Modern Lab: The Found Alphabet

National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

Washington D.C. | District Of Columbia | USA

May 14, 2011 - Nov 13, 2011

Alphabets and letters have long beguiled artists, who in modern times have been apt to treat them like found objects, isolated from their workaday contexts and appealing in their own right. Take, for instance, the sensuous Q, upended and repurposed as a beach house by Claes Oldenburg in The Letter Q as Beach House, with Sailboat.

Unlike Marcel Duchamp's 1914 Bottle Rack鈥攃onsidered the first found object or readymade鈥攁n alphabet has special potency, linked as it is to sounds, words, and meanings. In this installation, the artists took both fanciful and analytic approaches. James Castle invented his own alphabetic systems and often graced them with the sibilant caption Purse ! Discusses or the abbreviation P ! D. Al Taylor graphed a two-word phrase (and its inversion) by plotting the distance between its component letters. Robert Cumming created an alphabet in shaving cream and captured the letters as they merged into a rapidly dissolving mass. Kim Rugg cut the front page of the Financial Times into individual letters, numbers, and punctuation marks, then rearranged them in alphabetical order鈥攁n oddly anachronistic practice that recalls outmoded movable-type printing.

The Modern Lab is a small gallery dedicated to focused installations of modern and contemporary works in a variety of media from the Gallery's collection.