Phillips took copies of “A Human Monument,” a second-rate Victorian novel by W. H. Mallock, covering the pages with drawings and collages and leaving portions of the text visible to create an entirely new narrative.
Ilse Garnier’s “Afrikanische Legenden” (“African Legends”) work incorporates an African symbolic writing system sewn by women into ceremonial carpets and vestments.
This unique piece, one of three in the physical exhibit, tells a tale of a community through multiple component parts encased in a pair of leather shoes.
Artist Richard Tipping explores the authority embodied in signs, subverting it and replacing it with playful anarchy. “Man Aging Direct Or” is a small, unassuming desk nameplate. The work divides “Managing Director,” a title of authority and control, into chunks of text forming new words and meaning.
Seven small matchbooks, a common form for advertising in the past, have Kruger works printed on their covers. Your Manias Become Science (set against an image of an atomic explosion), You Are An Experiment in Terror, Your Silence Is My Comfort and four others enact a double valence of identity and effect through the use of pronouns, a common feature of Kruger’s art. The “Your” and “my” of “Your comfort is my silence” are both viewer and other, interchangeable, allowing the viewer to apply the text to themselves or somebody else. Small and subtle, the matchbooks are an elegant example of Kruger’s sensibility and artistic agenda.
Among the Jenny Holzer artworks in the Sackner Archive is a trucker hat, one of her multiples, bearing the embroidered text, “Protect Me From What I Want.” The message, like others of Holzer’s, speaks of identity, power, and desire. The hat is High and Low culture simultaneously, shifting seamlessly from one to the other, unstable and dangerous.
Ruth and Marvin’s work The art of typewriting delves into a small but incredibly robust portion of their collection. It is a full-color work featuring some of the many typewriter pieces in their Archive.
John Furnival’s “The Fall of the Tower of Babel” is one of the early classics of concrete poetry and exists in many versions. It depicts the Biblical story of the splintering of the World’s languages as a vision of nuclear apocalypse.
Not long after Ruth and Marvin Sackner purchased the first items for their Archive, they began creating detailed records of the materials within it. Nothing demonstrates their determination to do so quite like the bulk of this 1984 catalog—roughly 3 inches thick!
