A Blog is Semi-born

Ride the Judd: Act III: “Under the Tongue” 27 February-2 March 2014 “I never said nothin’”—Liz Phair, “Never Said”, Exile in Guyville, 1991 Language breeds metaphors. Language itself, released into the wild of human exchange, becomes a metaphor. The “language” of art, art as “language”, sign and interpreter, structure and morphology, it would be very difficult to reconcile the competing guises art and aesthetic theory have fashioned for language with the spare, if infinitely expressive, recursive function smuggled into the brain which makes linguistic communication possible. The easy anthropomorphic assumption that language exists for communication belies a much deeper and more complex set of relations. Language maybe one means of communication, but, as anyone who’s read a press release knows, it is also the means by which communication is avoided, obscured, and obliterated. Art which interrogates language must also deal with these features of the most familiar and yet the most elusive aspect of the interface between thought and the world of objects. Art and language may not be identical but they are deeply entangled. The language of criticism, the demand to see one thing as another thing, the tyranny of structured representation, the creation and bleaching-out of subjective experience, all of these dynamics feed and delineate the realisation of the two forms. The discourses generated by that inexhaustible engine of reinterpretation, image proliferation, re/decontextualisation, and infinite comment threads known as the Internet only adds further cacaphonics to the general din. In Act III of Ride the Judd, these interchanges become subject matter for a group of artists who examine the properties of language which illuminate and obnubliate the conceptual and physical terrain of contemporary existence. Language is more than object and more than metaphor, it is more than structure and more than medium, it is a window into consciousness but, with the passing of George Formby, who can be counted upon to scrub that window clean? Here comes Ride the Judd, for when the window of language is cleansed, humanity may see the world as it truly is: beyond copyright protection. “Under the Tongue” includes work by Georgie Grace, Maryniak & McLean, Jammie Nicholas, Ross Taylor and Claire Zakiewicz. “Under the Tongue” opens with a night of performances on 27 March 6-9PM and concludes with a day of musical performances 12-6PM on Saturday 1st March and 7pm-10pm Sunday 2nd March.