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.

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.

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.

In Kay’s words, “When I read about the creation in the text of Genesis, my thoughts were primarily about the abundance, diversity, and pristineness of life that was created and how impoverished and degraded it has become under our stewardship. We have squandered those remarkable gifts and  privilege almost to the point of no return. My contribution to “In the Beginning” concerns this critical issue.”

Through its text and through its form, Do Not Disturb functions as a message and as a metaphor.  It carries through it’s message, DO NOT DISTURB, a command to cease the reckless abuse of the earth.  Uncannily, the structure of the text verbally mimics the creation.  The text contains letters which are capable of grouping themselves into dominant families of D’s. I’s, S’s, T’s, and O’s.  Organizing themselves in this way, one letter under the other like letter, they create a system of divisions and classifications of similar forms.  This arrangement of text is very closely related to what happens in Genesis and to the methodical order and sequencing, divisions and relationships, as in “each after their kind” and “gathering together unto one place.”  The letters simulate an efficient model of Genesis through a process of alignment.  At the same time that they comment on the creation, the letters act it out as little verbal surrogates.

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.

Sinking Feeling draws on sound, pronunciation and meaning.  It refers to ‘synching’  as a chorus of simultaneous voices, as in synchronizing; as ‘cinching,’ like a tightening noose; and of course ‘sinking.’ They combine in various ways to ‘lynching,’ a violent abduction by a mob; and ‘linking’ in which groups of people are linked and oppressed by association.  To take one of these references further, the text makes bold the fearful thought that comes from a “feeling” (aka something that is not tangible).  It utilizes the seemingly ‘era-appropriate’ vernacular font of the subject matter of a lynching, yet one of the key elements of the work, in this age of immediate responses and criticisms of difficult subject matter, is the absolute requirement that the work exist in multiplicity.  “Officially” the work is a pair (each pair is signed and numbered as if it were one piece, which the artists considers it to be), and thus no lynching can occur without MORE THAN ONE.  This rule is something that poetically refers to many troublesome issues – no one person every seems to truly act alone.  In order for an awful situation to occur MULTIPLE people have to be working, in some way, together.  Rosen’s work uses a play on words and verbal repetition to get at very serious topics, all while expanding the issue from one awful type of crime to the issue of human nature.