Kay Rosen

IOU, 2017:
In Rosen’s words, “IOU” is a “found textual treasure which required minor adjustments to color to address major historical wrongs”.  For anyone who has followed the attempts by the corporation, Energy Transfer Partners, to build the Dakota Access Pipeline less than one mile from the Standing Rock Sioux reservation, the message of the letterpress work “IOU” will be clear: both a promise and an apology to that tribe, and by extension, to the many other indigenous peoples whose rights and treaties have been trampled over the years.  As the protocol for approval of these pipelines, such as a thorough Environmental Impact Study, is radically altered by Trump’s orders, “IOU” fashions a simple message out of the heart of the Sioux tribe’s name.

Migration consists of two boards, one with the word, ICELAND” printed on it while the other has IRELAND.  The similarity of the names of the two countries, only one letter apart, presented itself as a sort of found text to Rosen, a situation that demanded to be reconstructed by color in order to make a point.  It couldn’t be more relevant than it is now. While the single blue or green letter, “R” and “C” creates a little visual and semantic disruption, having “migrated” from one name/country to the other, they change the work into a more multi-hued, complex and heterogeneous ‘place’ than it was as a monochromed one.

Something Happened, 2017:
The text on the top right panel reads, CORNER, while the bottom left panel reads, CORONER.  As Richard Klein discusses in his essay about Rosen’s work for her solo exhibition at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Rosen actively chooses the way text occupies the architecture of the page/paper.  The current installation of Something Happened is still only a ‘representation’ of a real-life event, yet it takes the artwork a step further beyond a discrete work on paper by placing the work in a real space jointly shared by the viewer.  Of course the extra “O” suggests that whatever happened wasn’t good.  As both an installation and an edition, the work leaves much space in the middle both literally and figuratively

Kay Rosen traded in her academic-based study of language for language-based art four decades ago, realizing that what she found interesting in language had to be expressed visually, using color, scale, materials, non-linear composition, processes such as drawing and painting, and graphic strategies. Her approach has often been more passive than active in the sense that she doesn’t begin a work by saying, “I am going to deliver this message.” Rather, she responds to language as found material, identifying potential in it that exceeds its normal function as a mode of communication. She manipulates its body parts – letters, letterforms and sequencing, to shape her message. The writer Rhonda Lieberman, who has written insightfully about the work many times, called her as a “revealer of language, showing it doing things that it didn’t know it could do.” The poet Eileen Myles, who has also written on Rosen’s work several times, described what she did as “moving the furniture around.”

“Echoes” is a visual representation of a vocal concept. The word draws on the features of its letterforms – the vertical and horizontal symmetry and non-directionality of “O” and “H” to emulate echoing. The versatility and symmetry of “O” and “H” allow “Echoes” to reflect and intersect itself horizontally and vertically four times over, creating a graphic reverberation. The space of “Echoes” conveys an enclosure, a chamber, where sound has bounced off the left and right and top and bottom edges and landed in the center, reoriented.

BLUE MONDAY- “Blue Monday” is one of the artist’s early lists. It was originally created in 1991 in response to an invitation from Michael Shamberg to contribute to a CD-Rom about “Blue Monday,” the best-selling 1983 hit by the British rock band New Order, for whom Shamberg was the producer. In 2005 it became a web project for the Bronx Museum, and in 2015, it was published as a continuous video with sound in an edition of 100 by Krakow Witkin Gallery. “Blue Monday” systematically combines every day of the week with each of the six colors of the spectrum in order to explore the alternatives to the colloquialism, “Blue Monday,” and to discover the poetic and personal associations of colors and days. Rosen’s piece begins on “Blue Monday” and cycles through 6 colors over the course of 7 weeks, taking 42 days to return to “Blue Monday,” all the while, the viewer experiences Orange Thursday, Green Friday, Yellow Saturday and 38 others.

SISYPHUS – was originally created for the 1991 exhibition “Candyass Carnival” at Stux Gallery in New York City, featuring the work of Cary Leibowitz and friends. The video draws on two sources to depict futility and hope, as well as observations about language: the Greek myth of Sisyphus, a mortal who was condemned by the gods to roll a boulder up a hill for eternity, only to have it roll down again; and phonetic peculiarities in the English language. In the video, Sisyphus is spelled seventy-two different ways, one name per frame, but never correctly. There may not be another word which has so many possible spellings. Each failed iteration is accompanied by a drum roll followed by a ta-da, reflecting the descending trajectory of the rolling stone. Since its inception in 1991, Sisyphus has been presented in numerous museum and gallery exhibitions and was mastered onto DVD and published in 2011 by Barbara Krakow Gallery as an edition of 100.

Sweet Jesus, Kay Rosen’s first project with BEYER, develops her longstanding use of language as pictorial material in a medium which is new for the artist, stained glass. A wall-mounted sculpture produced in edition of 6, this intimate work is connected to a 2011 series of drawings of phrases depicted as overlapping letters, which were made according to a pair of predetermined constraints: each phrase must begin and end with the same letter, and must bear a formal or stylistic correlation to its meaning. This visual symmetry is thrown into sharp relief by the brilliantly backlit, overlain letters of Sweet Jesus, which can be seen all at once, as a bright abstraction, or identified individually. As a three-dimensional object, the work dramatizes what has been an implicit theme of Rosen’s art of the past four decades: the idea that words, far from being neutral instruments of communication, can possess an obdurate physicality and their own tangible, even sculptural, qualities. In her presentation of the title phrase as translucent, Rosen demonstrates—seemingly paradoxically—how language can resist the transparency often ascribed to it.

Indeed, Rosen’s work in a variety of mediums (painting, drawing, editions, and installations) has cleverly shown how words’ physical qualities—typeface, color, spacing, scale, positioning—can alter legibility and, in turn, affect meaning. She favors those instances of language that foreground linguistic materiality and confound the processes of seeing and reading, such as misspellings, homonyms, homophones, rhymes, puns, palindromes, and double-entendres. This use of word as image, and the rule-based methods according to which this work was created, aligns Rosen with a text-based Conceptualist heritage that includes Lawrence Weiner and Ed Ruscha, but other ties are also evident. Her chosen words and phrases, like those of her contemporary Jenny Holzer, often have pointed political implications, while on a purely formal register, the stacked letterforms of Sweet Jesus call up Jasper Johns’s overlapping numbers and alphabets. And if the work’s means and devotional size evoke yet another tradition—a history of religious art that encompasses illuminated manuscripts and stained glass windows—the link is hardly unequivocal. “Sweet Jesus” is, after all, often used as an expression of surprise or stupefaction.

To fabricate the stained glass panel, BEYER worked with material from Glasshute Lamberts in Waldsassen, West Germany, widely considered to be the world’s finest producer of traditional hand-blown glass. The Lamberts’ palette comprises five hundred standard colors that transmit light superbly. The LED light panel, which minimizes the thickness of the wall sculpture, provides an efficient energy source, with 2,200 lumens of light. The LED light source produces almost no heat, resulting in no measureable thermal build-up, and has nearly five times the life span of the most efficient fluorescent bulbs. It lasts over 100,000 hours, virtually eliminating the need for replacements. The sculpture is easily mounted on the wall via a cleat on its reverse side. An electrical cord on its underside can simply be plugged into a regular outlet, and a small switch turns the light on and off.

In order to model itself after its real life counterpart, PENDULUM’s letters have to be completely reordered. The new order, PNUUMLDE, reflects the successive stations of a pendulum’s arc as it swings back and forth across an imaginary center between the first and last letters, the second and seventh, the third and sixth, and the fourth and fifth, punctuating each one with a change of direction. The sequence of letters is deliberately out of order linguistically but in order conceptually. While the word does not actively move, it serves as a kind of score for reading which the viewer activates each time they read it. As they attempt to spell it correctly by visually reordering the letters, their repeated eye movements back and forth between P and E, N and D, U and L, and U and M mimic the pendulum’s motion. It is an unintelligible jumble of letters until the viewers set it in motion. The reader generates the pendulum, whose alternating rhythm is reinforced by its black and white palette.
 
Color, sequence, and incidence of letters are important to the way words play out their message, but in issues of polarity numbers are important too, as in any situation involving two sides.  PENDULUM is stabilized by balance. Its even-numbered letters, four on each side of the center, methodically record each stroke to the right and left by the virtual pendulum. When it swings one way, it can be assured by gravity and momentum that it will swing back by that much the other way. The center here is not the subject of colonization, but the fixed point against which the equal distance to each side is measured. Within a word, that distance is measured by the number of letters. If pendulum did not have even-numbered letters, it would not have worked.

 — from The Center Is a Concept, Kay Rosen.

The tenuousness and slippage which occurs in language parallel the fragility and uncertainty inherent in political systems of power. In “Palimpsest” a sacrosanct list of popes and kings, whose nine predecessors enjoyed authority determined, validated, and endorsed by a history of their namesakes, is thrown into confusion by the final ambiguous function of the single letter “X”. “X” changes this history from unquestionable ancestry to unknown ancestry. Historical predicability is threatened by the implications of a letter.