Word Play

Sometimes images fail by themselves, especially in postmodern art, to communicate anything comprehensible to the general public... Sometimes words fail by themselves. In this show, words and images come to the aid of each other, aiming to avoid the cartoonish and striving toward some fleeting profundity beyond paint and beyond language. -- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

I just found out that I missed the opportunity to see Ferlinghetti's Word Play art exhibit at the Krevsky Gallery (Geary Street, SF). Bummer.

I've been intrigued by this writer/artist who so openly questions the meaning of symbols, words, images, etc. with such pointedness and w/o high-handedness. In a recent KQED Sparks show (a rerun, I think), he spoke about his Word Play exhibit, remarking on the obsurdity of how some art (could he also have meant writing?) was meant to obfuscate and thus was deemed avant-garde.

Taking his quotation under examination, I'm reminded of Lessing's Laocoon (which I am courageously plowing through at a snail's pace -- yes, plowing at a snail's pace) which was (dare I say it) the quintessential German piece of writing that articulated (rather harshly and too definitively at times) the distinction between painting and poetry. The argument is the same throughout the ages -- poetry is painting, painting is poetry, or painting is not poetry and poetry is not painting, etc. Lessing was eloquent about his distinction between the two (they differ in the object of representation, as well as in the manner of representation), but I was more interested in him stressing that they are in fact both representing absence and illusion. Certainly something to think about...