The "Logical Status" of Words in Painting

Abstract

Following the lead of his mentor Duchamp, Arakawa carries on the deconstructive play of non-art (readymades) and the non-visual (enigmatic texts) on his canvasses and posters, operating in the humorous vein of affirmative irony that Duchamp had mined in the dada generation. Going beyond the reiteration of the disruptive effect of words in painting, his book, The Mechanism of Meaning, combines pictorial and textual elements in a complex investigation of meaning where the apparent simplicity of the literal is undone by the spectator’s interactions with the contradictions of words and images. An examination of some of its pages attempts to show how Arakawa’s work glosses Duchamp’s concept of the regardeur, the indeterminable reader/spectator, by performing a critique of the speech-acts theory of meaning. The performative in meaning is shown to be a rhetorical, not a discursive, movement, where intention and convention are inoperable.