Words to Watch, 1999
Busch-Reisinger Museum,
Harvard University Art Museums,
Cambridge, Mass. 1999
Announcement
We are used to radically original and non-representational paintings appearing in our museums. Why shouldn’t newly invented, abstract words with no established meaning be equally challenging, beautiful, persuasive?
Since 1994, the German artist Adib Fricke, based in Berlin and functioning as The Word Company, has generated a series of such proprietory neologisms, which he terms “protonyms.”
A selection of these unprecedented words will be presented at the Busch-Reisinger Museum, under a licensing agreement and in a typeface determined by their inventor.
Will these words be poetically and provocatively utopian? An irritating critique of a society obsessed with trademarks, ownership of intellectual property, innovation? A subversive use of presumably a-national words to comment on the Busch-Reisinger Museum’s language-based mission (focussing on “the art of German-speaking Europe”)?
–Peter Nisbet,
Daimler-Benz Curator of the Busch-Reisinger Museum
Project Page Words to Watch
PDF Catalogue