Today I took my Comm students outside and we discussed semiotics around Jenny Holzer's "Green Table" at UC San Diego's Muir College. I've loved Holzer since Ana Cecilia had that Dallas Cowboys hat "words tend to be inadequate" when we lived in NY. One has to ask how Holzer got away with that commission. The work is exasperatingly emphatic the artist calls them 'truisms', the point is they're not(?) We can talk about how meaning is a system in which we inevitably fail to fix things, but attempt to, which is what we did about the color red meaning stop in Barthes' "traffic light" scenario. there was bird poop on it, but I didn't realize it was on my blazer. I was so happy to be teaching unpractical things.