Saying Nothing About Something
There is a line from John Cage’s 1949 Lecture on Nothing that has followed me around for years:
“I have nothing to say and I am saying it…”
People sometimes bring that line up when they talk about my work. I understand why. On the surface, my collages and asemic texts can look like a kind of cultivated silence. Fragments without syntax. Letters without sentences. Language that appears to have been retired from its job.
But I have never felt that I am saying nothing.
If anything, I suspect I am saying nothing about Something.
Not the kind of something that can be packaged into a statement or defended in a paragraph. I mean something so wide that ordinary language cannot carry it without breaking under the weight. Something so continuous that words, when forced to hold it, turn brittle. They crumble into sound. They collapse into gesture. They fall back into silence.
Over the years, some of my exhibition titles have circled this territory: Beyond Words. Reduced to Silence. The Unspoken Remains. These are not declarations of despair. They are more like field notes from the edge of language.
My work is sometimes described as meaningless. I do not resist that description. Meaningless is not the same as purposeless. A cloud is meaningless in the literary sense. So is a river. So is a field of wind moving through tall grass. Yet none of these are without purpose. They participate in a larger order. They enact it.
I have often said that my interest is in expressing what I call the underlying universal harmony of all things. I do not mean harmony in a sentimental sense. I mean the structural coherence that holds opposites in relation. The quiet mathematics of existence. The pulse beneath the noise.
When I remove or obscure literary meaning in a collage, I am not trying to frustrate the viewer. I am trying to free the language from its thankless labor.
Words work very hard in our culture. They persuade. They argue. They instruct. They accuse. They sell. They defend. They justify. They optimize. They brand. They notify.
They rarely rest.
In my studio, I take language off duty.
I liberate it from the obligation to carry a specific message. And in doing so, I hope to liberate the reader or viewer from the corresponding obligation to decipher that message. You do not need to be literate to stand before one of my works. You do not need to “get it.” You do not need to solve it.
You can simply look.
You can let your eye wander across torn edges and typographic rhythms the way it might wander across stones in a creek bed. You can enjoy the composition as shape, density, interval, breath. Language returns to being texture. Tone. Movement. Silence punctuated by marks.
We live inside a continuous deluge of information. Streams within streams. Feeds within feeds. Every day we are asked to interpret, evaluate, respond, and reposition ourselves within an expanding field of data. The horizon shimmers with updates. The mirage of relevance keeps receding. The simulacra multiply.
In such a landscape, even reading can feel like labor.
I am not against information. I am not against meaning. I read. I write. I participate. But I also recognize the fatigue that accumulates when everything demands comprehension.
My work attempts to create a small clearing.
An oasis of non-instruction.
A space where language is present but no longer barking orders. A field where letters gather without insisting on being converted into conclusions. A moment in which you are not required to extract value, only to experience form.
This is not nihilism. It is not a rejection of meaning. It is an adjustment of scale.
There are times when meaning serves us. There are times when we serve meaning. And there are times when both can step aside and allow a deeper current to be felt.
If I am saying nothing, I am saying it in order to let that current be heard.
As a reminder that beneath the noise of explanation there remains something unspoken, vast, and coherent, waiting patiently for us to stop talking long enough to notice it.
Very interesting ideas, thanks for sharing!
I can relate so much to all of this, Cecil! I appreciate you giving words to what I've always felt about my own creations... "You can simply look." Yes!