The words I posted previously on the topic “Eclectic reflections on Art and Language” were written before Christmas. When I finally came back to work on them I realized that the practical work I was producing was worrying tutors and was also motivating strange behaviours. For example, other students were taking objects because one of my installations “looked like a pile of garbage”. I know it did, but after all it was in a sculpture art studio in a University! One way or the other this frustrated me. If it were an expressionist painting people would “pretend they were getting something from it”. It’s not because this was not a successful installation that its automatic destruction is allowed. For my reflections this credit given to painting and not to the installation work I’ve been doing became relevant but the text that I managed to write was too subjective and personal to be included in this report.

7. Why should I write about Hermeneutics?

My initial plan was to finish this report with research on this topic and a few other areas of similar intellectual relevance. However it suddenly became more significant to argue that this theoretical research is actually productive and strategically crucial for me as a practitioner.
To avoid the fact that this text could become a mystical reflection on language I will underpin the research objectives I achieved and argue for their relevance in what relates to my practice.
Instead of choosing the science park external project (painted mural) to become a pivotal piece, which would be an easy path, I will try to prove the relevance of this investigation for the installation practice. This mural was a parallel project and that is how I want to think about it. The burocracy and the “installation” of the six panels were almost as relevant as the creative development of the painting itself (see external project file).
To start my argument I would like to put forward evidence that contemporary thinkers actually believe words in general and text in particular are crucial to establish artistic periods. Claire Bishop writes the following lines related to the historical scope of her book on Installation Art:

[…] the majority of examples featured here [her book] date from 1965 to 1975, the decade in which installation art comes of age. This is because it is at this time that the main theoretical impulses behind installation art come into focus: ideas of heightened immediacy, of the decentred subject (Barthes, Foucault, Lacan, Derrida) and activated spectatorship as political in implication.
Bishop, Installation Art, page 13

It could be argued that this importance given by this author to written publications is typical of art critics, writes, philosophers and teachers. However as a practitioner I always felt language was crucial for my installation work and I was quite sure many others would feel something similar happening within their practice.

Anyone who is worth their grain of salt has to use the world around them. An artist’s responsibility is to acculturate the world. That’s what one does. And you can’t do it properly without some kind of “form language” – without some kind of system of reading and looking at the world. The better equipped we are to acculturate, the better reading you can give of the world around you. […]
I think that the works are about perception, but I also think that there are many ways to “read”. I’m fascinated by language, but I think we need to think of it in a much more contemporary sense. Written word is no longer just the written word. There is the spoken word there is the picture. Because of technology, we now have a very short circuited kind of language – a layered language – and I think that’s what I like my works to do. I like to think that this is how people perceive. That’s why I became interested in the media, I think, because of a new language base.

Sonnier, Sculpture Magazine January / February 2006, p.54 / 57

Keith Sonnier is an artist I respect for his past and cutting edge attitude. Even if I feel distant from his “face like” (apparently unintentional) formal compositions, I take his work as a reference. After all he was the first using video and his concerns and the media he uses are basically the same as mine.
Just to give one last example of the relevance of language and its understanding for other generations of artists I find Banks Violette quite significant.

Language Systems are predisposed to collapse: a lot of what I do references sub-cultures in which people seal themselves off and elaborate a language that becomes more and more complex. The logical conclusion is to make it end tragically to prove they are not acting.

Banks Violette, Sculpture Magazine (December 2005), p.19

In this quote we don’t only have the proof of the importance given to a language research but we also have the use of language to promote and enhance some of the installation’s qualities. In my practice I have something very similar happening with a specific subculture that made their language so complex that even suicide is not that far away (if we take it from a social point of view). I’m talking about the scientific community.