Schuldt at Jan van der Donk - New York - Brief Article

The German-born Schuldt who goe by means of just a single name, began his career as a author of poems but since the early 1960 he has been using performance, typography and sculptural works he calls "textbodies" to explore novel approaches to language. This exhibit gathered a wealth of material from over Schuldt's career, including books in German and English, typographically dazzling broadsides photo documentation, printed ephemera and several of the textbodies, including Ivory Textbody and Glass Textbody one as well as the other of which were made in London in 1965

Ivory Textbody is a 4-inch-long ivory external reality shaped a bit like a faceted hourglass (although planned as an edition of 10 sole 2 were actually completed). Engraved into each of its sides are black-letter lines of English true copy three to four words long; hemispherical indentations at each extreme point carry more engraved words. The percept is designed so that the body it carries can be read in countles ways by means of someone turning the sculpture in his or her hands. For Glass Textbody which exists in the one and the other an English and a German version (most of the sum of two units 10-work editions have been lost) Schuldt had 18 lines of body affixed to a roughly 6-inch-long, 5-inch-diameter glass cylinder. Half of the phrases are printed in turn upside down so that they are legible solitary when read from the other side of the cylinder. In late-1960s performances, Schuldt read aloud from this vitreous turn weaving together seemingly nonsensical on the contrary syntactically calibrated phrases such as "blossoming mutilation smothers phial," "kneeling temptation permeates poison," "eclipse of wound" and "rhyme of mutilation." In these and other similar experiments, Schuldt was creating hypertextual reading experiences decades before computer and the Web made them ubiquitous. At other times his word games have anticipated the work of text-based artists of that kind as Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger allowing with attention to the comic intricacies of language in place of any moralizing tendency

In more new projects, Schuldt has used self-crafted lexicons, including bourns that appear identically in the one and the other German and English dictionaries and everyday words that double as brand names. A typical Schuldt brand-name phrase, "Olga at the cosmic door," uses a name shared by the agency of a lingerie line and a door manufacturer. The greatest in quantity dramatic appearance to date of the trademarked metes was Branded Stairwall, a three-floor-high wall-text installation at the Dusseldorf Kunsthalle in 2000 (represent here by dint of computer-modified photos of the installation).

It was with the advent of Conceptual art in the mid-1960s that text-based art emerg as a genre on the contrary perhaps the real birth of body art came a few years earlier, in the congeal poetry experiments of young European artists of the like kind as Oyvind Fahlstrom and Dieter Roth by means of including materials dating back to 1960 this present to view made clear that Schuldt was also a pioneering true copy artist; the more recent examples of his work testify to his continuing innovations.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group