"People Don’t Like To Read Art" at Western Exhibitions

Western Exhibitions’ summer show seems designed to torture the average person who, according to various surveys, spends less than 30 seconds looking at an artwork.

Sure, it’s easy to digest Kirsten Stoltmann’s funny but shallow fashion-magazine collages—TO FART OR NOT TO FART? the artist paints next to one perplexed-looking model. But it would take days to process Andy Moore’s modern-day illuminated manuscript John’s Luv (2003–10), and I lost track of time contemplating Simon Evans’s Monument for Sun-Related Events (2008). Evans covers this pyramidal sculpture with strips of yellow legal paper, covering them with handwritten memories of a gloomy English childhood, his later experiences in San Francisco and Berlin, references to Egypt and other poetic non sequiturs.

Evans’s stream-of-consciousness assemblage is one of several works that engross viewers as narratives. Deb Sokolow’s and Joe Hardesty’s text-based works also prove that a thousand words or fewer can paint a vivid picture. There are also lists: David Leggett’s tally of “things I don’t understand” asks readers to forge connections among disparate phrases such as “skinny jeans” and “Richard Tuttle.” Adriane Herman’s grocery lists, applied to the wall as vivid decals, are almost entirely crossed out. While text is these artists’ primary medium, it merely enhances John Parot’s amusing Total Eclipse (Parot’s Zodiac) (pictured), which updates star signs for contemporary gay urbanites.

Except for Rachel Foster, whose This print… is embossed in Braille, and Meg Hitchcock, surprisingly few artists use text to address language. In one of two mesmerizing collages, Hitchcock cuts and pastes letters from an English translation of the Koran into a snakelike form, composed of repetitions of the word BLISS. Like most of the works in this exhibition, the ambiguous piece allows for multiple readings.—Lauren Weinberg