The Calligrapher Replies

The Calligrapher Replies
welded copper wire 
182 x 115 cm 
1996 

The following text is adapated from Works and Texts 1992, p. 94 et seq.

I have used writing in pictures both to say something and to cancel out meaning, so that the signifier (in once fashionable parlance) destroys the signified. If these are called language drawings, what do they say? For me they are full of silence. Reference has been stripped away and they are dispossessed of meaning: signifying is all that is signified.

Paintings such as The Calligrapher Replies deal with writing by accumulating utterance, by heaping meaning on meaning, so as to cancel out coherence and isolate the echoing beauty of letter forms as things in themselves. Deciphering such a picture, unpicking its verbal strands, would add nothing to its meaning as a picture.