Langue Froide… Cold Language/Tongue
curated by Bill Wright & Conny Dietzschold
Conny Dietzschold Gallery
Sydney, Australia
November 14 – December 12, 2009

“The impulse to undertake this project was partly the result of a vacillating but long term interest in artists’ uses of language in the visual arts: usually in reductio as slogan, expletive, proclamation, as warning, coercion, as ironic re-iteration, so on and so on… Word, our species’ visually associative equivalent of phonic utterance has been there in art practice for several millennia, but essentially, for us, its precursive modern usages began in the early twentieth century, mainly in the differing socio-cultural circumstances in France and Russia. It is a powerful presence because, as so often, divorced from its more commonly fluid conversational and other spheres of human-to-human discursive function; separated, graphically alone; elementally ‘cold’ while equivocally hot…

When the collaboration with Conny was first suggested, I had been thinking about a couple of quite good but insufficiently inclusive recent word-based art exhibitions I'd seen, meanwhile, inevitably, ruminating on earlier collaborations I had undertaken with artists working in video, sound and text. Most importantly, being aware of the activity of extremely good contemporary artists in Australia variously incorporating the poetics of language to realise work of exceptional concentration and vivacity, it seemed apposite to put some of them together, albeit in this inevitably space-concentrated kind of format. One that I enjoy.

A few others are invited on the basis of their less widely known material aptitudes; intellectuals each of whom is alive to and active in art in curatorial and/or critical capacities and I feel lend themselves to this kind of exhibition. Some have successfully participated in my previous curatorial excursions. The final list of artists for represents what I believe will be a most vibrant and hopefully challenging slice - no pun intended - of an intriguing aspect of contemporary art
practice.” WILLIAM WRIGHT