The power of words – slogans, graffiti, signs, newspaper stories – and the interpretive space opened up between their transmission and reception are explored in works such as Homage to the Walls of Athens 1941-19…, 1958, by Vlassis Caniaris (1928 - 2011), a palimpsest of sacking, wax and cloth saturated with whitewash plaster in which we see fragmentary hand-painted letters – including the letter E, for Eleftheria (freedom), for Ellás (Greece), for EAM, the National Liberation Front, the main movement of the Greek Resistance during the Axis occupation during World War II. Ian Hamilton Finlay’s La Rèvolution est un Bloc, 1992 – a wooden block carved with the words of the title and a central aperture reminiscent of a guillotine’s lunette – refers in content and form both to advances in secular democracy and social progress, and the bloodshed and unrest brought about by the French Revolution. Doug Aitken’s Free, 2016– a sculptural text work lined with shattered mirror – takes a single word and, through the actions of light and reflectivity, turns a ‘quick read’ into an endlessly shifting experience. Rirkrit Tiravanija's sculpture untitled 2013 (no no america), features a slogan used in chants and on banners by groups of Shia and Sunni military and civilians in Iraq over the past two decades.
Richard Prince Untitled (Protest), 2013 Ink jet on paper 61 x 55.9 cm 24 x 22 in
Courtesy of Richard Prince Studio © Richard Princece
Alice Neel Nazis Murder Jews, 1936 Oil on canvas 107.3 x 76.5 cm 42 1/4 x 30 1/4 in Courtesy the Artist’s Estate
and Victoria Miro, London © The Estate of Alice Neel