IN COLLABORATION WITH THE
3RD ANNUAL TYPOGRAPHY SYMPOSIUM
JUNE 12–15, 2013
JUNE 14—AUGUST 10, 2013
CHRIS DORLAND, HOWLING MOB SOCIETY,
JACLYN JACUNSKI, JEFFREY T. JONES, JUSTSEEDS,
LAURA KINA, STEVE LAMBERT, NICOLAS LAMPERT, PETER LIVERSIDGE,
ERIC MAY, JONATHAN MONK, JASON THOMAS PALLAS, JOEL ROSS (WITH JASON CREPS), SUPERFLEX,
MARK DEAN VECA, AND THE ARTISTS’ BOOKS FROM THE JOAN FLASCH ARTISTS’ BOOKS COLLECTION
Word on the Street:
Image, Language, Signage
Display and the Multivocal Rhetoric of
Places and Things
“WHO SAYS?”
It’s long been known that our perception of
the “what,” the substance or content, of an
utterance is subject to our perception of the
speaker behind it. Roman-era Cicero and, later,
Medieval Quintilian thought that a speaker
needed to be knowledgeable, sincere and
virtuous, of demonstrably good character,
to be fully effective. While the “who” behind
an utterance still matters today in many instances, the classic features of an ethical,
embodied rhetoric described by Cicero and
Quintilian can be difficult to define when
language is extended beyond speech, especially today, in public signage and in
some forms of electronic media. Authorship
preserves a link back to a responsible “who”
in most written texts, a person, as Foucault
pointed out, who is ethically subject to praise
or blame, but in many areas today, from
public signage to digital text-to-speech,
an utterance’s author is neither recognizable,
nor reducible to a human agent. Authorship,
and/or the ethics or character of the speaker,
rests as an abstraction. This leaves the
evaluation of the message in a strange state
from the point of view of classical rhetoric.
The rejoinder “who says?” in instances
where we might challenge the content of the
message, or the authority or ethics behind
it, falls on deaf ears, not because no one is
listening, but because no one is speaking.
“Who says?” then presents itself as an
TOP
Nicolas Lampert, Warning Signs (2010)
aluminum sign, vinyl letters, spray paint top
BOTTOM
Joel Ross (in collaboration with Jason Creps), Do Don’t (2012)
archival pigment print, 55 x 50 inches;
courtesy of Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago
Jaclyn Jacunski, I’m Not Waiting (2012)
screen print made from trellis installation
aporia or puzzle. The works in Word on the
Street: Image, Language, Signage also ask,
“who says?” The works themselves answer,
but they do not answer in ways that we would
expect, largely because the “who” has been
displaced or greatly altered by the
rhetoric of the message or its way of “saying.”
Who says, “stop” on the stop sign, for example?
Who’s speaking? An array of speakers—
individuals, and, as I’ll develop, also places and
things—a whole concatenated, contextualizing
multivocality. We could imagine the sign maker
(both human and machine), the road engineer,
the road crew that erects the sign, all speaking
in a piecemeal, aggregative way. But language
also speaks through us; we say, “stop,” too, in
our reading—and in our stopping—when we
do, as “stopping” becomes a form of speech.
Place and context play a role here, too.
If that stop sign shows up on the wall of a
college dorm room, it still says “stop;” the sign
keeps saying it, but the word has been stripped
of its instrumentality: nobody listens, and
nobody stops. That reality, the reality of a
different kind of speaking, or message, displaces
our original understanding of the utterance.
Here context speaks—the dorm room speaks.
And it has its own antiphonal message and
ethics. It says, “don’t listen to the stop sign.”
“Who” doesn’t speak here so much as “what”
and “where.”
“WHAT SAYS?” “WHERE SAYS?”
In Word on the Street, “what” and “where” acquire agency and begin to look a lot like the
figures of classical rhetoric—how we might
present and form our speech. In classical rhetorical terms, this development can be understood as display. In his treatise on rhetoric,
Aristotle lists the epideictic, the rhetorical
aspect of display or showing, as an integral
part of the general function of rhetoric and
how we communicate and persuade in language. Over the centuries, the epideictic has
remained conspicuously underdeveloped.
Its development has been hindered by the way
in which we conceive of showing in the first
place: we usually split showing off from language and verbal performance and conceive
of it as an independent activity—something
paralinguistic and incidental instead of a true
bearer of meaning. “Show” is the “here it is.”
“Tell” occupies a different temporality and
rhythm and maintains a distinct metaphysics.
Tell is temporally present, like show, but tell has
the full latitude of language to come and go,
to conger and imply, well beyond the physical
and spatial constraints of a particular showing.
Word on the Street shows exactly how “show”
tells: how things and contexts, old, new and
remixed, can be structured to speak: how a
Plymouth Road Runner (Jonathan Monk) hood
can be coaxed into a nostalgic ventriloquism on
American road culture; how, shorn of their textual anchors, corporate logos speak graphically
of a movement and grace that is unavailable in
their original designs (Superflex, Chris Dorland,
Mark Dean Veca); how authorized and “unauthorized” signs can speak a tale of resistance
and counter-hegemony by their very presence or
re-presentation (Nicolas Lampert, Howling Mob
Society, Jaclyn Jacunski); how mundane phrases, objects and products find their poetic voice
in a new rhetoric of display (Joel Ross, Steve
Lambert, Jeffrey T. Jones), as show now tells.
—WARD TIETZ
Ward Tietz is a word artist best known for his outdoor installations of large three-dimensional letters and words. He teaches at Georgetown
University and the Corcoran College of Art and Design. His book, Hg—the Liquid, is forthcoming from 1913 Press.
TOP
Superflex, Colonial Bank acquired by BB&T,
August 14, 2009 (2009)
cotton fabric and acrylic paint, 78 ¾ x 78 ¾ inches;
courtesy of Peter Blum Gallery, New York
LEFT
Superflex, Bank West acquired by Commonwealth
Bank of Australia, October 9, 2008 (2008)
cotton fabric and acrylic paint, 78 ¾ x 78 ¾ inches;
courtesy of Peter Blum Gallery, New York
RIGHT
Chris Dorland, Untitled (prototype), 2011
enamel on aluminum, 23.75 x 23.75 inches;
courtesy of Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago
We gratefully acknowledge the artists and
Peter Blum Gallery, Casey Kaplan Gallery,
Sean Kelly Gallery, Monique Meloche Gallery, Breeze Block Gallery, Justseeds, Charlie
James Gallery, Rhona Hoffman Gallery, and
Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection for loans
of artwork that made this exhibition possible.
Installation support by Leonardo Selvaggio
and Katie Kullen.
Word on the Street: Image, Language, Signage
was held in association with the 3rd Annual
Typography Symposium, Signage and Street
Typography, organized by April Sheridan, Studio
Technician and Special Projects Coordinator,
Center for Book and Paper Arts.
This exhibition was organized by Jessica
Cochran, Curator of Exhibitions and Programs,
Acting Assistant Director
Gallery Hours:
Monday – Saturday, 10-6pm
1104 S Wabash Ave, 2nd Fl,
Chicago, IL 60605
bookandpaper@colum.edu