Monday, May 28, 2012

Words

"Words---I wonder if you can realise how much I love them"

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Vive la France, circa 1915.
Gift of the Benjamin and Frances Benenson Foundation.
© 2012 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti /
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome

"Words are man's first and most grandiose invention. With language he created a whole new universe; what wonder if he loved words and attributed power to them! With fitted, harmonious words the magicians summoned rabbits out of empty hats and spirits from the elements. Their descendants, the literary men, still go on with the process, morticing their verbal formulas together and, before the power of the finished spell, trembling with delight and awe. Rabbits out of empty hats? No, their spells are more subtly powerful, for they evoke emotions out of empty minds. Formulated by their art the most insipid statements become enormously significant. "
~ Denis in Aldous Huxley's Crome Yellow
Joseph Kosuth, Titled (Art as Idea as Idea) The Word "Definition"
1966-68. Gift of Seth Siegelaub and the Stichting Egress Foundation, Amsterdam

"...language makes it impossible to receive the exact message sent...Words are those slides they constantly fed you in art history, the blurred, color-poor angels of annunciation meant to stand in for the trip to Bruges."
"Language, however faulty a direct describer, can get to the place, even change it, by strange ability, to simulate, to suppose, to say something else than what is."
~ Richard Powers, The Goldbug Variations.


Guy Laramee, Biblios

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