Michael Winkler
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Michael Winkler (Lima, Ohio, 1952 – ) is a poet/artist who successfully combines mathematics, linguistics, poetry, and visual art in an easily accessible and user-friendly manner.
His most often used format is a circle of 26 points, each point representing a letter of the alphabet, running in abc sequence. Winkler creates designs inside these circles by forming lines which spell the words by connecting the letters. Each word, then, makes a distinctive graph. Much of his early work consisted of sentences made of such glyphs. More recently, he has created installations in which the circles, letters, and lines are made of different materials. Some use either lighted components or make use of lighting in the exhibition space.
Although Winkler has exhibited his work in major museums such as the Kassel Art Museum in Germany ("Poetic Positions", 2004) and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago ("Lessons in Learning", 2007); he is best known for his inclusion in the book, Imagining Language published by M.I.T Press in 1998--Ed: Rasula & McCaffery.
Although many contemporary visual artists have explored the use of langauage (Lawrence Weiner, Robert Barry, Richard Prince, Jenny Holzer, etc.), Michael Winkler's philosophical approach is in stark contrast to the widespread acceptance of printed words as images. In "Signalglyph"--Winkler's 2005 Sci-Fi Net Art project co-presented by Turbulence.org and the North American Center for Interdisciplinary Poetics (housed at SUNY/Buffalo), and subsequently published in RAMPIKE Magazine, Vol. 14, #2, 2006--the artist writes:
"the letter-sequences which form our written words are not visual images--they are a form of abstract symbolization which has no visual meaning. Written words are not images because the visual characteristics of their form are irrelevant; if that were not true, the same word would have an entirely different meaning depending on whether it was hand printed, written in script, typed in uppercase or lowercase, written in Braille, or spelled verbally. The form of the letters is irrelevant to the transmission of a word's meaning because the visual characteristics of a letter do not define its identity--a letter's identity is defined by its role in the patterning of lexical sequences. Although written language is not visually expressive, its patterning is capable of triggering meaningful imagery; consequently, in some sense, it would have to be in sync with our mechanism of comprehending imagery."
By focusing on the idea that written words are inextricably linked to the sequencing of letters, not the images of letter-forms; Winkler challenges the foundation of the hermeneutic approach to cultural theory which permeates much of the discourse relating to contemporary art involving language--as Winkler says, "you cannot describe boats as fish simply because they are both conveyed via the medium of water" (cultural associations of a sign which rest on a false perception of the mechanism of the sign's apprehension are not likely to provide true insights). Yet, the artist insists his philosophy does not discourage the use of written words in works of visual art, it only demands that such works be treated as interdisciplinary conceptions involving literary content. But there is no question that Winkler is challenging the theoretical conceptions of the world of visual art which is clearly treating printed words as images (an exhibition entitled "Word as Image" was mounted by the Milwaukee Art Museum in 1990).
[edit] Selected Exhibitions
- Regular Words
March 5 - 27, 1981, Marymoor Art Center, Seattle, WA
- Word Art/Art Words
September 1-30, 1984, Kunstraum, Kunoldstrasse 34, Kassel, Germany
- Word Works
March, 1986, University of Maryland, Baltimore
- Michael Winkler
November 2 - 23, 1988, Kansas City Art Institute, Photo/Video Gallery
- Michael Winkler - Word-Images:1982-2004
September 20 - December 10, 2004, Van-Pelt Dietrich Library Center, University of Pennsylvania
- Dance Read Art Words...DRAW - Patterning within language as the basis of an audience-interactive installation/performance with The Portland Ballet
February 24, 2006, Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine.
- Alignments
May 15 - 26, 2006, Galleria AT (Academy of Fine Arts) Poznan, Poland
