AJSabatini.com

                                   Footnotes to Footlights (1975)   (37) “13” x “19”

                        Argon, mercury in clear glass.  Literally footnotes from a page in Joseph Kosuth’s

                        influential essay,   “Art After Philosophy” in Art International, 1969

This is actually pretty simple: art after philosophy amounts to a footnote. Duh. But, then again, what or who was Kosuth quoting so repetitiously? And what did Kosuth actually mean by “after”?  Footnotes are in books and other publications, footlights are significant in relation to the theatrical stage and ordinary indoor architectural design. A footlight/footnote on the bottom of a gallery wall references what exactly?

It matters, somewhat, that Kosuth created elaborate works in neon, so Annson’s remark is yet another instance where he both inserts himself into then current discussions of art and artmaking, particularly as it pertains to language and pop and conceptual artists.  Other works allude to artists such as Bruce Naumann Cramped for Style and Three Model Vector, which draws on ideas of Carl Andre. 

The footnotes to footlights Annson selected are from the philosopher A.J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic, which Kosuth draws on to formulate his own conclusion that “Art indeed exists for its own sake” and “Art is the definition of art.”  Which suggests, for Annson, that, analogically, ‘footnotes exist for their own sake’ and ‘footnotes are the definition of footnotes.’

I’m joking. You don’t need footnotes, even when transformed in works of art, to tell you that they are footnotes reconceived as neon footlights. Language. And Annson’s title indicated what the work plainly is. Truth. As for Logic, isn’t it a form of language art? 

Not content with the regulation of penmanship and spelling, English teachers and grammarians in the field of education decided that a useful method to teach writing and understand language would be to visually depict sentences in odd stick figure diagrams with straight lines angled against each other, presumably to identify figures of speech in sentences (ignoring the fact that speakers rarely put words out of order in a typical utterance, except when quoting Shakespeare or if one is very drunk). More precisely, the system of parsing and diagramming the workings of language developed in the late 18th century following sources of Greek and Latin, where at least one system for diagramming made sense. Catholic school English teachers applied a rigor to sentence diagramming with the same attitude they held toward precisely making the sign of the cross. Annson took the idea to extremes in luminous tubing by suggesting dozens of short and long sentences for treatment. No doubt nuns and other teachers appreciated his appropriation of diagramming, though probably not those in his series PARSE and Free, White and Twenty-One which diagrammed phrases such as: In the Pink and Get Bent…Joseph Kosuth also created neon sentence diagramming with different intentions.

Annson Kenney (1944-1981) was a Philadelphia writer and artist who crossed boundaries and left a luminous mark in his wake.  Annson produced music-theater spectacles, constructed art-language objects, played and composed music. Coming of age through the late 1960s, he challenged everyone around him with body art, conceptual art, performances, art criticism and talk as fast and funny as the night was long. Raised in the Frankfort sections of Philly, he took his Catholic School education lightly and he was  drawn to art and ideas on the intersections of vernacular subjects spiked with theoretical energetics. Stylistically, he pulsed with a high/low gambit that led him to write, in purposely posturing prose, essays on haircuts, roller derby, Marcel Duchamp and the semiotics of musical notation. He found signs worth penning about in female wrestling and drag racing. he bought a fast car, that he never drove but died in a car crash anyway one New Year’s Eve eve before the unsettling 1980s settled in on us. Language and wordplay, writing and sign systems, the sacred and profane of everything and relations between the body, sight and sound were among his most consistent themes. He worked with neon for a decade, or, as he preferred to call it, luminous tubing. He created over 100 works – some for commercial businesses – and had sketched out plans for dozens more.  In the most basic sense, Annson had the conception of transforming walls (in galleries, museums, homes) into planes for writing that glowed and torqued  seeing into reading, ideas into hotter ideas. This was all before the Internet and webpages, which are too tame for his kinetic intelligence and combative aesthetics.  But he would have figured out something and there is no telling where he would have gone as an artist. For those of us who knew him, the memories have never faded. Annson and I had luminous times and talked a lot. As I put together some pages on him, I hope to convey some of what he did.    

On the Line (Sentence Diagram)  “37”x18"  On the Blink" (Sentence Diagram)  “37”x"18”
                   Argon, mercury vapor. coated tubes. From the series, PARSE and Structuring 

                                the Syntagm.   Reed-Kellogg  diagrams often used to teach writing.

  Bruce Naumann, Cramped for Style (1976) 46" x 28"
Argon, Mercury Vapor in Blue Bromo Glass, with mirror

  Catalogue cover for exhibition and selected page: Annson Kenney: Writings, Luminous Tubing and Other Work.   

                               At Moore College of Art,  Philadelphia, 1983.  By Arthur J. Sabatini

               Pidgin Tongued (1980)

14”x42” 14”x 56”Argon in Clear Glass

         (Design in handwriting)

The texts, artworks, videos, music, and in his aesthetic self-fashioning in life and live performances as Annson Kenney - and a few akas such as Blackie Carbon and Hender Hayman – comprise an oeuvre that intimates that a biography will be needed to account for the narratives of his incomplete and too damned brief life.  His works and the archival bits and pieces that remain are rife with clues, anecdotes and gestures that pose unanswered/unanswerable questions and latent mysteries, nearly all of which were, in one sense, hidden in plain sight if his critics – and friends – would have paid closer attention. Perhaps, eventually what he was up to would have been as lucid as the clear glass he used for his luminous tubing, though not any less ludic or brilliant.

It is as if what he was doing was as evident as ‘the handwriting on a wall,’ a sentiment which he rendered with characteristic irony in a neon work with the title Pidgin Tongued.  The common saying about what you see is obvious when it is written is derived from a brief scene in “The Book of Daniel” in the Old Testament of The Bible. It refers to an act of interpretation by Daniel for the Babylonian King Belshazzar, who was unable – or incapable – of figuring out the meaning of the words mene mene tekel upharsin which were written on a plaster wall by ‘the fingers of a man’s hand’ and became either a hallucination by the drunken King or an otherworldly message directed at him. In Annson, keen to the sounds of the phrase, remade it as many many tinkle a parson, which is slightly funny to say but no less complicated to unravel once you know the backstory. 

The Biblical episode itself seems as if it had been ready made for Annson’s critical and performative fascination with the hand and gestures, the acts of artmaking and writing and, of course, language play, codes and identity. Over the years, he created analogous works, including: a sound/body art performance for radio titled One Hand Clapping (1973); and another for voice and performer, I’ll Huff and I’ll Puff and I’ll Blow Your Impedance Match Down (1975), in which he wrote on a blackboard and amplified the screeching sound of the chalk. Other neons, including Gregg Shorthand (1975), Seventeen Strokes 1975), 12 Strokes (1975), Double Cross (1975), are also based on hand movements in different contexts. In an unrealized design for one, he conveyed his the ideas on how hand, eye and mind were not always in sync with simple slash mark:  gesture/get sure.

Briefly, as written in chapter five of “The Book of Daniel,” the King held a great feast with his wives, concubines and lords. While drinking from vessels he had inherited, he began praising the gods of gold, silver, stone, bronze, iron, wood and stone. At that moment, “the fingers of a man’s hand appeared and wrote on the plaster of the wall of the king’s palace, opposite the lampstand; and the King saw the hand as it wrote.” Frightened and knowing that Daniel, a Jew who was the son of King Nebuchadnezzar and considered a wise man, had interpreted dreams for his father, he was summoned to read and interpret the words.   

Daniel was also known as Beltshazzar and his two names suggest an ambiguous identity hinted at in Annson’s rather plain neon sign. First, Daniel had been named Beltshazzar by Nebuchadnezzar after valiantly capturing the city of Jerusalem with other fighters.

As a reward, they were turned over to the chief of the eunuchs to work for the king and his concubines. Given various passages about eunuchs in the Bible, there is a dispute over whether or not one has to be eunuch to even be in the presence of the king and his women, so….In any case, a linguistic factor to consider is that Nebuchadnezzar is an extended form of Nabu, the name of the Babylonian god of scribes, wisdom and literacy. In the book named after him, Daniel learns “letters and wisdom.” Useful skills for a dream reader and concubine minder, one guesses.

In Daniel’s interpretation of King Belshazzar’s vision, he sees signs that the King’s reign was soon to end by the hand of God. The writing on the wall, mene mene tekel upharsin, which the King considered to be nonsense, were words actually known to Daniel. They were for weights and counting and when put together, formed an arithmetic metaphor.  That is, mene is a ‘mina’ or means ‘to number,’ tekel, is a ‘shekel’ or ‘to weigh,’ and parsin is ‘two half-minas’ or ‘to divide.’ As Daniel explains, the dream meant that the King, his own Father and the previous rulers had diminished and divided their wealth, and thus their legitimacy and power. Worse, they had not honored the Lord of Heaven, the true God of the Jews, and instead worshiped idols. In sum, they had been “weighed in the balances and found wanting” by God. Thus, it will come to pass that the Babylonian kingdom will be destroyed.

Annson did not care much for the prophecy and more exegesis is necessary to understand the parable as written in the Bible. It is, however, of importance to note that the phase ‘the handwriting on a wall’ is a gloss on mene mene tekel upharsin, much like contemporary urban graffiti, about which Annson wrote, is generally identified as merely signifying anonymous markings and not for its particular imagery, design and authorship.


There is yet another pertinent detail to consider in Annson’s luminous tubing. For his act of interpretation, Belshazzar gave Daniel the gifts of purple clothes, a gold chain and he was made a third ruler of the kingdom. (Sometime later he was thrown into the lion’s den, though there are no descriptions of what he was wearing.) Annson, reading closely, designed his neon in a glowing, eye catching pale purple with thin, loosely handwritten cursive script. This homonymous parody of the words (parson derives from person) also adds a naughty inference about tinkling, which has usages that imply light sounds, urinating and, in a British colloquialism, to make a phone call (perhaps to a Protestant cleric!). Altering mene mene to many many at once creates the inference that many people may call up or tinkle on a clergyman, though for what is unstated.

All of which is to say that the work, so obvious on its surface as to be unremarkable, needs to be interpreted intertextually in the context of Annson’s other neon pieces, performance works, texts and videos where the hand, handwriting, writing, reading, movements and gestures complexly interrelate with overt and coded social, religious, even sexual allusions.

It all contributes to elements of Annson’s critical and aesthetic theme of the personal, physical, mechanical, cultural and historical practices where interpretations and, broadly, writerly/readerly crimes and punishments simultaneously bring to light and obscure human ways of making meaning and understanding ourselves and others. For Annson, all forms and practices of communicating were constraining, distorting or misleading, especially for the individual, whether or not they were artists. In that sense, we are never certain, nor should we be, of the meaning of any sign or the circumstances of its production.

Of course, Annson’s particular sense of fun, aggressiveness and aesthetic subversion was shared by many other artists of the ‘60s and ‘70s; and he is not the first artist to simultaneously display and obscure what he was up to in various works over time and across genres and media. Although distinctly American, the materiality, mediations, performative and theoretical underpinnings of his work are patently drawn from 20th century avant-garde/experimental traditions, initiated by a precursor he had high regard for and often quoted without using his name, Marcel Duchamp.            

                                 L'ecole: An Exhibition at UARTS ART ALLIANCE  Philadelphia, Pa       August 25 - October 14, 2023

  https://www.uarts.edu/centers/artalliance & https://www.uarts.edu/gallery/lecole-dan-levenson-skz-monochrome-classrooms

                                                                          

                                                              
Annson was not impressed with the quality and aesthetic use of neon in a series of works by artist Bruce Naumann. Taking things into his own hands, he fashioned a stylized epigrammatic taunt that, in its title and content, expressed his critique. In the piece, he appropriated a school kid’s writing puzzle. The barely legible elongated letters of the artwork spell out what might be the effort involved in physically writing them; and when seen in a mirror that is set behind the luminous tubing, the phrase is readable. Of course, being Annson, the childs’ play relates both to his other works and overall themes bearing on language, writing, reading, speech and performance. aixelsyD is a piece from the same series which is simply Dyslexia, written in cursive and spelled backwards and placed opposite a mirror. It is a quick joke but another example of how written forms of language can be subverted as easily through intentional misspelling, reversing or transposing letters or the very form and spacing of alphabetic characters. As an artwork, the placement in an exhibition room and use of a mirror reminds the readers/viewers that they are engaged in an embodied writerly/readerly social performance.  In another piece, Annson, used alphabetic letters made from bent and reshaped paper clips. Set on black posterboard, the letters spelled out the statement: “Subversion of the Code is Achieved by Formal Disfiguration of the Code.” He accomplished that by messing with the shape of letters in Bruce Naumann, Cramped for Style. But, more frequently, alphabetic characters in “codes” are subject to substitutions and rearrangements or complicated by use of additional or irrelevant letters. This is the basis of everything from simple forms, as in a=x, b=y, etc. to elaborate military/spy codes. The ‘formal disfiguration’ of letters in Bruce Naumann, Cramped for Style implies that the literal words in Naumann’s sculptures not only lack ‘style’ linguistically but as words used in an artwork, are not treated in a visually significant stylistic fashion, whereas, by contrast, Annson…In another taunting, art/language and critical work, Annson named the artist, but reversed and permutated the lettering while alluding to a quite famous book, S/Z by the French theorist Roland Barthes. Titled Ess/Zed, it reproduces versions of Picasso’s signature, which Annson respells as Pizzass Kissass and Pissazz Kizzass, etc. (Barthes’ study, incidentally, is analysis of a short story in which the central character is a eunuch)..

Seventeen Strokes (1975) 12" x 62"

Argon in Flourescent Blue Glass


Seemingly in a scripted code, Seventeen Strokes is a work that has innocent origins and discloses Annson’s research into the physical mechanics of writing and the representation of language. Like other pieces, such as Trace (1973), Gregg Shorthand (1974, 1975) and Bruce Naumann Cramped for Style it’s focus is on the movement of the hand and putting the reader in the position of simultaneously reading and “decoding” the image. A source for the piece is a 1975 Harper’s Magazine article left in Annson’s files which describes a process for standardizing handwriting in 19th century England. In an attempt to standardize the production of written texts, educator James Henry Lewis determined that writing by hand could be made more efficient by learning these elementary “strokes.”

By reproducing and altering them, Annson’s piece calls attention to the particularities of English orthography and the means by which writing, language and individual expressivity is made to conform to a system. Of course, it is not clear that seventeen strokes are all that is required to actually write.  Annson, ever attentive to the overtones of words and gestures, puts free associations in play with the word ‘stroke,’ also linking the title to a seven page work titled Stroke Book, which alludes to what pornographic magazines and novels of the day were often called. In the caption below, he underscores “the artist’s visual preference,” highlighting the significance of the visual, idiosyncratic personalized character of  handwriting over the value of a proscribed “manufactured” order, moreover calling into question the notion that a type of “code” may underlie the selection of the “strokes.”


A Stroke Book (1977):  A related work is a folded and stapled 8 ½” X 11” graph paper which forms a booklet. On each page, a type of line (drawn, ruled, etc.) is represented.