknown origin

Untitled (alphabet and text), n.d. Found paper, soot

Untitled book (receipt), 22pp., n.d. Found paper, soot

Untitled book (SMITH BROTHERS COUGH DROPS), n.d. Found paper, soot, string

Untitled book (CAMEL), n.d. Found paper, soot, string

Untitled book (DROMEDARY CRANBERRY), 8pp, n.d. Found paper, soot, string

Christine Sun Kim is a sound artist who has been deaf since birth. She primarily communicates through American Sign Language (ASL), the written word, and visual manifestations (ranging from art to physical gestures and expressions). The aural environment that the hearing world experiences is, for her, mediated by interpreters, subtitles, and written descriptions—all of which filter and limit full knowledge. She writes that “despite the fact that I cannot access sound directly, I perceive ideas surrounding the concept of sound….” This has led her to explore ideas of power, authority, access, and limitation in relationship to both actual and interpreted sound.

In Close Readings, Kim compiled a selection of movie clips that focused on the idea of voice, such as the removal of Ariel’s voice in the Disney film, The Little Mermaid. Kim then invited four deaf friends to provide captions. In the scene referenced above, the caption reads: (sound of voice being extracted). In the movie, the soundtrack at this point features Ariel singing a wordless melody “ahh ahh ahhhhh.” Her voice is depicted visually as a smoky emanation that streams from her mouth, transforms into a small ball of light, and then is magically drawn into the waiting hands of the powerful Ursula. Ignore for the moment Ariel’s questionable choice to give up her voice for a pair of human legs so that she can pursue Prince Eric, and instead return to the caption—”sound of voice being extracted”—and imagine what that might conjure up in the mind of a deaf person, or a hearing person that hasn’t seen the film.

This is just one example of what Close Readings offers in terms of understanding and interpreting the idea of silence.

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Christine Sun KimAmerican, born 1980

Close Readings, 2015 4-channel video, 25:53 minutes Courtesy of the artist

John Cage American, 1912-1992

4’ 33” John Cage Centennial Edition Henmar Press, Inc. A member of the Edition Peters Group

Terry AdkinsAmerican, 1953-2014

Aviarium (Broad Winged Hawk), 2014 steel, aluminum, silver plated brass cymbals and trumpet mute Courtesy of Lèvy Gorvy, New York © 2018 Terry Adkins / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

An assemblage of cymbals and metal disks capped off by a trumpet mute/muffler, this artwork is an abstracted illustration of the wavelength of a hawk’s song. This sculptural representation of a sound is placed slightly high on the wall to suggest an environment more typical for a bird—a tree branch or the

sky. For someone trained in music or sound engineering, this object may suggest a score or map of a sound that can be clearly read or heard without the presence of the actual hawk’s trill.

Adkins addressed the topic of the historic silencing of African American voices throughout his career. The muted trumpet can be seen as a reference to this idea, and thus the work evokes both sound and imposed silence.

This facsimile of John Cage’s score for 4’ 33” is a 1989 recreation by David Tudor of the original manuscript used for the premiere of this work in 1952.

John Cage described 4’ 33” in this way:

The title of this work is the total length in minutes and seconds of the performance. At Woodstock, N.Y., August 29, 1952, the title was 4’ 33” and the three parts were 33” 2’, 40” and 1’ 20”. It was performed by David Tudor, pianist, who indicated the beginnings of parts by closing, the endings by opening, the keyboard lid. However, the work may be performed by any instrumentalist or combination of instrumentalists and last any length of time.

On February 24, 1960, John Cage appeared on the popular game show, I’ve Got a Secret. This CBS program featured a panel of celebrities who were allowed to ask simple yes or no questions to guess a contestant’s “secret.” The series aired from 1952 through 1967.

John Cage presented Water Walk as a example of his work. The performance included a variety of objects related to liquids—a bathtub, a pitcher, ice cubes, a pressure cooker, a rubber duck—as well as more traditional musical instruments such as a piano.

The score consists of a floor plan showing the placement of the objects, a timeline with descriptions and pictographic notations of the order of use, and a list of notes regarding some of the actions to be made. Like 4’ 33”, the performance was timed, in this case for 3 minutes. The instructions include the following note: “Start watch and then time actions as closely as possible to their appearance in the score.”

For this exhibition, documentation of Cage’s performance of Water Walk on I’ve Got a Secret is presented on a video monitor. At specified times, a live performance of Water Walk will be presented by percussionist and sound artist Katelyn Rose King.

John Cage famously argued that there is no such thing as silence. Ambient noise is present even when no one is actively producing sound. His 4’ 33” is but one example. In recalling its 1952 premiere he noted, “You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began pattering the roof, and during the third people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out.”

Cage is included in Louder than Words to emphasize the nuances inherent in understanding silence, and to draw attention to ambient sounds as vehicles for communicating ideas.

1 Alex Ross, “Searching for Silence: John Cage’s art of noise,” The New Yorker, 4 October 2010.

Water Walk 3-minute sound performance I’ve Got a Secret

Zaum Box is a collection of ten solo performances commissioned by Katelyn Rose King and Alexv Rolfe for their collaborative Speak/Strike project. The scores for each composition are based on original zaum poems written by Russian Futurist poets Alexei Kruchenykh, Elena Guro, Vasily Kamensky, and Varvara Stepanova between 1913 and 1919. Kruchenykh was particularly interested in linguistic experiments in sound and symbolism. He coined the term zaum—which is a combination of two Russian words (or partial words)—to mean a language beyond reason. Kruchenykh sought to achieve a language with greater expression, and to recover the sounds of a lost Slavic mother-tongue.

This nationalistic desire on Kruchenykh’s part separates Russian zaum poetry from similar-sounding Dadaist nonsense poems. Working in the same time period, Dada artists in Zürich also experimented with sound-based recitations. Their focus, shaped by a rejection of reason and logic born out of the horrors of World War I, incorporated a self- conscious irony that is absent in the Russian work.

In the Zaum Box videos in the exhibition, Katelyn Rose King performs the following poems accompanied by various percussive instruments:

Dyr bul shchylText by Aleksei Kruchenykh from Pomada, 1913For brushes and one object

Frot fron itA concerto in four movementsText by Aleksei Kruchenykh from Pomada, 1913For metal object, guiro, sandpaper, rattle and low drum

Ta sa mayeText by Aleksei Kruchenykh from Pomada, 1913For five ceramic bowls, four suspended metals, water, and a flower

FinlyandyaText by Elena Guro from Troe, 1913For vibraphone

Kho bo roText by Aleksei Kruchenykh from Learn, Artists!, 1917For crotales (two octaves)

Telephon—n. 2B – 12zText by Vasily Kamensky from Tango with Cows, 1914For smartphone, desk bell, woodblock, music stand, cymbal, snare drum, rain stick, vibraphone, crotales, junk metal

StorhaText by Varvara Stepanova from Gaust Chaba, 1919For vibraphone, three pitched woods and three pitched metals

Pye Ry ZatText by Aleksei Kruchenykh from F/Nagt, 1918For keyboard percussion and five objects

VnaftiText by Aleksei Kruchenykh from F/Nagt, 1918For keyboard percussion and five objects

S-K-LText by Aleksei Kruchenykh from Learn, Artists!, 1917For seven instruments/objects

4Zaum Box, 2015-2016 Liber Pulveris Press

Realization by Katelyn Rose KingVideo by Ute FreundSound by Christoph Utzinger

Christopher Adler American, born 1972

Katelyn Rose King American, born 1992

James Castle was born profoundly deaf. Between the ages of 10 and 15, he received his only formal education at a boarding school in southeastern Idaho, the Gooding School for the Deaf and Blind. While there he was taught an oral method of communication, and

though sign language was not a part of the curriculum, it is thought that he had some exposure to it through fellow students. It is unknown whether Castle could read, but he began to draw at a very young age. He also began to explore his environment, making a ritual of collecting paper and substances that could be used in his work. When gifted with art supplies, he mixed them with soot, spit, and other ingredients to extend both his palette and the life of his materials. His work came to the attention of the art world in the 1950s and was exhibited regularly until his death in 1977. For the following two decades the family denied access to the remaining collection, but in 1998 Castle’s work was re-introduced at the Outsider Art Fair in New York City.

While the majority of Castle’s work depicts his environment, the people around him, and the architecture and details of daily life, he also produced a group of drawings that the Castle Foundation divides into five categories: Grids; Patterns; Geometry; Letters, numbers and symbols; and Words. Four hand-made books and four drawings, all featuring some combination of letters, numbers, and symbols, are included in this exhibition. Not knowing the extent of Castle’s ability to read, one can only guess at whether this work is simply about a visual arrangement of forms on a page or whether it might have a specific meaning for the artist. If there is an intended text-based message, it is lost to us. Thus, the weight of the work and how it communicates is based on what we see rather than what we read.

All courtesy of James Castle Collection and Archive LP, Boise, Idaho

James Castle American, 1899-1977

Joseph GrigleyAmerican, born 1956

What Did I Say?, 2008 Ink and graphite on paper; pins Collection of Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago purchased with a gift from the Stenn Family to the Edlis/Neeson Art Acquisition Fund on the occasion of the MCA’s 40th Anniversary, 2008.21

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Sipp’s drawings and collages are illustrations for a wordless graphic novel, Wolves in the City, that focuses on the Algerian War of Independence. Algeria was a colony of France for over one hundred years. The National Liberation Front sought to free Algeria from French power, a goal they accomplished after eight years of guerilla warfare. The artist writes that as he researched this history he became acutely aware of the topical

relevance of this conflict, “particularly as it relates to insurgency and counter-insurgency military tactics.”

Sipp’s intent with Wolves in the City is to tell the story of this struggle for independence, a war he suggests:

…might be considered the first modern conflict, an insurgency where the guerilla wins if he does not lose, and the conventional army loses if it does not win. It was a war that relied on the marriage of terror and torture; over 1,000,000 Muslim Algerians died and as many European settlers were driven into exile. There were suicide bombers, women fighters, street-to-street and house-to-house combat. With multiple simultaneous bombings in an urban environment, employing asymmetrical battle techniques that focused on urban terrorism for national liberation, the goal was to activate the population to understand that these acts would result in the overwhelmingly heavy-handed response by the French. Algeria has become a code word for the type of amorphous struggles that we’ve seen repeated in the Balkans and the Middle East. Questions of religion, nationalism, terrorism and retribution killings have taken on a new and lethal intensity.

This difficult subject—occurring just after World War II, romanticized by tales of the French Foreign Legion, and resonant with a contemporary context—provides a rich ground for Sipp’s work. His American protagonist, Buster Higby, is the outsider, the tool, and the witness. Through his growth and understanding, a history is revealed.

This narrative is wordless, a convention that is not uncommon in comics and graphic novels. Dependent on images and style to convey mood, setting, and story, the lack of words encourages personal projection and interpretation.

Hobbs creates installations that are seen only through photographic documentation, as well as physical environments that exist in real time and space. Her consistent objective in this work is obsession. In Keep Sake, the artist continues this focus, finding inspiration in scrapbooking and “extra-illustrating” (adding one’s own drawings to a text as a form of personal commentary). The altered books and materials on view demonstrate fanaticism through the obsessive assembling, organizing, and sharing of visual information.

Historically, scrapbooking was a popular hobby for women of leisure, who had both time and means. These carefully constructed and collaged books often granted voice to individuals who were otherwise silenced within the male-dominated society of the Victorian era.

Hobbs revives this nineteenth-century notion of quietly asserting an opinion or point of view through scrapbooking, presenting an assemblage of books that speak to her own feelings about climate change, environmental pollution, and individual and collective responsibility. She writes:

In this work…[there are many photographic] examples of ecological damage, pasted in existing…histories and reports of industries who are ecological offenders and polluters of our land, air, and water. [These photographs] deliberately cover over the text to reveal the truth, the effects these industries have had on our planet. At first, the images, by their arrangement on the pages, seem lovely and pleasing. Upon closer inspection, the ugly truth comes through...

The insertion of new material in an existing book obscures the original text and message. Words are replaced by images that offer a different point of view.

The Deaf Club, a 2-channel video, is edited from documentation of punk rock performances held in a venue in Maspeth, Queens in the spring of 2016. Hearing-impaired herself, the artist produced this event as an extension to her film The Tuba Thieves, which explores a real-life story of a series of tuba thefts in schools in Los Angeles.

The performances and video pay homage to a former punk music venue in San Francisco, The Deaf Club, which was in operation for eighteen months in the late 1970s. Bands such as the Dead Kennedys and Pink Section recorded albums in the club, firmly establishing the space within punk rock history. The name of the club is derived from the fact that the building was a clubhouse for the deaf community in the 1930s.

The event in Queens included three bands and four American Sign Language storytellers who performed between sets. They shared stories of personal hardships and the deaf world’s relationship with music. One remarked that punk rock is the perfect music for deaf people because it is loud and has strong vibrations.

Like Christine Sun Kim, with whom she has worked, O’Daniel explores the loss and translation of the sensory experience of sound. O’Daniel has written that the impulse behind her work is her “hypersensitivity to a lack of information.”

Alix Pearlstein’s performance-based videos function as abstract dramas, operating in a realm between the theatrical and the cinematic. With deadpan humor and a minimalist aesthetic, she employs stylized gestures, role-playing, and pop- cultural references to create

narrative meaning, or uses actors to examine group dynamics and social constructs.

Conversation is set in a stark white landscape in which two performers engage in an intensely psychological dialogue that is filmed in a giddy shot/reverse-shot style. Their verbal repertoire consists of groans, sighs, growls, laughter, and primal screams.

Text selected from Electronic Arts Intermix entry.

For this installation, Haugaard created an environment in which the viewer participates in the work through a physical sensation built into the viewing experience. His goal is to provoke shifts in perception that induce self-reflection and a heightened sense of awareness.

The work evokes the experience of quietly sitting on a porch during a warm

Southern evening. The viewer is drawn to the bare, glowing lightbulb in the projected video. Moths, attracted to the light, circle the source. It is a small moment in time that many of us have experienced, and as such, it may trigger a specific memory of a place and or time.

The sound of the buzzing, the small light in the darkness, and the physical stimulation offers another insight as well—the perception of sound as sensation; feeling a sound.

On the opposite wall is the large-screen video by Alison O’Daniel in which bands perform for both a hearing and a non-hearing audience. The deaf can feel the vibration of the music, the beat and the amped energy. Haugaard’s installation provides a similar experience in real time and space.

The six performance-based works, in which the artist explores a woman’s psychological states through physical gestures, are raw, direct, and unmediated. The young Birnbaum appears on camera, alone, as the performer. (By the late 1970s she would no longer appear

on-screen, although she would often employ female figures as surrogates.) The videos introduce themes that recur throughout her later work, particularly the articulation of a feminist subtext through the central figure of a woman who is both strong and vulnerable. She investigates the body as a vehicle for intense emotional or psychological manifestations while also foregrounding the relation of the camera to viewer and subject to performer. Although Birnbaum famously broke new ground in video by engaging directly with popular television as source material, these earliest works reveal a link to the Body Art and performance-video practices of the generation of artists who immediately preceded her, such as Vito Acconci, Joan Jonas, and Bruce Nauman.

Text from Dara Birnbaum entry for Six Movements: Video Works from 1975 Electronic Arts Intermix, New York

Nick CaveAmerican, born 1959

Gestalt, 2012 Blu-ray, 16 minutes Edition EP 1 of 5, with 2 artist proofs Courtesy of the artist & Jack Shainman Gallery, New York © Nick Cave

In this video the soundsuit, Gestalt, is shown in performance.

In 1992, twenty years before Gestalt was made, Cave produced his first soundsuit. This wearable artwork was the artist’s reaction to the beating of Rodney King* in 1991. This initial costume/sculptural suit was made from twigs and sticks that rattled and made sounds when put in motion. Intended as a form of armor, the body is fully concealed, thus obscuring any indicators of race, gender, and class. In this protective guise,

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Geo SippAmerican, born 1958

Selections from Wolves in the City, 2012-2018 Mixed media on glass and paper Courtesy of the artist

Sarah HobbsAmerican, born 1970

Keep Sake, 2018 Altered books, photographs Courtesy of the artist

Alison O’DanielAmerican, born 1979

The Deaf Club, 2016 Video Courtesy of the artist

Alix PearlsteinAmerican, born 1962

Conversation, 2000 Video: 8:36 minutes Camera/Director/Editor: Alex Pearlstein Performers: Garland Hunter, Leo Marks Courtesy of the artist and Electronic Arts Intermix, New York

Dana HaugaardAmerican, born 1983

All Time is Past Time, 2018 Wood, paint, audio, video Courtesy of the artist

Dara BirnbaumAmerican, born 1946

Chaired Anxieties: Abandoned, 1975 Black-and-white video, sound Courtesy of the artist and Electronic Arts Intermix, New York

Chaired Anxieties: Abandoned is part of Six Movements: Video Works from 1975, a limited-edition boxed set that represents Birnbaum’s earliest experiments with video.

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the soundsuit becomes a vehicle for empowerment and a political expression that is activated by sound and movement.

Gestalt is a two-piece garment that covers the body from head to toe, with only the heels and hands being left bare. The entire surface, with the exception of the area over the face, is covered in buttons of various colors. The face mask is made from a wood abacus—an ancient counting tool comprised of wood beads that slide on wires arranged in parallel rows within a frame. With the beads shifting from side to side and the buttons jangling against one another, the performer announces his/her presence and every move without saying a word.

* King, an American taxi driver who was stopped for speeding on a Los Angeles

freeway, was violently beaten by LAPD officers during his arrest. A nearby civilian

filmed the incident and this video was subsequently shown by news media around

the world. The four officers were tried on charges of excessive force. Three were

totally acquitted and the jury failed to reach a verdict on one of the charges for the

fourth. The outrage over this injustice led to the 1992 Los Angeles riots, a six-day

series of events in which 63 people were killed and over two thousand were injured.

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Jagodinsky explores identity and displacement in her interdisciplinary work. Candidate 23, performed during the opening reception of this exhibition, is documented through photographs. Initially, the work is represented in the exhibition space by instantaneous images (such as Polaroid photos) made during the performance. These will be replaced later with one large photograph and the costume worn by the artist.

For those who did not witness the live performance, words (somewhat

ironically within the context of this exhibition) describe what took place. Jagodinsky recognizes the inadequacy of words to provide tangible information about the event and draws our attention instead to “things we cannot see.” Though undefined, there is a suggestion of quantum particles and what physicists call dark energy. Latent, silent, mysterious—there is a gap in what we know and, as a result, in what we can communicate. The artist writes about her work in the statement to the right.

Reese is an object-maker/poet who is interested in altering the viewer’s understanding or perception of a thing or place. In this installation of a vintage stereo system, the unit is turned on, but it makes minimal sound. Reese describes the intent of this work:

An attentive viewer will notice the audible sound of the speakers turned on. The display lights will also confirm that the unit is turned on. These subtle clues prompt the viewer through a few important feelings. Anticipation, Potential, Possibility, Absence

He goes on to explain that the viewer may anticipate that sound will emerge, and fret about the audio level or the choice of music. They may wonder who owns or owned the stereo and where that person might be. They might draw conclusions about the owner due to the nature of the outdated technology and how it has been maintained.

Vanessa Yvonne Jagodinsky American, born 1990

Candidate 23, 2016 Performance, photographic documentation, costume Courtesy of the artist

Trevor Reese American, born 1979

Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat, Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the best, Only the lull I like, the hum of your valvéd voice, 2018 Receiver, records, record player, speaker Courtesy of the artist

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16Published on the occasion of the exhibition Louder than WordsBernard A. Zuckerman Museum of ArtKennesaw State UniversityFebruary 2 – May 5, 2019

All rights reserved. No part of the contents of this book may be reproduced without the written permission of the publisher.

Images © the respective photographers unless otherwise notedAll essays © the respective authors

ISBN # 978-0-9915503-1-9

Concept, Design, and Production Joyce WeinerEdited by Teresa Bramlette Reeves and Sarah Higgins

Special thanks to Cayse Cheatham, William Downs, Sarah Higgins, George Long, Becky Parker, and Maria Shah.

We would also like to thank Kathie Beckett, Mike McGehee, Geo Sipp, April Munson, Harrison Long, and Ivan Pulinkala for their work on behalf of the museum, TK Smith and Nzinga Simmons for conceiving and realizing the interactive educational initiative Actions Speak, Jerry Cullum for his essay in this brochure, and Nicole Livieratos for developing the experiential tours for Louder than Words.

Bernard A. Zuckerman Museum of ArtMD 3308492 Prillaman Way NWKennesaw, Georgia 30144zuckerman.kennesaw.edu

© 2019 Bernard A. Zuckerman Museum of Art

Mor

tin G

aller

iesPerformer sits on stage with a pair of scissors in front of him. It is announced that members of the audience may come on stage—one at a time—to cut a small piece of the performer’s clothing to take with them. Performer remains motionless throughout the piece. Piece ends at the performer’s option.

By inviting viewers to interact with her, they become a part of the work. Ono, as the central figure of engagement, is silent and palpably vulnerable. Her response to the invasions of her space and decorum appears passive, as she does not resist or offer defense. Yet her silence speaks volumes as she enacts the role of the weak and the oppressed, modeling a state of being that reminds viewers of the impacts of aggression and unchecked power.

Cut Piece is an early performance by Yoko Ono, presented in the form of video documentation. The work follows the experimental focus of the international art movement, Fluxus, prominent in the 1960s and 1970s. Not focused on any one medium, Fluxus emphasized artistic process over the finished product and embraced the new technology of video, as well as noise music and visual poetry. Multi-media artists such as Ono, produced events based on simple scores or sets of instructions, but were otherwise not choreographed or planned. Thus, chance played a prominent role in how the performance unfolded. The instructions for Cut Piece are:

Yoko OnoJapanese, born 1933

Cut Piece, 1964 Video Courtesy of the artist and Studio One, New York

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Direction is given a choice is made with different outcome and perception

Bodies as materials work together to take up space

The exchange in energy and in glances perceptions of power constantly shift

No words are exchanged only glances, sounds, breaths, and heartbeats

Fear discomfort and comfort appear

The performer looks and analyzes the Patrons wait and wonder both trying to understand their place both existing together

Together but separate different but the same

Once it’s all over all the bodies leave all that’s left are their markings and things we cannot see

All of these conceivable reactions activate the object and infuse it with meaning beyond its relatively silent state within the exhibition.

Reese’s title is a quote from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Section 5: “Song of Myself” (1891-92):

Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat, Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the best, Only the lull I like, the hum of your valvéd voice.

Here the focus is on a bodily sound, a low vibration in which the words are not distinguished. This rumbling serves as a backdrop to Whitman’s co-mingling of the body and the soul. Within the context of this poem, it emphasizes nonverbal expression, physical projection, and understanding.

Bernard A. Zuckerman Museum of ArtMD 3308

492 Prillaman Way NWKennesaw, Georgia 30144zuckerman.kennesaw.edu

© 2019 Bernard A. Zuckerman Museum of Art