Hasta La Ideas

Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language, which opened at MoMA this Sunday, is a survey of text-based art over the last sixty years. The exhibition is divided into two parts, beginning with the Modernists in te 50s and concluding with twelve contemporary artists, including Tauba Auerbach, Kay Rosen and Paul Elliman. The new crop of artists that use type in sculpture, photography, video and installation are a fine testament to the enduring legacy of typography, but the earlier group of Dadaists and Futurists address letterforms in what strikes me as a purer way—in their raw form. Both groups are playful, but the Modernist work still seems more experimental, even today.

Exhibited chronologically, as they are, it’s difficult not to compare the two. I appreciated Tauba Auerbach’s tongue-in-cheek “All the Punctuation” (2005)—a piece of paper with every punctuation mark typed one on top of the other until they become a muddled splotch—as well as her piece “How to Spell the Alphabet” (2005), which spells out the letters of the alphabet phonetically and gets you to consider the sounds of single letters in a whole new way (above). But I’m an unabashed sucker for letterforms printed on plain paper, and the Modernists, with their strikingly bold, nonsensical typographic compositions, may do it better than anyone, with exceptional examples by Raoul Hausmann, Christopher Knowles, Liliane Lijn, El Lissitzky, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Henri Chopin.

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