Y+T MOCA

I visited the Yokoo Tadanori Museum of Contemporary Art today to view the intriguingly titled The Word In Art - As Is Painting So Is Writing. The exhibition explored the arbitrary nature of the relationship between signifier and signified, word and object, and how, paradoxically, the two are inseparable. I was particularly intrigued by his painting Indicate Art which highlights the collaborative relationship between artist and viewer (the painting is uniformly grey with the names of colours written on top indicating where the viewer is to imagine the colours onto the canvas), and also the manner in which purely arbitrary words are visualised in the reader's eye. Conversely, the viewer of a work of art comprised entirely of images usually encodes the visuals into words when attempting to decipher meaning or simply determine his or her degree of appreciation.

Tadanori often attempts to separate words from their meanings by reducing the words or letters to purely graphic forms (for instance, by turning them upside-down or inverting them) but I feel he is fighting a losing battle here. There were some other interesting paintings in which he reversed Magritte's The Treachery of Images with a painting of a glass and a painting of a shoe, both of which were labelled, in large letters, "GLASS" and "SHOE" in the painting. Stating the obvious? Or highlighting the peculiar way in which those four letters create those objects in our minds?

Here is a link to Yokoo Tadanori's official website which is definitely worth exploring.

By a strange coincidence, I am currently reading Cornelia Funke's Inkheart, a novel in which characters step forth from books created by the voices of gifted readers who are able to give flesh to words. This led me to reflect upon how the words we type alongside our blipfoto images are probably giving life to avatars of ourselves in the minds of our fellow blippers. I wonder how accurate these "virtual creatures" are?

Anyway, this is probably the best musical representation of the exhibition's theme I could think of in as much as, so far as I am aware, the "words" (title excepted) are meaningless and chosen purely for their auditory value.

Diva - Jean Michel Jarre

"I am an abstract artist. No oils. No brushes. No canvas. I just think about paintings." (Steven Wright)