LAZNIA 1 2009 - Eduardo Kac LAGOGLYPHS
15.01-08.02.2009
Opening of the exhibition after the artist`s lecture: 15 January 2009 at 6 p.m. / Exhibition: 15 January - 8 February 2009
Opening of the exhibition after the artist`s lecture: 15 January 2009 at 6 p.m. / Exhibition: 15 January - 8 February 2009
Curator: Katarzyna Woźniak
Lagoglyphs are a series of works in which the artist develops a leporimorph or rabbitographic form of writing. As visual language that alludes to meaning but resists interpretation, the Lagoglyphs series stands as the counterpoint to the barrage of discourses generated through, with, and around Kac's celebrated artwork GFP Bunny (Kac's green-glowing bunny, called Alba, created in 2000 and featured in exhibitions and publications all over the world).
The pictograms that make up the Lagoglyphs are visual symbols representing Alba rather than the sounds or phonemes of words. Devoid of characters and phonetic symbols, devoid of syllabic and logographic meaning, Kac's Lagoglyphs function through a repertoire of gestures, textures, forms, juxtapositions, superpositions, opacities, transparencies, and ligatures. These coalesce into an idioglossic and polyvalent script structured through visual compositional units that multiply rather than circumscribe meanings.
Composed of double-mark calligraphic units (one in green, the other in black), the Lagoglyphs evoke the birth of writing (as in cuneiform script, hieroglyphic orthography, or ideography). However, they deliberately oscillate between monoreferentiality (always Alba) and the patterns of a visual idiolect (the artist's own). In so doing, the Lagoglyphs ultimately form a kind of pictorial idioglossia or cryptolanguage.
Kac, who parallel to his art has written and published experimental visual poetry continuously since the early 1980s, as exemplified by his noted holopoems, digital poems, and biopoems, has created in the Lagoglyphs a series that brings from poetry both the power of condensation of meaning and the productive ambiguity of carefully-crafted linguistic syntagms.
At the same time, genetic engineering, a new art medium pioneered by Eduardo Kac since the late 1990s, has often been compared to a language, "the script of life" – a comparison that Kac has always attacked and denounced as a hollow metaphor, extremely reductive and insufficient to account for the true complexity of life.
In the Lagoglyphs, Kac brings together the multiple forms and the varied issues that have informed his art in over two decades. Indeed, a new chirographic synthesis that is also a new beginning for the artist, one in which word and image come together as mark and meaning.
Lagoglyphs are a series of works in which the artist develops a leporimorph or rabbitographic form of writing. As visual language that alludes to meaning but resists interpretation, the Lagoglyphs series stands as the counterpoint to the barrage of discourses generated through, with, and around Kac's celebrated artwork GFP Bunny (Kac's green-glowing bunny, called Alba, created in 2000 and featured in exhibitions and publications all over the world).
The pictograms that make up the Lagoglyphs are visual symbols representing Alba rather than the sounds or phonemes of words. Devoid of characters and phonetic symbols, devoid of syllabic and logographic meaning, Kac's Lagoglyphs function through a repertoire of gestures, textures, forms, juxtapositions, superpositions, opacities, transparencies, and ligatures. These coalesce into an idioglossic and polyvalent script structured through visual compositional units that multiply rather than circumscribe meanings.
Composed of double-mark calligraphic units (one in green, the other in black), the Lagoglyphs evoke the birth of writing (as in cuneiform script, hieroglyphic orthography, or ideography). However, they deliberately oscillate between monoreferentiality (always Alba) and the patterns of a visual idiolect (the artist's own). In so doing, the Lagoglyphs ultimately form a kind of pictorial idioglossia or cryptolanguage.
Kac, who parallel to his art has written and published experimental visual poetry continuously since the early 1980s, as exemplified by his noted holopoems, digital poems, and biopoems, has created in the Lagoglyphs a series that brings from poetry both the power of condensation of meaning and the productive ambiguity of carefully-crafted linguistic syntagms.
At the same time, genetic engineering, a new art medium pioneered by Eduardo Kac since the late 1990s, has often been compared to a language, "the script of life" – a comparison that Kac has always attacked and denounced as a hollow metaphor, extremely reductive and insufficient to account for the true complexity of life.
In the Lagoglyphs, Kac brings together the multiple forms and the varied issues that have informed his art in over two decades. Indeed, a new chirographic synthesis that is also a new beginning for the artist, one in which word and image come together as mark and meaning.
KAC'S LAGOGLYPHS: MARK AND MEANING
BIP