I was wandering around the Pompidou, thinking about how disillusioned I was with the art world (in a past life, I made sculptures) when all of the sudden, I happened upon this strange and heartwrenchingly beautiful exhibition of drawings. I was struck by how many of them contained writing. This one has writing in a variety of different languages, a variety of different hands. It’s by Allghiero e Boetti. It’s called Attratto da improvviso centro.This is purposeful, not marginalia like the stuff on the diagonal lines, but it’s also purposefully sloppy and illegible. I can’t even tell what language it is. Maybe it’s just important that it IS language, not what it’s saying. Which, come to think of it, is almost NEVER the case with marginalia or graffitti. That stuff is there to lay claim, to impose meaning especially where it’s not wanted. This keeps to its place, says nothing.Some seems very purposeful, like the Chinese/ Japanese coin here in the middle, but can you also see the scrawling hand pointed outward?This one broke my heart. It’s not graffitti because it’s in a frame. It’s not marginalia because the word is not in response to any other word, I don’t think. Unless the “no” builds on the “no.” Unless the fury of the word becomes the meaning of the word, like the gesture of some graffitti. I looked at this long enough that I thought I saw a “yes,” but when I looked back, it was gone. Untitled by Rona Pondick.I wish I could show you more pictures by this person, but these drawings were so minute and intricate, it would take 15 pictures to show you much at all. But most of them have writing, illegible, around the periphery. And this one has the writing crossed out. Did the artist plan this? Or was she just drawing and took a notion to write something down and then cross it out? And why am I so moved by the drawings of sawhorses alongside the gesture to annul language?Lastly, this. Jenny Holzer. Of course it’s not marginalia at all, but how strange that she is an “artist” and not a “writer,” that her words are in frames and those frames are in museums– it’s not so far removed from graffitti, the font is important, the brand and the gesture.
