Amanda Wilkinson: A lot of art today is about language, I want to curate an exhibition about language, but where it is not obvious what is being said.
Jonathan Lahey Dronsfield: So not the representation of words or text...
AW: Well, you could have text-based works or pieces in which words are visible, where something is being said, but what’s being said is about language.
JLD: So they might be works where nothing is being said, silent works, but works of unspoken words, words there but not said out loud.
AW: Words can be made visible without showing them.
JLD: And words might be visible, but that fact by itself does not guarantee what the words say, or even that they are readable... So it would be about the difference between language and word, that one is not reducible to the other.
AW: It would be an exhibition about language, the idea of it. And I want to commission you to write a text for it, but that text would function as some sort of invitation to say or show something about language.
JLD: An invitation? What if I were to claim something about this relation which artists might be moved to respond to... a provocation.
AW: They wouldn’t need to make it explicit, but they’d have to think their work addressed what you write, even if they disagreed with you.
JLD: Yes, better that there not be consensus amongst them. So nothing like a manifesto – more like a work in itself. But if I were to do that then the text would have to be an image...
