Words: Who Needs 'Em?
Clark Humphrey
Belltown Underground Art Gallery
2211 First Ave, 448-3325
Through July 5.

I absolutely love the discomfort that arises when art--any art--begins to tap-dance out of its accepted territory. When dance and theater mate to produce the maligned bastard offspring performance art. When sound and visual art morph into multimedia installation or web art. When literature and art gang up on the establishment in the form of comics. And when these hybrids come together to create even newer art forms, this will be where Ezra Pound's famous dictum, "Make it new," is truly fulfilled.

This also applies to the use of text in visual art, even though it's not, strictly speaking, a new invention. We began to see it as far back as Picasso and Braques' use of newspaper fragments in their cubist collages. But the question posed by the appearance of text in a visual work is one that continues to exert pressure on the viewer. If artists wanted to simply tell us what was in their work, they would write an essay instead of producing a painting or sculpture or installation. So what does the use of text tell us? What is it--both literally and metaphorically--saying?

Read All About It! doesn't offer a pat answer to this question--as well it shouldn't--but it does provide excellent material for building a theory. The wide range of work from 24 artists shows us that the appearance of text in visual art isn't merely a trend, but a device both aesthetic and rhetorical that artists can use to deepen their modes of inquiry. In some works, such as a series of watercolors by Jacquelyn Tough, the text works against the images. A darling little Kim Dingle-like girl, cute as a button, throws a textual tantrum, exclaiming, "I'm not going to Nanna's house anymore... I am not nice!" Peregrine Honig's delicate waifs in Awfulbet are executed on 26 paper lunch sacks, drawn as lightly as an apology. The text on each bag is tiny and gruesome: "E is for Emma, throwing up dinner; F is for Faye, who prayed to be thinner." The lilt of the rhyme works hard against the terrible stories of the difficult road of girlhood, on pristine unopened (read: virginal) paper bags; the words tells us that sweetness is an illusion.

Much of the work in this show is truly funny and dark, such as Chris Burden's untitled piece. It shows a photograph of his hands bearing what seem to be stigmata, and in fact, in a 1974 performance piece Burden had himself crucified on top of a Volkswagen Beetle. Above the image is a lithograph of a note from one of Burden's assistants, which reads, "Chris--Took bus to work. Can not do nails. Couldn't sleep." Evidently this was a sign of some last-minute squeamishness at the prospect of driving nails through the artist's hands. The pleasure of the work is reserved for insiders--you have to know about the performance piece to get the humor--but if you have the knowledge, it gives the logistics of Burden's grisly self-crucifixion unexpected humor.

Text can also be read as a typographic element, purely visual, so that we're implicitly instructed not to read it. In James Castle's strange untitled works, a piece of text--a headline, a magazine ad--is cut out and attached to a blank background; the art of it is that Castle extracted a tiny piece from each one, and then meticulously re-glued it in. Robert Yoder takes this idea a step further, by taking apart road signs into little pieces and then reassembling them so that they're unreadable. They still register as signs, but their message is inaccessible.

By way of contrast to the sense and nonsense exhibited in Read All About It!, I stopped by (Stranger writer) Clark Humphrey's Words: Who Needs 'Em?, which is a series of photographs of signs that say nothing. It's a project in the vein of the work Walker Evans did toward the end of his life, photographing signs in terms of their visual effect, but Humphrey's images are oddly lonely, objects that want badly to tell you something but can't. The signs become simple blank forms, an information void. The urge to communicate and clarify is exactly the opposite of what's going on in the Greg Kucera show, where text would seem to confirm and explain, but instead complicates and obscures. By virtue of its paradox, it tells us not to believe what we see.