Don’t Confuse Your Conceptualists:
Text, Humour and Conceptualism

by
Liz Knox

BA Hons University of Guelph, 2006
Guelph, Ontario
A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE
REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
MASTER OF APPLIED ARTS
in
VISUAL ARTS

EMILY CARR UNIVERSITY OF ART + DESIGN
2013

© Liz Knox, 2013

Abstract

This essay considers humour and contemporary art practice as cultural forces, through
which the expression of the intangible is possible. These ideas are examined through my
recent works: Everything I Know About History…, an installation in advertising space;
Don’t Confuse Your Conceptualists and My Roommate Recalls a Text Work, large vinyl
wall text installations; and the artist books Synopses, Missed Connections, and Excerpt.
Related to imagination, humour and art practices have the ability to access something vital
that is beyond the reach of language alone. I consider French philosopher Henri Bergson’s
theories of humour, determining the function of humour to be human and social, while
looking to the contemporary poet Kenneth Goldsmith to further my understanding of
conceptual writing practices. Early conceptualism is defined as a precedent for my
practice. Mirroring and reframing existing content, repetition, humour, and self-reflexivity
are strategies I use to make artwork in a post-conceptual trajectory.

Table of Contents

ii

Abstract

iii

Table of Contents

iv

List of figures

v

Acknowledgments

01

Introduction

06

Chapter 1: Humour and Text: Everything I Know About History… and
Don’t Confuse Your Conceptualists

14

Chapter 2: Reframing Existing Text: Synopses and Missed Connections

26

Chapter 3: Self Reflexivity: My Roommate Recalls a Text Work

33

Chapter 4: Context: Excerpt

42

Conclusion

44

Works Cited and Consulted

List of Figures

8

Figure 1: Liz Knox. Everything I Know About History… 2011-2012. Text
installation in transit advertising space. 28” x 11”.

10

Figure 2: Liz Knox. Don’t Confuse Your Conceptualists, 2011. Vinyl wall text
installation in Emily Carr University library.. 96” x 6”.

16

Figure 3: Liz Knox. Synopses. 2013. Book page. 5.5” x 8.5”.

19

Figure 4: Fiona Banner. The Nam. 1997. Bookwork (detail). 11.5” x 8”.
Courtesy the artist.

23

Figures 5 and 6: Liz Knox. Missed Connections, 2012. Book pages.
7.5” x 7.5” each.

27

Figure 7: Jenny Holzer. Truisms. 1977-1979. Offset Lithograph. 34¾” x 23”.
(Image removed due to copyright restrictions.)

29

Figure 8: Liz Knox. My Roommate Recalls a Text Work… 2012. Vinyl wall text
installation. 185” x 40”.

36

Figure 9: Ron Terada. Untitled (My Mother). 1994. Acrylic on canvas. 30” x 30”.
Courtesy the artist.

37

Figure 10: Liz Knox. Excerpt, 2011. Bookwork (detail). 4.25” x 6.87”.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Kyla Mallett, David MacWilliam, Melanie O’Brian, Judy Davis,
Shep Steiner, Patrik Andersson, Trish Kelly, Simon Levin, Chris Jones, Cameron
Cartiere, Angeles Hernandez Correa and all of the faculty and staff I worked with at
Emily Carr University, for the constant support and feedback they provided me. I
especially appreciate all of my classmates for the long conversations and even longer
critiques; I am glad that we were in this together.

1

Introduction

I consider my practice to be an act of cultural engagement, mirroring aspects of
everyday life as a way of reframing an idea of the original to expand old meanings and
convey new possibilities or understandings. I utilize conceptual strategies in my artwork
to make connections between the past and present using text and ideas to reveal the
comic or fragile nature of the human condition. These appropriations of conceptual
strategies pertain specifically to those practices that became prominent from the mid1960s to the mid-1970s; practices that engaged the conversation around the
dematerialization of the art object, the linguistic turn in artistic practice, and freedom from
pictorial representation. I employ an allegorical approach for its ability to offer multiple
ways to consider one subject. My intention is to create opportunities for criticality,
subversion, and the possibility of new meanings from histories and ideas that seem to
have an accepted or recognised status. The artworks I am currently focusing on act as
refusals of values that reflect the ways we consume text and popular culture. The
structure of these artworks offers an oblique distillation of the familiar.
Often I use an element from everyday life and display this without altering the
content, but shifting the context, scale, or focus, to offer it back to the viewer in a
different form that provides new interpretations of the subject. A sub-text to this research
is the consideration of conceptualism1 and conceptual writing2. I play with the pervasive

1

I am privileging the term conceptualism over Conceptual Art to be clear that I am interested in
conceptualism as it manifested itself globally and not only in Western Europe and North America
in the 1960s and 1970s (Heiser, Moscow 5).
2
Conceptual writing is a movement within literature that has become prominent in the early
2000’s. It does not share the history of conceptual art; rather the methods employed are analogous
– such as appropriation, redaction, translation, and transcription.

2

influence of conceptualism through homage and reference, taking as inspiration early
conceptual frameworks such as self-reflexivity,3 questioning the nature of art itself,4
works that consider the nature of – and are often critical of – their context, 5 and
constraint-based methods of creation.6
Humour is a main tenet of my practice. I place an emphasis on the ironic and the
deadpan, as well as the more intangible aspects of humour itself – its indescribability, the
mystery of what makes us laugh and exactly why. Early on (in my first year of this
degree) I was playing with a text that read, “The best way to kill an artwork is to explain
it” – this is working off of the adage “The best way to kill a joke is to explain it”. This is
a small but apt example of the way humour and popular culture are used within my
practice. The example above, like much of my work, reworks an existing piece of
recognizable culture (the quote) while placing it in an unexpected context (often
humorous) and using these things together, ultimately plays with self-reflexivity and
considers the nature of art itself (the conceptual framework). The philosopher Henri
Bergson’s text Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic considers the social
nature of humour and the dependant relationship between humour and humanity. This
essay was published in 1911 and while the theories are reflective of a time gone by,
laughter and humour are considered to be traits that are intrinsically social and therefore
human which still remains relevant. “To understand laughter, we must put it back into its
natural environment, which is society” (Bergson 5a). Some of my artworks evoke
impressions of specific people, groups, or other artworks; for example Missed
3

I am considering here a particular conceptual attitude that valued self-reflexivity, especially
precedents set by artists such as Robert Barry, Luis Camnitzer, and Lawrence Weiner.
4
Joseph Kosuth provides a strong precedent for this value. See Kosuth 163-169.
5
Hans Haacke, Adrian Piper, and Michael Asher are apt examples.
6
Evoking artists such as John Baldessari, Vito Acconci, and Hanne Darboven.

3

Connections, an artist book, is made from content posted by Craigslist7 users that related
to the Occupy Wall Street protests. The social is a concern that allows the humour in the
work to function, and highlights the social nature of the circulation and distribution of art
and ideas. Artwork itself, as an idea, is scrutinized. One of my large wall text
installations, My Roommate Recalls a Text Work, considers when the realization of an
artwork is validated: is it in its original existence, its possibility to exist later, or in its
idea alone? I am interested in the nature of art – what it takes for a work to become an
artwork, and what it means to be taught to be an artist.8 The ideas I put forth are in
opposition to the notion of a fixed identity and in allegiance with the valuing of the
fleeting and the ephemeral.
I find myself examining conversations around mirroring, reframing and offering
new considerations where old or cemented meanings seem to have foreclosed
possibilities. I locate my works within the trajectory of allegories; I use this term to
denote a way of expressing a meaning through something (a story, a text, a poem) that
also has a separate literal meaning. Franz Kafka’s writings are a good example of
allegorical writings, and the kind of allegory attributed to the writing depends on who
interprets it (whether it be read as psychoanalytic, religious, or social, etc.)9 Allegory is a
way to express multiple ideas at once, and creates a possible site for textual complexity.
These works inhabit the weight of reference, allegory, and conceptual practices, often
using tools from the recent emergence of conceptual writing. Robert Fitterman, a
7

Craigslist is a website of classified advertising including sections for housing, personals, jobs,
items for sale, and so on. Craigslist exists for numerous cities across at least fifty countries.
8
Acknowledgement of the problems of being an artist have been considered by artists working in
Fluxus Dada, and Institutional Critique among others. While all of these are a part of the critical
context my work exists within, they are not modes I am dealing with directly.
9
In Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag outlines the many types of allegories attributed to the
works of Kafka (6). Sontag highlights the role of translation and the subjectivity of the translator
in the final outcome of the allegory or meanings attributed to the writing in question.

4

contemporary poet, and Vanessa Place, a poet and art critic, co-authored Notes on
Conceptualisms a book considering the position and condition of conceptual writing
practices. Notes on Conceptualisms provides insights into the significance of conceptual
writing, which is a resource for my practice. This text, along with texts by the
contemporary poet Kenneth Goldsmith, will be utilized towards an understanding of
allegory, and mirroring and reframing existing content.
Each work10 functions within a specifically chosen site, some works are more
accessible within a fine-art context, (such as those which question the ontology of art
itself) while other works are inserted into spaces of advertising or are in more direct
dialogue with popular culture. These shifts in site point to shifts in perception, if a work
would be received differently in a different space or form, something is being
communicated about both the site/form and the work itself.
The historical moment of a work is an integral part of its context as well; text
itself is in abundance in a way that is unparalleled.11 Text, as a form of visual art,
communicates differently today than it did fifty years ago. The form itself is not so
transgressive and not as invested in the dematerialization of the art object, rather the form
of text is a way to cloak artworks in vernaculars that are a part of regular life and mass
culture, to open up the reading of the work to resonate beyond the concerns of the nature
of art only. The condition of readership also shifts depending on the format the work
takes. Some works are small artist books while others are large-scale wall texts. The
books are intimate and relate to the rich history of artists books while wall texts are

10

I use the terms work, artwork, piece, and text piece interchangeably. These are all equal ways
of connoting the output of my artistic practice.
11
See Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing, particularly the Introduction and chapter 1, for an analysis
of this textual abundance, especially in relation to the emergence of the Internet.

5

within the vernacular of signage and public information while engaging another history
of conceptual text art. Each presentation demands a different relationship from its
viewers and a distinct kind of engagement.
Together, all of these concerns: humour, conceptualism, repetition, mirroring and
reframing, self-reflexivity, and context, provide a framework through which to
understand each work on its own and my practice as a whole. My thesis project proposes
a way of working rather than one singular work. Indeed the project is the development of
this method of inquiry, this use of text, humour and conceptualism to tap into something
otherwise inaccessible; moments that touch on essences of the human condition.

6

1.

Humour and Text: Everything I Know About History… and Don’t Confuse
Your Conceptualists

Humour is a strategy present throughout my practice. The kind of humour I am
speaking of is wry; for example, though my work is often described as funny it rarely
elicits laughter. Bergson offers the following regarding the nature of humour: “For the
comic spirit has a logic of its own…Can it then fail to throw light for us on the way that
human imagination works, and more particularly social, collective, and popular
imagination? Begotten of real life and akin to art, should it not also have something of its
own to tell us about art and life?” (Bergson 3b-4a). There is a cultural context that, in
tandem with the ideas of each work, generates the idiosyncratic humour underpinning my
practice. Humour is used to communicate in a way that can be inclusive and collective, it
is a way of opening up works to a larger public – humour not only taps into what is
shared by a social group (as Bergson suggests) but also provides a way for viewers to
connect with the work. When you find something funny, there is something you relate to
or understand about the source of the humour, you become part of the group that is inthe-know.
Humour, in my work, is used as a strategy to connect the viewer to the work in a way
that lets them know they understand something, but then pushes them to consider what
they know in a new way. Take my earlier example “the best way to kill an artwork is to
explain it.” Some viewers would recognize the adage this text is riffing on – “the best
way to kill a joke is to explain it.” For those who get the reference, the work becomes
about both ideas and the power of experience verse the weight of explanation. At the
same time, the viewer also considers the act of cultural reference. Viewers who do not

7

realize the text acts referentially still consider what explaining an artwork does to ones
experience of that work.
Everything I know about History… is a text work that exists in the space of
advertising, hiding in plain sight as an artwork. The text in its entirety says: Everything I
know about history, I learned from The Simpsons. This text is put into the context of
advertising space, on city buses and trains in Vancouver, BC. This is an ideal space for
the piece as it is not at-first-sight an obvious artwork and it sits in a space often activated
by ads in support of genuine pop culture.
This text relies on a kind of irony to provoke meaning from the viewer. It is clear
that the text states a fallacy; it is impossible to know only history from one source. At the
same time, the kinds of plays on history provided by The Simpsons as well as many other
pop or cultural sources easily get mixed in with the knowledge we have of the world from
‘more reliable’ sources.12 The real irony is that this work gestures towards how
knowledge is assimilated in general and how this is affected by popular culture. John
Storey, a professor of cultural studies, considers the weight of popular culture in
ideological terms.
This usage [of the term ideology] is intended to draw attention to the way in
which texts (television fiction, pop songs, novels, feature films, etc.) always
present a particular image of the world…Texts are said to take sides, consciously
or unconsciously, in this conflict. The German playwright Bertolt Brecht (1978)
summarizes the point: ‘Good or bad, a play always includes an image of the
world…There is no play and no theatrical performance which does not in some
way affect the dispositions and conceptions of the audience’… Brecht’s point can
be generalized to apply to all texts. (4)

12

I am considering here everything from understanding the AIDS crisis during the 1980s through
the musical Rent, perceiving the struggle between Democrats and Republicans in America
through the lens of Dan Savage’s writings/podcasts, to developing a notion of classic literature
and American history through a television show like Star Trek: The Next Generation.

8

Figure 1: Liz Knox. Everything I Know About History… 2011-2012. Text
installation in transit advertising space. 28” x 11”.
My knowledge of history, especially American history, is largely influenced by fictional
accounts from popular culture. While this work relies on a more subtle and idiosyncratic
use of humour than that which will likely elicit laughter, Bergson’s theories (which
largely consider laughter) still have a relevant purchase on what I am doing. “Now we
can obtain a first glimpse--a distant one, it is true, and still hazy and confused--of the
laughable side of human nature and of the ordinary function of laughter.” (Bergson 8a).
The theory Bergson is developing in Laughter is an examination of humanity and that
which can be considered collective among a public.

9

When I read Bergson’s Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, what I
am left with is the idea that the role of humour is primarily social and human (4a-5b).
Further, his theories are beyond the scope of the theory of humour I am most familiar
with, which is incongruity. This is significant because incongruity theory, 13 while
explaining an immediate reason for the existence of humour, falls short of articulating the
significant human and social elements contained within the presence of humour. This is
Bergson’s significance; he establishes that humour exists as an intangible element that
expresses the human condition: “So there is a logic of the imagination which is not the
logic of reason, one which at times is even opposed to the latter…It is something like the
logic of dreams, though of dreams that have not been left to the whim of individual fancy,
being the dreams dreamt by the whole of society” (Bergson 15a). I work to engage this
‘dream dreamt by the whole of society’ (Bergson 15a) with my work, adding a human
element to the dry, intellectual questions of 1960s conceptualism. At times this is
accomplished through weaving together multiple voices and perspectives (found online
for example). Other times, I employ familiar histories to explore their contemporary
relevance. The works draw from common aspects of daily life and engage with everyday
occurrences. Simultaneously pedestrian and quirky, there is something human reflected in
the ideas and the works themselves.
This task of considering a familiar history in terms of contemporary relevance is
taken up in another way, in Don’t Confuse Your Conceptualists, a vinyl text-based wall
work that I exhibited as a site-specific installation in a public space: the art-school library

13

Incongruity theory states that something will be humorous if it disrupts our expectations. See
John Morreall, especially Chapter 3; and Jean Harvey, especially Chapter 1, for further analysis.

10

at Emily Carr University. The text of the piece is restated in the title, it simply directs:
don’t confuse your conceptualists. The act of learning and teaching art provides a
standard for which art is important (and by extension which art is less so) without that
role being directly acknowledged.14 The text is stated as an imperative, an instruction to
all those visiting the art school library. A viewer is placed into the position of being
instantly confronted with judgments of the work, before fully experiencing the work.

Figure 2: Liz Knox. Don’t Confuse Your Conceptualists, 2011. Vinyl wall text
installation in Emily Carr University library. 96” x 6”.

14

Critiquing the canon has been essential for other traditions that were then absorbed by the
canon; post-structuralism is an apt example.

11

I call regularly on the conceptualists – on the history of dematerialization and the
linguistic turn in art. Curator Daniel Marzona suggests a way of considering the
emergence of conceptual practices when a focus was placed on the institution and art
itself, and “the idea or conceptual structure of the art work began in the late 1960s to
liberate itself from the material realization, which was seen by many artists as
subordinate or even superfluous” (7). I am speaking in conceptualism’s visual language
and am cloaking my work in the nature of its frameworks. Don’t Confuse Your
Conceptualists for example, which calls on the nature of knowledge, also calls on art
history and significance in a way that is self-reflexive – a great ideal for certain
conceptualists, many conceptual works, and particularly Joseph Kosuth who wrote that
art was a tautology and this was part his determination that art’s condition is a conceptual
state (166). I see humour in the idea of, for example, confusing a neon piece by Kosuth
with a neon piece by Bruce Nauman,15 or confusing a photo of John Baldesarri with
Lawrence Weiner – both being fairly shaggy-haired bearded white men it is an
understandable confusion. Bergson offers an explanation for why this sort of instance is
humorous, “to imitate any one is to bring out the element of automatism he has allowed
to creep into his person. And as this is the very essence of the ludicrous, it is no wonder
that imitation gives rise to laughter” (Bergson 12b). Stretching this idea, Don’t Confuse
Your Conceptualists could then be seen as bringing out an element of conceptualism,
through imitation, that now has a kind of automatism within it. These simple errors draw
light on the larger error of art history which, in defining genres, connects a number of
artists in a way that can homogenize distinct practices. Don’t Confuse Your

15

Nauman’s neon’s were often playing with puns, where Kosuth’s were more reflexive of the
material employed and the physical, quantitative measure of the text itself.

12

Conceptualists fits easily into the framework of wall text pieces, like those of Lawrence
Weiner. In calling itself out, the work considering itself within its conceptual lineage, is
both imitating the past and also noting the possible automatism within post-conceptual
works.
This calls to mind writings about contemporary practices that reinterpret and
reproduce existing works. Nicolas Bourriaud, in his essay Postproduction, considers such
repetitions in terms of the “proliferating chaos of global culture in the information age”
(13). Curator Daniel Birnbaum’s essay Late Arrivals also examines the returns and
repetitions of art of the past in current practices. “Repetition, appropriation, revival…Can
today's repetitions be interpreted as critical appropriations of previous aesthetical models
in the name of a genuine avant-garde tradition, or has today's art finally succumbed to the
ongoing recycling of fashions and style?” (Birnbaum 86). My intentions are certainly not
the latter but better distilled in Birnbaum’s subsequent point, which considers art
historian Hal Foster who has written extensively on the return of avant-garde aesthetics
or structures in contemporary practice:
When the abstract surfaces of high modernism today reappear in lifestyle
magazines as well as in the art world, one clearly wants an answer to Hal Foster's
query: "How to tell the difference between a return of an archaic form of art that
bolsters conservative tendencies in the present and a return to a lost model of art
made in order to displace customary ways of working?" (Birnbaum 86)
My work is not reconsidering high modernism or the avant-garde but those artists
who were working in the wake of those movements. The “lost model of art made” and
“displacement” (Foster qtd. in Birnbaum 86) present in my practice is a way of
reconsidering the critique of the institution and art production that was being tackled by
the conceptualists. Considering Kosuth’s determination that all art, to be meaningful,
must consider its own nature (163) then Don’t Confuse Your Conceptualists is

13

considering what kind of currency post-conceptual practices have, in a time when making
work that at least looks conceptual is the easiest way to make a piece look like art, rather
than affecting transgression to push art’s boundaries as conceptual practices did in the
past. Because of the long and accepted tradition of conceptualism, post-conceptual
artworks today, in looking like the artwork that was transgressive in the 1970s, now just
look like ‘art’. Conceptual Art dominates the history books and what is written about art
from the 1960s and 1970s. Practices in the decades following are often discussed in terms
of their relationships to Conceptual Art and conceptualism.16 Dominating the discourse
has put conceptualism in a strange territory, it is now something of an authority, and this
authority complicates the anti-establishment point of view of early conceptualism.

16

One apt example would be the way Alexander Alberro writes about artists from Jenny Holzer
to Richard Prince to Allan Sekula. Alberro notes ways that the diverse practices of these artists
can be seen to follow directly from conceptualism and also challenge this predecessor (xxviii).

14

2.

Reframing Existing Text: Synopses and Missed Connections
Allegorical writing (particularly in the form of appropriated conceptual writing)
does not aim to critique the culture industry from afar, but to mirror it directly. To
do so, it uses the materials of the culture industry directly. This is akin to how
readymade artworks critique culture and obliterate the boundaries between art and
life. The critique is in the reframing. The critique of the critique is in the echoing.
(Fitterman and Place, 20)

Central to two of my recent bookworks, Synopses and Missed Connections, are these
strategies of mirroring and reframing that Fitterman and Place contextualize. Mirroring
and reframing, as they propose, offer ways of engaging with culture at a critical level, reinterrogating its purpose, meaning, and possibilities. Let’s consider this again in light of
Foster’s considerations of repetitions and returns in contemporary art and theory: “In any
case, the becoming-institutional of the avant-garde does not doom all art thereafter to so
much affectation and/or entertainment. It prompts in a second neo-avant-garde a critique
of this process of acculturation and/or accommodation” (Foster 24). Mirroring, or
returning to ideas from the past, can open up an idea or cultural object that has a fixed
identity and, when reframed in a new context or light, provide a new or contrary
significance in tandem with the original’s identity. Returns from the past, as Foster
suggests, can provide a perspective that is possible only now, from the vantage point of
the present.17
I am not suggesting that my work is or should be considered an update of
Conceptual Art. For the purposes of this paper, when I use the term, I am demarcating a
specific moment in art history. I do, however, describe my practice as being conceptual in
17

Using Foster with Fitterman and Place is an unusual pairing. Foster’s view is that the task of
obliterating the art/life divide is done under a false pretense; the very laying out of the binary
maintains the autonomy of art. Fitterman and Place take on a slightly more romantic stance,
writing about the possibility of the art/life divide to be obliterated by certain works (like
readymades). While my work isn’t asserting the desire to meld art and life completely (or taking
that on as a utopian goal) daily life, art, and the tension between the two are my materials and
subject matter.

15

nature. By this I mean that it is the idea behind my work that dictates other concerns
(materiality, process, poetics). My work contains an affinity for, and an awareness of, the
conceptual work that came before it, and often references that history. In this way I see
myself within the trajectory of post-conceptual practices.
Synopses is an artist’s book of one-page texts. These are constructed from text
found on IMDb.com’s18 user-generated content advisory. Each page is representative of
one film. The films in the book range from those produced in the 1920s to the 1970s. The
subject matter of Synopses is at times intense, including violence, abuse, and sex. This
content is mediated by the tone of each page and the tone of the book as a whole. In
IMDb’s advisory, there is a note advising users to simply state the facts of the films
without adding an opinion about the content. This directive is at the top of the advisory
for every film and reads in full:
Since the beliefs that parents want to instill in their children can vary greatly, we
ask that, instead of adding your personal opinions about what is right or wrong in
a film, you use this feature to help parents make informed viewing decisions by
describing the facts of relevant scenes in the title for each one of the different
categories: Sex and Nudity, Violence and Gore, Profanity,
Alcohol/Drugs/Smoking, and Frightening/Intense Scenes.” (IMDb)
The text that is added then reads in a fairly deadpan manner; horrific events are
described in a similar manner to sillier or racier events. This results in each line of text
seeming to bear the same level of seriousness and weight that breaks expectations and
leaves humorous moments throughout the text. There is a kind of social coding behind
our mores, which this work reveals. For instance, anything that is not hetero-normative
will garner more attention - indeed it merits a mention in the advisory. Take as an
18

IMDb is the Internet Movie Database, one of the major online resources for finding information
about a film such as who directed or acted in a film, running time, awards, synopsis, trivia,
content advisory, and so on.

16

A man is taking a shower.
A woman takes his clothes and gets rid of them in order to
make him stay.
A leopard escapes.
A woman tries to find it.
Later she is seen with a leopard that is aggressive.
The leopard is not the right one.
The leopard does not harm anyone.

Figure 3: Liz Knox. Synopses. 2013. Book page. 5.5” x 8.5”.

17

example a few lines from one page of Synopses: Some mildly sensual dancing
from women in skin colored leotards. / A man punches another man
to the ground. / A few uses of the word gay used to mean happy.

The deadpan nature of the texts, combined with the familiar situations and narratives,
draws a compelling picture of the characters and moments described.
The reason I rely on Bergson’s theories of humour so heavily in this writing is
that he develops ideas of humour as truly social and indicative of both those who find
something humourous, and the social situation from which this humour arises: “… how
often has the remark been made that many comic effects are incapable of translation from
one language to another, because they refer to the customs and ideas of a particular social
group!” (Bergson 5a) He continues: “Laughter must answer to certain requirements of
life in common. It must have a SOCIAL signification” (5b). This awareness of the social
requirement for humour to have its full impact is crucial. It is not only the humour that
relies on the social signification, but the meaning of the work itself would not be apparent
otherwise. It is not only a picture of the characters being drawn, but also a snapshot of
North American popular films and by extension, the culture that is represented in, and
supports, these films. The content of the advisories points to the proclivities inherent in
this culture of production and consumption. Synopses looks at the culture of popular film
through the lens of the proclivities of that culture. These strings of text are distillations of
filmic narratives. The work taps into filmic memory, examining films as they have been
processed through the filters of time, memory, and interpretation.
Synopses is a work born of an allegorical impulse, making suggestions about the
human condition without making direct statements. In a significant portion of Notes on
Conceptualisms, Fitterman and Place focus on allegorical writing. They develop ideas of

18

allegory as related to and contrasted with symbolism and think about allegory in relation
to narrative. “Allegorical writing is a writing of its time, saying slant what cannot be said
directly, usually because of overtly repressive political regimes or the sacred nature of the
message. In this sense, the allegory is dependent on its reader for completion (though it
usually has a transparent or literal surface)” (Fitterman and Place 13).
Rather than claiming something specific in Synopses, the collection of
descriptions points to what is common in popular film and how this content is interpreted.
All are addressed in these suggestions – characters, film-goers, content advisors, and
members of the culture in which all of these others exist. Humour is again relevant; it is
another way to say what cannot be said directly, though I would suggest for entirely
different reasons than those proposed by Fitterman and Place. What humour allows is for
that to be said that cannot fully be articulated; humour is a way of gesturing through the
human condition of a specific place and time. Rather than saying what can’t be said for
pragmatic reasons (like repressive political regimes), humour allows for the expression of
ideas with a certain kind of intangible quality. In this way, humour is like a dream,
impossible to fully explain in a way that will convey your full understanding and
experience. But when experienced, dreams and humour are vivid, unique, and
understandable within their own logic.
The cultural conditions of Synopses are those of a self-conscious present and past.
Rather than a specific meaning enfolded within the work, what the allegory intends to
deliver is a glimpse of a contemporary social condition. Fiona Banner’s book project The
Nam (1997) influenced this work. The book is a compilation of the artist’s personal
descriptions of well-known films about Vietnam (Full Metal Jacket, The Deer Hunter,
Apocalypse Now!, Born on the Fourth of July, Hamburger Hill and Platoon). Banner’s

19

subjectivity is forefronted and adds to the strength of the work. The reader is at once
reading about a film, about a time in America of political urgency that had grave
consequences, and about one woman’s subjective experience of these circumstances.
What Banner accomplishes is to use these films as a way to reveal the resonance of the
Vietnam War in the American psyche of the generation of those who were young adults
during the 1960s.

Figure 4, Fiona Banner. The Nam. 1997. Bookwork (detail). 11.5” x 8”.
Courtesy the artist.
I am interested in Banner’s ability to use pop culture to point to other things, like
interpretation, memory and cultural evolution. I work to emulate this in many of my
works. In Synopses, my subjectivity is more stealth and contained in the reductive editing
system employed (I removed text at will in creating each Synopses text, I did not add text
except to change a personal pronoun to a generic pronoun such as “a man”). The changes

20

I make to the texts are subtle and relatively invisible. The reader sees the whole of the
text as it is presented. My subjectivity is contained in the whole of the text rather than on
single pages or in any given line of text – it is in the collection of the texts together and
the overall tone, which I see as humorous. My subjectivity is also present in the overall
formal decisions, the font of the text, which is that of a film script, and the format of the
book itself which is generally a carrier of information and provides a personal experience.
My subjective position is most evident in the underlying tone of the individual pages and
the book in its entirety.
Synopses challenges a kind of cultural capital; I see the work as emptying the
accepted value of popular films–easy entertainment, consumable narrative–and offers
instead a condensed view of common narratives. As Fitterman and Place explain, “[i]n
allegory, the author-artist uses the full array of possibilities—found and created—to
collage a world that parallels the new production (collectively) of objects as commodity.
Words are objects” (13-14).
“Words are objects” (my emphasis) (13-14). Words are commodities. This is
something increasingly present in this Twitter, Facebook, Newsfeed RSS, “Like it”,
“Share it”, “Rate it”, moment of Internet culture. Conceptual writing is a movement
within contemporary literature that has been recognized and considered seriously since
the early 2000’s. The movement is distinct from conceptual art, in discourse as much as
in history; my interest is in the methods employed (such as appropriation, redaction,
translation, and transcription) and using these within a post-conceptual art practice in
order to expand my understanding of text and its possibilities. The contemporary poet
Kenneth Goldsmith has written extensively on conceptual writing. In his introduction to
Against Expression, Goldsmith considers the abundance of conceptual writing practices

21

with regard to broadband Internet and the materiality of language in relation to the mass
digitization of language in general. Goldsmith considers the emergence of broadband
Internet’s impact on writing as analogous with the impact the invention of photography
had on painting (Against xvii-xxi). He expands on these ideas further in his text
Uncreative Writing: “In the face of unprecedented amount of digital text, writing needs to
redefine itself in order to adapt to the new environment of textual abundance”
(Uncreative 24). Goldsmith continues “there’s been a huge increase in text-based forms,
from typing e-mails to writing blog posts, text messaging, social networking status
updates, and Twitter blasts: were deeper in words than we’ve ever been” (Uncreative 26).
My project Synopses delves into this abundance and offers strings of text as small mirrors
of the culture of popular film, the proclivities of the culture that consume those films, and
the culture of user-generated content. This textual abundance is a source and fuel for my
work. The increasing mass of content on the Internet and this being an ever-more
ubiquitous source for everything from day-to-day tasks to entertainment to social time
makes it a prime material for works considering the social and humorous sides of the
human condition.
Missed Connections, another bookwork, takes user-generated text found online as
its source material. This text is selected from the mass of content on Craigslist to frame a
political movement in an ironic way19. Each page documents a ‘missed connection’
posted on Craigslist from October 7 to November 22, 2011 that related to the global
Occupy Wall Street movement. Missed connections are part of the personal section of
Craigslist, for people to post about a missed opportunity or connection with a stranger

19

This work also reflects an affinity for artist Ron Terada’s series of paintings of the text from
newspaper personal ads.

22

they were interested in, ie. “you were wearing a yellow scarf, we locked eyes on the bus,
I thought we shared a moment…” The collected postings were compiled to form the
content of the book. The postings are laid out one per page, chronologically and include
postings from over a dozen North American cities.
These ephemeral postings, collected in book form, create an intimate opportunity for the
viewer, highlighting the sincerity, vulnerability and absurdity in many of the postings.
Presenting a political time period in a way that focuses on something different, tertiary,
and incredibly personal provides a completely new perspective from which to consider
the “Occupy Wall Street” protests. The way the “Occupy” movement figures in the work
changes from page to page, at times being a signifier or proof of shared values and at
other times being a simple marker of place or subject of conversation. The political
potency of the time is bent and adjusted by each poster to suit their specific needs and
purposes. This collection of found postings displays moments that are touching, banal,
humorous, and revealing. Rather than emptying out the political weight of the time
depicted, something else happens to this political agency: a human element emerges.
Desires become evident, this is a quotation from one posting: “You have changed me so
much. I look at music differently; I look at people differently; nothing is the same
anymore.” These kinds of values, like looking at life anew, are hopes acknowledged to be
possible through the relation of one person to another. This is powerful along side the
weight of a political movement in which people bonded together in an effort to be heard
and acknowledged.
The humorous and tragic gesture made by Missed Connections, much like the
politics employed, is subtle and particular. Many of the postings are funny. An example
from another posting is the line “Rawr, you sexy punx you.” The line itself is silly, yet

23

Figures 5 and 6, Liz Knox. Missed Connections, 2012. Book pages. 7.5” x 7.5” each.

24

the humour exists because there is a quality that transcends silliness and reveals a kind of
human condition that is both endearing and embarrassing. The embarrassment functions
as the humour does, it is due to its relatability – to the willingness of those who posted
messages to be forthright about their desires, the all-too-humanness of the texts – that the
reader can be moved to empathize with or laugh at. The overall humour of the work isn’t
found in any one instance of the text alone but in the format itself, in the idea of framing
the “Occupy Wall Street” movement through the Craigslist personal ads section. The
tension between these personal ads and protests provides a way to consider the cultural
climate of 2011 with a tongue-in-cheek nod to the old adage: the personal is political. At
the same time, it is not a joke at the expense of the hopes of the past. Missed Connections
intends to explore the way that we connect to one another now. Cultural theorist Sianne
Ngai describes ‘this moment’ as “the performance-driven, information-saturated and
networked, hypercommodified world of late capitalism” (948). In this bookwork I am
interested in the differences in the way politics is enacted on us – a consideration of the
kind of engagement possible for an average individual today is at the root of this.
Presenting a protest through the lens of online hook-up ads wouldn’t be nearly as
funny in the 1960s; it is in the context of today that this gesture has the kind of weight
that it does. The way political engagement is enacted now seems different than it was in
the past. Kristin Ross, a professor of comparative literature at New York University,
notes the following when considering the difference in the general strikes in France of
1968 and 1995: “In [Cohn-Bendit’s] comparison of the two events, all of the
sociobiological trappings of the ’68 movement as a ‘generation’–its speed, youthfulness,
and forward-thinking audacity–were mobilized to create in the ’95 movement their

25

opposite: the aging pensioner’s anachronistic attempt to cling to the past” (211). Political
enactment changes as society evolves. The way we engage with one another has changed,
the state of protest has changed along with it. Looking back at the culture of the 1960s,
protest is central in the pop songs from that time that garnered mass appeal and likewise
in popular films. Missed Connections demonstrates that social engagement is changing
and so is political engagement. This point of view is expressed through a deadpan irony.
Allegory is employed by both of these bookworks. Art historian Craig Owens
sees allegory as an outmoded device: “It also denies allegory what is most proper to it: its
capacity to rescue from historical oblivion that which threatens to disappear. Allegory
first emerged in response to a similar sense of estrangement from tradition; throughout its
history it has functioned in the gap between a present and a past…” (68). In the instance
of Missed Connections, this past is a very recent past, but fleeting nonetheless. The
allegorical suggestion is that of individuals and polemic political times. In Synopses, the
allegory functions in a more traditional manner, using texts that are in themselves
interpretations of the original to reform the original and offer a new thought. The
slippages in language I point to in my work and earlier in this text are fundamental to the
current possibilities of allegorical works. I believe that we can read the present through
the prefiguration of works and texts of the recent past. This shift in how we relate,
communicate, and protest will develop and become pronounced in the years to come.

26

3.

Self Reflexivity: My Roommate Recalls a Text Work

My practice is self-reflexive; the material and physical situation of my works are
significant for the meaning of each piece. My interest in making self-reflexive work is
connected to my interest in conceptual art (which traditionally is occupied with such
concerns), and a sincere interest and curiosity with what I am doing, with the nature of
the social – art, pop, culture – and how we relate to each other and these things. I am an
artist and not a sociologist. Jenny Holzer is an example of an artist who works in the
manner I am describing, exploring the social and the relationship between art and its
conceptual past. Holzer’s practice has a strong focus “on the complex link between text
and image, and between language and subjectivity” (Alberro xviii). Holzer pays close
attention to “the construction of the subject” (Alberro xviii) from a clear engagement
with discourses relevant to contemporary art and art history. Through the careful
consideration of her text pieces and their placement in time and space, Holzer is able to
affect aspects of the intangible side of the human condition. At the same time, from the
vantage point of coming after early conceptualism, I believe she constructs artworks that
are conscious of the significance of the works that came before and also of the social
situation of the present. Her Truisms (1977-1979) are a good example, using a text
statement format and, rather than destabilizing meaning, Holzer opens up the social
aspect of meaning, using found texts and presenting them as truths pasted in the streets
like other advertising or political posters.
For Holzer, form is important; as art historian and curator Elizabeth Smith notes:
“Through her staunch commitment to the central role of language in art and her unique,
inimitable approach to presenting it in various visual manifestations and contexts, Jenny

27

Holzer intertwines form and content to produce a potent tension between the realms of
feeling and knowledge” (27). My affinity for Holzer’s practice exists because she is
concerned not only with the ontology of art but also the social realm it engages.

Image not available due to copyright restrictions
Google “Jenny Holzer” & Truisms

Figure 7, Jenny Holzer. Truisms. 1977-1979. Offset Lithograph. 34¾” x 23”.
(Image removed due to copyright restrictions.)

28

Her work is deeply political in the way it raises questions and catalyzes thinking
about the role of individuals in society and the relationship between the public and
private realms. Power and vulnerability, violence and tenderness, moral struggle
and depravity—all manners of contradictory motivations—are chronicled in her
work as interwoven impulses. (Smith 27)
Robert Bailey, writing about Holzer for October magazine observes that “Holzer uses the
language of others, and this adds a further layer of mediation, as historical events are
presented in the voices of a wide variety of speakers and writers (28). This is significant
as it makes her work about more than the propositions they contain; the works are about
the culture that created the ‘truisms’ (for instance) as much as they are about the texts
themselves.
My interest is in posing questions and making connections, offering potential
meanings and relationships that are also cognizant of their status as art, and of their social
reality. My work is not overtly political, unlike Holzer, and is more ironic or deadpan.
Where Holzer may consider the role of the individual in society and the relationship
between public and private (Smith 27), my work is concerned with the interaction
between society or mass culture and the individual. My Roommate Recalls a Text Work…
is a work that exemplifies these goals and desires. The full text reads:
My roommate recalls a text work she learned about in art school.
An artist painted on the wall: I want to be a hippie but I don’t know how to love.
It is impossible to find any information about this work online.
So I’m not sure if it ever really existed.
Or if it exists now.
Similar to Missed Connections and Synopses, this work uses text that is fairly specific in
terms of its content and source to signal to other concerns outside of its visible/readable
contents. Fitterman and Place consider this signaling in other terms: “Note that pretextual associations assume post-textual understandings. Note that narrative may mean a

29

Figure 8, Liz Knox. My Roommate Recalls a Text Work… 2012. Vinyl wall text
installation. 185” x 40”.
story told by the allegorical writing itself” (15). The information being relayed in My
Roommate Recalls a Text Work… is straightforward and meaningful in its most basic
reading, but this text also gestures towards other associations and meanings. My ideal
placement for this work would be to install it in the four independent art schools in
Canada: Emily Carr University, NSCAD University, OCAD University and ACAD. The
work in each school would have a different resonance because of the different histories of
each place. For example, this text against the backdrop of NSCAD would be read in
terms of the legacy of the school and the conceptual artists who visited during

30

conceptualism’s heyday. Within Emily Carr University and Vancouver, the text might
highlight west coast conceptualism and notions of ‘hippie-ness’ and so on.
This text work points to multiple forms of communication and exerts a tension on
the relationship of this moment and the 1970s. The time of hippie culture and a longing
for the past is displayed in the text. At the same time, the work asks questions of an
ontological nature: What is required to be a hippie? What is required to be an artwork? At
what moment does the work of art exist: the moment of conception, recollection, or
visibility to the outside world? It is written in short stanzas, using the quickness and
thought process common in emails, while being displayed in a form that evokes both the
dissemination of pertinent information in public, and text works by early conceptual
artists (Lawrence Weiner can be seen as a reference20).
In his introduction to Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, Alexander Alberro
offers the following while laying down a way to understand the framework of historic
conceptual practices: “In particular, four trajectories can be singled out as strong
precursors of Conceptual Art. The first includes the self-reflexivity of modernist painting
and sculpture that systematically problematizes and dismantles the integral elements of
the traditional structure of the artwork” (xvi). My Roommate Recalls a Text Work… is
situated outside of the realms of public information and gallery-bound work because of
the nature of what it is problematizing. Rather than focusing on the traditional structure
of the artwork itself, this work considers the structures around artwork, specifically the
creation of work, how we learn to identify what an artwork is and when it exists and how
we learn to be artists. By staying on the edge of an aesthetic reminiscent of public
20

One example is Weiner’s large wall text TAKEN FROM HERE TO WHERE IT CAME FROM
AND TAKEN TO A PLACE AND USED IN SUCH A MANNER THAT IT CAN ONLY REMAIN
AS A REPRESENTATION OF WHAT IT WAS WHERE IT CAME FROM (1980).

31

information or standard gallery wall-text, the work can achieve a sort of neutrality and be
read outside of existing constructs. Its first reading can be in the simple construct of text.
Contingent and contextual elements figure largely in how the work functions and
is read. While conceptualism in the 1960s was more interested in deconstruction, my
work highlights the slippages of language. There is a failure to completely, accurately
communicate through language because of these slippages; communication breaks down
and understanding and meaning are broadened. Referencing postwar art’s expansion of
historical allusions and minimization of actual content, Foster writes: “Indeed, such art
invokes different, even incommensurate models, but less to act them out in a hysterical
pastiche (as in much art of the 1980s) than to work them through to a reflexive practice –
to turn the very limitations of these models into a critical consciousness of history, artistic
and otherwise” (3). That is what this work intends to accomplish, and what makes
engaging in a practice that has a relationship to conceptualism interesting to me even
today.
My Roommate Recalls a Text Work… was installed on a wall in Emily Carr
University; this location is significant to the reading of the work. It is against the large
white walls of an art school that this work’s meanings are provoked. My intention is to
embed skepticism of the institution, and authority in general, in the text that makes up
this work. The piece favours information from a Google search over what is taught within
the art school. The work is intended to function in a self-reflexive manner, the reference
to art school calls to light not only the way that we read artworks, but also the way we are
taught to read artworks. The physical situation of the work calls to a sympathetic
audience, the initial or primary viewers of the work are students within the four schools,
undergoing training learning how to create something that is allowed to be called 'art'. For

32

a public found in a shopping centre, for example, there would be less concern or
awareness of the role and function of artworks and the historical precedents at play. For
the audience within an art school, there is already a kind of discourse present within
which this work can resonate. This is what makes engaging with the history of
Conceptual Art today so alluring; the large discourse to work against and play with, the
possibility of critiquing the commodity-driven contemporary art world, and the breaking
down of assumptions and expectations.

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4.

Context: Excerpt

For each work I have been developing during the last two years, context and site
have been significant factors for every project. There are many legacies that this interest
links to. Institutional Critique21 and Minimalism22 are two movements that easily come to
mind when considering such concerns. While these legacies are a part of the critical
context within which my work exists, I am not referencing them directly in these works
but instead I am interested in location. My Roommate Recalls a Text Work… for instance,
relies on the walls of the art institution to fully resonate, as Everything I Know About
History… has an impact in its situation, as advertising. Issues of scale are relevant, the
condition of readership or ‘thinkership’23 changes whether a viewer is presented with a
book or a large-scale wall text. There is a tension between site and content in my works.
The larger wall works exist in public space and these locations have a bearing on their
reading as well as the subject of the works. ‘Don’t confuse your conceptualists’, as text
on a page, functions differently than it does on the wall of a library surrounded by art
history texts. The role of the social is implicated in the locations of the work. A work that
exists as a book is intimate and displayed in the same form that commonly provides
information. A wall text is speaking in the vernacular of public information and is social
in its reception, a private or intimate viewing of this work is not guaranteed. While my
21

I am considering a way of working that started in the late 1960s and interrogated the role of the
institution on art practices. Institutional Critique, as a genre, generally considers the physical,
political, or social implications of the art system, actively examining the art market, the gallery or
museum and the social relations that underpin these mechanisms.
22
Minimalism is also a genre I locate from the late 1960s and early 1970s. The movement is
recognizable for its works (most commonly sculptures) made with the minimum or only essential
elements, focusing on form and the relationship of the object to the body and space.
23
Fitterman and Place use this term along with readership to connote the kind of engagement
being asked of the reader with the emergence of conceptual writing practices and the sort of
works this form employs.

34

books exist within the history of artist books, my wall texts speak to the traditions of wall
works and the linguistic turn in art.
Excerpt is a bookwork through which I will examine conditions of context and the
impact this has on the engagement of the viewer. One way a text work that exists as a
wall text is distinct from text work formed into a book is that wall works exist in a social
space. Engagement with that space is not primarily individual, the work is viewed within
an atmosphere that is social and there is the strong possibility of other viewers engaging
with the work at the same time. My books demand a different kind of engagement
because the experience is intimate and implies a personal understanding between the
book and the person reading it.
The idea of ‘the reference’ is an undercurrent in many of these works that is
contextually relevant. I am considering the use of references in the works of other artists
– what they reference and how – and also the use of references from popular culture, to
consider the act of referencing within the context of creating artworks. The references
used define the kind of audience for whom each work will be most impactful. Further,
through the way I use reference, the idea of reference within contemporary art is
interrogated. Take Synopses as an example, many of the films used in the book are films
which also have a life as a reference in the works of other artists: Dog Day Afternoon and
Pierre Huyghe, Cool Hand Luke and Ron Terada, Apocalypse Now and Fiona Banner.
Synopses references films, but also references other artists’ references. This is a part of
my interest in self-reflexivity, considering the way that work is made and the cultural
capital that is employed by other artists. This is true in a very different way for a work
like My Roommate Recalls a Text Work… where the interest in other artists’ work is

35

explicit, and the tension of the cultural references (the 1970s, art school and
conceptualism) is just beneath the surface.
Artist Ron Terada works with cultural reference and context plays an essential
role in the final impact of his works. There is a sense of humour that is explicit within his
practice as a whole, the nuances of which are developed in each distinct piece. There are
strong relationships I see between our works, such as his Untitled (1994) series of
paintings of personal ads. For this series, Terada selected a number of ads and painted
each in the visual language of monochrome painting. Artist and writer Lucy Hogg
explains the significance of context in his work: “The monochrome implies the generic
yet actualizes itself here as specific, providing the context for the advertisement of an
individual’s desires which are most often constrained to generic expression.” The context
of monochrome painting develops an impression from which the viewer can begin to
unpack the subtleties of the work. Terada uses references of both cultural and visual art
history to reveal “in a relatively neutral fashion the systems of exchange at work in the
production of an exhibition and that which then represents it…for perpetuity–thus
provoking, as opposed to critiquing, discourses within the realm of institutional critique”
(Low 44). Terada is constantly using expectations and forms found in everyday life to
reveal the inner workings of the art system and social exchange.
Excerpt is a bookwork I completed in 2011, during my first semester as a
graduate student studying visual art. The text functions as an excerpt of art theory,
documenting eleven well-known art theory texts – the texts I was reading at the time in
an effort to ensure I had the proper theoretical grounding of the dominant discourses and
vocabulary relevant to contemporary art. Each text was subjected to a reductive system of
interpretation; they were inserted chronologically into Microsoft Word software, and all

36

Figure 9, Ron Terada. Untitled (My Mother). 1994. Acrylic on Canvas. 30” x 30”.
Courtesy the artist.
of the words were erased except for those flagged by Microsoft Word as spelling errors.
Through certain language use, those engaged with contemporary art or theory will
recognize a theorist or thinker. There is also the possibility of confusion as the nature of
language is to grow and transform, so for instance, though Michael Fried may have
coined the term ‘objecthood’, many others since have used the term. The effect of this is
that it is possible to distinguish sets of concerns and terms that were significant at certain
times, those that remain consistent throughout the entire book and those that fade and
swell in waves. The strings of text on each page also make it possible to consider an
abstract kind of narrative of art history.

37

Excerpt contains an allegorical reading of contemporary art theory. Returning to
Owens: “In allegorical structure, then, one text is read through another, however
fragmentary, intermittent, or chaotic their relationship may be; the paradigm for the
allegorical work is thus the palimpsest” (Owens 69). This is true of Excerpt, both
figuratively and (comically) in a sort of literal way. It is this literal ‘reading of other texts
through this text’ through which the figurative nature of the allegory exists. I consider my
work in relation to conceptualists in this way; this is part of my palimpsest. This
bookwork offers a literal re-reading of art theory, only in a way that inherently forces a
new understanding of the content.

Figure 10, Liz Knox. Excerpt, 2011. Bookwork (detail). 4.25” x 6.87”.

38

An attempt to read Excerpt in the way most other books are read would be futile.
What remains on the pages of the book is a distillation of an excerpt of art history
vocabulary, an ironic system for re-reading the familiar, through optics of reference and
constructed language. The kind of constructed language I am referring to is, in most
cases, an easily recognized word that has been added to (with a prefix or suffix) to bend
it’s meaning to suit the ideas of the theorist. Words like ‘visuality’, ‘normativity’, and
‘avant-gardist’ are three apt examples. There are instances of constructed language
(neologisms) throughout the book, showing that language has never been in and of itself
adequate, and will always need to be stretched at times to fully articulate a complex
thought. As significant as some of the theorists are (Roland Barthes for example) the
language they constructed hasn’t been added to the Microsoft Word default library,
though the theories have been added to the canon of contemporary thought. My word
processor knows to capitalize the word ‘Internet’ but not the validity of the word
‘punctum’.24
The humour in Excerpt is in part communicated through the chronological
arrangement of the texts. This organization allows the reader a glimpse of the ideas,
artists, and theories and their popularity and mutations over time. It is ironic for such
cryptic information to be laid out in an organized manner similar to more linear
documents, just as the gesture itself is ironic, to take meaningful theoretical texts and
offer them back to the reader in a manner that requires an unfamiliar or unique way of
decoding the available signs. Through the limited use of language (all the words in the
book are ‘art language,’ personal names, and neologisms), certain trends or biases

24

This term is developed in Barthes seminal text Camera Lucida (1980). It is a concept that is
used in many of Barthes texts and many theory texts on film, photography and art.

39

become noticeable as they swell and fade in time. One moment where this is pronounced
is in the texts around the early 2000s, where names such as Bourriaud, Gillick, and
Tiravanija are constant hiccups across a number of pages, these moments offer the reader
the awareness that this is happening in even more subtle moments all through the text.
The reader can also consider the pattern of names that come up, Michael Fried for
example doesn’t appear in the book as his name is Anglo Saxon whereas less common
names (Ansel) or names that are more common in a language other than English
(Pasolini, Lacan) are dispersed throughout the book. Excerpt highlights a wide array of
names that may be ‘foreign’ though the person represented is most commonly an
accepted member of the art or theory canon.
The book excerpts moments in art theory from the late 1960s to the late 2000s.
Context is especially noticeable in the instance of this work as the public that Excerpt
will have the most resonance with is a public who is concerned with contemporary art.
Comparing this work to Everything I Know About History… highlights the contextual
difference called for from the content of each work. A text piece that would be most
meaningful to members of a contemporary art community or those familiar with art
theory would be less effective in a public advertising space - there it would seem at best
like an inside joke and at worst like alienation. Everything I Know About History…,
simply by referencing something as widespread as The Simpsons, has a much broader
audience than Excerpt, which is embedded with references that are meaningful and
relevant to a smaller niche group of people. What I find compelling about the content of
the book, is that the text places a focus on words specifically chosen to express how
standard language is ill-equipped to communicate and what has formed the basis of the
diction we use to discuss art today.

40

Books comprised of lists by artists such as Claude Closky and Gerald Feguson25
provide a historical precedent for Excerpt. Indeed it is because books by these artists exist
that Excerpt can take up the space it does; responding in kind within an existing dialogue
embedded in contemporary art; the bookwork can function as self-referential within the
art world system by which we consider works, discourses, and ideas. Where Closky is
condensing meaning into a quantity and form requiring a new system for comprehension,
my book is suggesting meaning from pre-existing information.
The bookworks I make offer a different experience of readership than my largescale text installations. The book, as a form, is intimate and individual. It calls for a kind
of immediate, focused, personal engagement with the text. The wall-based works are in a
constant negotiation between the visual language of public space and advertisements, and
the history of text works made for art spaces (Lawrence Weiner again being the most
obvious example). These contextual differences set the tone for the viewer upon initial
engagement with the work. My Roommate Recalls a Text Work… as a large installation in
a public space elicits attention from those around it. This attention and understanding of
the work would shift once the viewer is aware that the text is installed verbatim in three
other art schools.26 Likewise Excerpt, as a book, considers the origin of its content as well
as becoming preserved information that can be referenced.

25

Ferguson’s The Standard Corpus of Present Day English Language Usage Arranged by Word
Length and Alphabetized Within Word Length (1978) is exemplary of a list book. Closky has
produced numerous artist books using the list format; books such as The First Thousand Numbers
Classified in Alphabetical Order (1992), Three Thousand Four Hundred and Fifteen Friday the
13ths (1992) and The 365 Days of 1991 Classified by Size (1991).
26
Installation in the four independent Canadian art colleges/universities is the ideal and intention
for the work, but at this point this is not the actual case.

41

While I do not believe that “context is the new content,”27 (Goldsmith, Uncreative
3) I maintain that context elicits cultural significance and weight to an idea. Context is a
framing device, rather than content in itself, it is a part of the work that still
communicates and acts to highlight nuances within the idea itself. Excerpt is a book that
will mean more to an audience with an art or theory background, while Everything I
Know About History… is suited to a more pop-savvy audience. The awareness of these
nuances allows me to select the context which will ignite meaning in each work. Don’t
Confuse Your Conceptualists, installed on the walls of an art school library, was able to
have an impact because of the knowledge physically and metaphysically surrounding it.
Missed Connections is printed in an open edition unlike my other bookworks which are in
limited editions; it made sense to me to have an unlimited edition for a book made with
content from a protest movement for social and economic equality. Excerpt, on the other
hand, is in an edition of 100 as this work is more specialized and in its printing
acknowledges its smaller audience. These contextual elements are part of each work and
are a large part of the meanings evoked by the work.

27

This was Goldsmith’s description of some young writers who use appropriation without
citation (not a belief he necessarily holds).

42

Conclusion

This thesis presents my framing of a body of works that share overlapping
concerns rather than one work that is considered as the thesis project. My thesis project is
the development of a way of using artistic practice to continually work and explore,
through the use of humour and the ghosts of conceptualism, certain intangible aspects of
the human condition that can be observed and expressed. I hope ‘the project’ then is
tangible in this array of works, set within multitudinous contexts and taking different
forms, all united by the use of text and reference, a concern for the importance of
everyday experiences (often reflected through the words of others), and an interest in the
state of being an artist.
I am privileging a way of working, of eliciting humour and a kind of gesturing as
a way of approaching and considering the world around us. Creating artwork is my way
to make sense of the world. As a strategy, humour offers a way to do this; to both make
meaning out of the world around me and expand on the meaning that exists. I am
suggesting that my practice is more about a methodology than it is about a single idea.
This method places a value on the found. I try to garner meaning out of the abundance of
text, images, and ideas that surround me each day. Rather than offering conclusions, I’m
offering possibilities and platforms for meaning. Allegory is significant to this; it allows
for works to be what they are and still gesture at what could be. Meaning is presented as
hyper-abundant, contingent, fragmentary, and relative. What is left but to construct
meaning of your own? My work highlights irony and uses this as a tool to begin to
construct paths for alternate meanings.
The form each work takes is specific and is connected to particular histories and

43

traditions. Some of these are related to contemporary art history, while others are situated
within web or film culture. The references used in some cases intend to open the work up
to a broad audience while in other cases speak in a specific manner to a more niche
viewership. My practice allows the past to constantly overlap into the present by framing
the past in humour that is possible from the vantage point of now. This humour uses the
past as a stage on which to perform for the future. As Marx famously quipped, “What
history plays the first time around as tragedy, it reappears as farce” (qtd. in Burgin 430).
Humour has a special property. Akin to art, this property makes possible the
expression of the intangible that cannot be fully expressed by language alone. Through
art and humour we can experience and understand aspects of the human condition that
might otherwise be out of reach. It seems to me impossible to accurately describe the
human condition – except through jest.

44

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