Perhaps the textual content of the art in this exhibition suggests an obvious aural interpretation of many of the works. But I think it’s worth considering a few in particular, both in terms of the sound of the process of creating the work as well as the “sound” of the finished piece. Lately I’ve been interested in the idea of what an artwork that does not contain a sound component might sound like. While many of us might be familiar with the scratching noise of a writing implement or charcoal on paper, or of a brush on canvas (see if you can tease out the sound of artist Mary McDonnell drawing red ink lines, in Linda Dusman’s composition SKRA), there are other fascinating sounds produced by all variety of unconventional artistic practices. I’m particularly enamored of the oddly musical recording of someone “typing” a poem by Seamus Heaney onto a Teflon-coated surface, using typewriter elements affixed to gloves, in Stefana McClure’s Digging (Death of a Naturalist). I feel like these are secret sounds, resonances that are seldom shared outside of the artist’s studio, much less with a viewer.

Then there is the sound of reading some of these artworks, either in one’s head or aloud. Suzanne Delehanty notes that the cadence of Richard Serra’s Verb List recalls the rhythmic compositions of the artist’s friend Philip Glass. And like Glass, just when things become predictable [“to support” “to hook” “to suspend”], Serra exchanges one note for another, [“of tension” “of gravity” “of entropy”]. We can also consider the sound of a ghostly narrator. I can’t help but imagine the reader of Molly Springfield’s Chapter IX sounding a little like a less strident Winston Churchill. And an audible element is critical to the full experience of Annabel Daou’s Constitution, in which Arabic letters are sequenced not to become a literal translation of the landmark US document but to somewhat awkwardly mimic the sounds of the English text when read out loud.

Finally, with a respectful nod to John Cage, we can consider almost anything a musical score. Listen to Nathan Altice’s sound pieces made in response to Jon Laxdal’s Diary Sheet works and Allyson Strafella’s Untitled, or Frank Badur’s own composition, which in this online catalogue accompanies his Untitled. And then ponder the difference in how these works would sound compared to each other: John Fraser’s Fading Light I and Fading Light II versus Gloria Ortiz-Hernández’s Over and Over #5 versus any one of the lush pages in Sara Sosnowy’s Blue.

I could go on and on. And on. But I would prefer to discuss whether this audible connection exists in all types of artwork or if the construct of “text in art” particularly lends itself towards this interpretation? As an artist, do you ever notice or pay special attention to the sounds emitted when you make art? As a viewer, do you ever translate the visual into the auditory? And do you ever wonder what an artist was hearing when she made the work that you stand in front of?

N. Elizabeth Schlatter is the Deputy Director and Curator of Exhibitions at the University of Richmond Museums, Virginia, where she has organized exhibitions of modern and contemporary art since 2000. Previously she worked at the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, Washington, DC, and the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston. Elizabeth also organizes exhibitions independently and writes about art for various publications and websites. She has a BA in Art History from Southwestern University, Georgetown, Texas, and an MA in Art History from George Washington University, Washington, DC. Elizabeth lives and works in Richmond, Virginia.

Trisha Brown is a renowned post-modern dancer and choreographer with a long and distinguished national and international career. Brown is well-known for her nuanced collaborations with many visual artists, including Robert Rauschenberg and many others. Brown has also created visual art in her own right, including two works in the Art=Text=Art exhibition.

This online conversation gives us an opportunity to discuss the role of visual arts and choreography, as they interact artistically on-stage, as visual arts documents choreography as an archive, and as an interdisciplinary field of inquiry.

Jeff Friedman is Associate Professor of Dance Studies, Mason Gross School of the Arts, at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. He received his PhD in Dance History and Theory at the University of California-Riverside, where he was a Jacob K. Javits Fellow. As a professional dancer and choreographer, Jeff has toured nationally and internationally with the Oberlin Dance Collective and LOCUS Solo Dance. His solo work Muscle Memory has been seen in throughout the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, Poland and Germany. Friedman was a Senior Research and Teaching Fulbright Fellow in Frankfurt, Germany, in 2010. His publications are available in the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain and New Zealand. He was also a visiting Senior Lecturer in the Dance Studies Programme at Auckland University, New Zealand.

I’d like to begin this discussion by questioning the deviousness and seduction of language as used in art. Words are a lure and we are drawn to the writing on the wall, whether in a gallery or museum, a bathroom stall, or on a poster-lined street. Language captures the viewer and draws him or her closer in a different way than the image does, and I’m interested in opening up a discussion around that phenomenon.

In the same way that a title of a work can open up or even shift the way we see the work, language within the work can manipulate the way the viewer responds to and ultimately receives it. How might language be said to operate in ways that aren’t restricted to the contextualizing and annotative possibilities that language seems inherently to bring with it? Much discussion has taken place around the manipulative nature of the image; in what ways does the use of language become implicated in similarly manipulative strategies?

Annabel Daou (b. 1967, Beirut, Lebanon) was born and raised in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War. She attended Barnard College of Columbia University, New York (1989). Daou held a residency at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Studio Program, New York (2002-2007), and was a Brown Foundation Fellow in Residence at the Dora Maar House, Ménerbes, France (2008). Daou won the Biennial Award at the 2010 Cairo Biennale. She was in residence at CentralTrak, Dallas (2011) and was a visiting professor at the Meadows Art School, Southern Methodist University, Dallas (2011). Recent solo exhibitions have been held at the David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island (2009); Conduit Gallery, Dallas (2010, 2014); Josée Bienvenu Gallery, New York (2011, 2012); Galerie Tanja Wagner, Berlin (2012, 2014); and the Global Art Forum, Dubai, United Arab Emirates (2014). Select group exhibitions took place at Osart Gallery, Milan (2011); the Drawing Room, London (2013); and The Arts and Humanities Institute Gallery, Boise, Idaho (2014). Daou performed her work Fortune at MoMA PS1, New York (2013): more information about this work may be found at http://annabeldaoufortune.com/. She is a co-founder of S2A, a subterranean platform for art projects in New York City, and is a founder of dbfoundation in New York, a small collaborative effort to organize alternative exhibitions and projects. Daou has participated in a number of projects organized by dBfoundation, including Home Base IV, New York (2009); CAFÉ, the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC (2009); and We Are Not an Arab Artist, New York Chronicles, Virginia Commonwealth University, Doha, Qatar (2010). Daou lives and works in New York City.

Before an artist draws or a writer writes, s/he confronts a blank sheet of paper, which awaits the marks that transform it into a work conveying creative thought. In Art=Text=Art, several artists have created intriguing works that deliberately exploit the paper’s expanse of white, unmarked space as a meaningful element of the overall composition. Artists leave areas blank to mediate between “absence” and “presence.” Determining what to draw, or where to place a line or other mark, is as important as deciding which areas to leave pristine. Blank areas in drawings are not empty.

Consider works by Ed Ruscha, Robert Barry, John Fraser, Bronlyn Jones, or Jill O’Bryan.

How does each artist use the white of the paper? And to what purpose? What does each artist’s use of the white of the paper suggest to you? How are the white, unmarked areas of these works significant? Please share your thoughts about these drawings or about other drawings in the exhibition that use the blank space of the paper in interesting ways. In Bronlyn Jones’s Erasure List (2009), she offers for pondering: What is left out, What is unnecessary, and What is left unsaid.

To launch the Art=Text=Art discussion section, we offer the concept of tabula rasa [blank slate] and the “blank” parts of drawings as a catalyst for your ideas.

Marilyn Symmes is the Morse Research Center for Graphic Arts Director & Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. In addition to overseeing the Zimmerli’s installation of the Art=Text=Art exhibition in 2012, she organized the 2011-12 traveling exhibition Dancing with the Dark: Joan Snyder Prints 1963-2010. Other Zimmerli exhibitions she realized include: with the help of Rutgers University Art History graduate students, Pop Art and After: Prints and Popular Culture (2008); Jolán Gross-Bettelheim: An American Printmaker in an Age of Progress (2011); Aspects of Architecture: The Prints of John Taylor Arms (2012); Lynd Ward Draws Stories (2012); and Stars: Contemporary Prints by Derrière L’Étoile Studio, New York (2013). From the 1970s to 2002, Symmes held graphic arts curatorial posts at the Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts; Detroit Institute of Arts; the Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio; and the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, New York, where she organized many Old Master to contemporary graphic arts exhibitions. In addition to the monograph Dancing with the Dark: Joan Snyder Prints 1963-2010 (2011), her publications include Impressions of New York, Prints from the New-York Historical Society (2005) and Fountains: Splash and Spectacle, Water and Design from the Renaissance to the Present (1998). Symmes has also published numerous catalogues and articles on prints, drawings, and artist illustrated books. Currently serving on the advisory board of the Lower East Side Printshop, New York, and the National Endowment for the Arts International Advisory Panel, Washington, DC, Symmes has previously served on the boards of the Print Council of America and the International Confederation of Architectural Museums. She has a BA in Art History from Stanford University, Stanford, California; and an MA in Art History and Museum Practice from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Ekphrasis was an ancient Greek teaching method in which a student of rhetoric was placed before a painting, a sculpture, or a particularly fine krater and asked to describe the object so perfectly that a person who had never seen the work would feel as though they were standing in its presence. In this way, ekphrasis was basis for the first formal analysis and was also one of the earliest forms of art history.

In a certain respect, different types of ekphrasis run throughout the entirety of Art=Text=Art, as the very premise of the show concerns the relationship (or sometimes disconnect) between information communicated as text and information communicated visually. There are both differences and similarities between the ways these two forms convey information, such as the idea of “red” in Carl Andre’s typewriter work red red. Mel Bochner shows 12 inches both visually and in written numbers in 2 (12” x 12”). All of Jasper Johns’s works in this exhibition play with both text and numbers, engaging in a back and forth dialogue with the visual.

Furthermore, ekphrasis can be other forms of translation besides simply the visual/textual exchange. Fittingly, this catalogue is not just a textual/visual catalogue! Check out the musical interpretations of Jón Laxdal, Mary McDonnell and Allyson Strafella‘s work. Frank Badur interprets his own work, Untitled, with a musical piece entitled Different Lines – Different Colours. Lawrence Weiner’s works are turned into poems!

Nathan Langston is composer, writer, and dramaturg for Satellite Ballet & Collective (New York) and writes for the blog Psychopomp Kaleidoscope.