Linguistic Utopias, #1
Artist's Statement

Much of my artwork, so far, has been concerned with areas of religion: not only the nature of how and why things happen in the first place, but also how people perceive these processes and relate to their own beliefs.  I have also recently become very interested in language-- its structure, its uses.  These interests have begun to merge, I have lately become interested in such things as sacred languages, and religious practices that feature language.  Many spiritual activities in all religions center around language.  Prayer, readings of sacred texts, incantations, petitions.  Nearly all religions describe the creation of language, or in the case of the Judeo-Christian system, the creation of many languages from one.

Many religious belief systems are also notable for their absence of language.  There have been small numbers of believers and worshipers in many religious traditions that have taken the approach to nearness to God through the embrace of silence.  While researching what I thought was going to be an interesting linguistic anomaly of cultures that forsake language for silence, I actually became somewhat disappointed.   In these societies, there is rarely total silence, and there is always language.  These societies usually just postpone language, or at least forgo silence when it becomes truly necessary to communicate.  The Cistercian and Benedictine religious orders, for example, famous for their “vows of silence”, actually just have rules of silence--specific times and places where speaking is forbidden, but other times when it is permitted.  There is also the Eastern tradition of maunam- a more thorough, self-imposed acceptance of silence.  However, what is notable is that even when observing silence, these societies are still using language: a considerable amount of time in all of these traditions is the reading and contemplation of sacred texts- written, obviously, in some existent language.  They are still thinking in language, and have not truly forsaken it.

While researching all of this information, I did finally find what I was searching for (by adding the word “utopia” to my search engine inquiries.  I have also become interested in the idea of idealized communities adopting language for their own purposes.)  A small, extremely devout community so successful in their abandonment of language that historians and linguists have only been able to refer to them as the [     ].  (This is not to be confused with (  ), a music CD by the Icelandic band Sigur Ros.)  Linguistic extremists, they saw only total silence as the sole way to both show proper respect to God and to fully receive his message, which they viewed as beyond mere words. 

Almost all of this information comes from their earliest texts--texts being an odd and fascinating term for what they left behind.  Even after making the decision to totally eschew language, the [     ] had an obvious need to communicate, both their religious ideas and practical day-to-day matters.  They initially used a sign language for face-to-face communication, and simple pictograms for their written records.  However, there was a feeling among them that even this was too literal, and over time, simple shapes and colors began to replace the pictures, and their “spoken” language became more and more intuitive, relying more on body language, eye contact, and a shared understanding of their common goals and procedures.

It is here that the linguistic evolution of their records becomes difficult to follow, and their history much more difficult to translate.  They were able to perfect their wordless language with increasing effectiveness.  The colored shapes of their symbolic texts became too restrictive on the written page, and they began to “write” in three dimensions, moving their texts off of the page and into space.  A sculpted script evolved: blocks of colored shapes allowed more information to be carried in three dimensions than in the two dimensions on paper.  Very long blocks of painted wood were assembled into sentences- the varying colors of the sections of block, and the varying lengths of these colors carried meaning to the [     ] that are largely lost on us today.  

Eventually, even the colors disappeared.  The final perfection of their entirely wordless, symbol-less anti-language--or perhaps non-language--was attained after the shapes of the previous colored blocks of text became so familiar to the [     ] that the ratios of length, width, and depth of the words and stories became so recognizable that the colors were eventually left off of new blocks.  This left a final, beautiful collection of white shapes as the collected literature of the
[     ].  These shapes were easily readable to most [     ], to those brought up in the tradition of wordless communication and three-dimensional language.  These blocks, it is believed, carried complete concepts within them- similar to Chinese ideograms, which each embody a specific idea, but carried further--more like a string of ideas forged into each unique shape.  The problem, of course, and the cause of the eventual decline of the [     ] language and culture in general, was that it was difficult to relate these meanings down through the generations.  The [     ] took great pride in their ability to train their children in silence, and they were actually quite successful in teaching them to communicate through the very subtle means of facial expression and posture.  And the [     ] were renowned for their very subtle gestures, which often could not even be detected by those in their neighboring communities. 

The problem was in communicating how the final, white cubes of the written language could possibly contain anything interesting, let alone anything sacred.  Generational frustrations abounded, increased by the stern customs of the culture in general: lots of work and silent contemplation; not much fun.  This was exacerbated by the fact that the youth of neighboring communities did talk, and saw it as a challenge to get the [     ] kids to speak.  Around the age of puberty, the temptations often proved too great.  The [     ] culture, perfect in the purity of their silence and isolation, died out after only a few generations.

The pieces in this show represent some of the more visually interesting relics of this truly unique society.  They are painstakingly reconstructed from historical records, as most had fallen into serious decay.  Only one from the later “white” period has been successfully translated--the perfect cube in leather cover, a paean to perfection: God.  It is tribute, statement, hymn and prayer.

I have also reconstructed several of the translation machines built by early historians and linguists to try to analyze the shapes and ratios of these [     ] literary works, which were rarely successful but are nonetheless visually interesting.  I hope you enjoy the show.

(Sources available through the artist.)