“This is a great problem we have with art because there is this whole theory that art is a linguistic activity. The reason Conceptual artists deal with linguistic abstractions is because we live in a society which is ruled by linguistic terrorism. We are ruled through language, through bureaucracy, by private business, or government, through lawyers. We don’t understand what they do because they don’t even speak the same language that we do. We are surrounded by these aspects of linguistic terrorism and are trained to react to the world as if it were a message we can ever understand. Like the beautiful Kafka story (“In the Penal Colony”) where a man’s abstraction, a machine, punishes man by writing the name of his crime on his back. That is the relation of language to ourselves. We are ruled os much, abstracted so much by language that naturally we got to a work of art expecting to read it.”
“Linguistic Terrorism” (1976)
by carl andre
from Cuts : Texts 1959 - 2004
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