Notes In/troducing Englyph by Tim Roseborough

I have often had conflicted responses to text-

based art. On one hand, I appreciate its role as one of the

hallmarks of conceptualism, helping to free art from its

reliance on the object. On the other, I find it boring.

In this brief note, I detail how I resolved this tension in my

own experiments with text-based art and the result of

that process.

The past few decades have witnessed a

proliferation of contemporary art with text as its basis.

One can find text in oil on canvas, in frames, in light

boxes, affixed to the wall in vinyl lettering, as

instructions, in scrolling LED, on industrially produced

street signs, in neon, on tombstones and in other

manifestations too numerous to elaborate here.

I felt that the totality (as opposed to individual

instances) of text-based art had the cumulative effect of

being visually uncharacteristic and somewhat

redundant. I saw words as too closely tethered to their

meaning, often lacking any fresh sense of the visual. If

I were going to look at words, I reasoned, I would

rather read a book.

A visit to a Korean restaurant in San Francisco

offered a revelation. Presumably by mistake, the waiter

offered me a version of the menu in Korean. I can

neither read and write, nor speak, Korean, but I found

myself fascinated by the formal properties of the text. I

marveled at the order, the array of shapes and the

knowledge that this deliberately organized schema of

marks was conveying meaning to someone, but not me.

I recalled how others unfamiliar with Asian

languages are fascinated by their form as distinct from

what they signify, as evidenced by the legion of people

wearing Chinese character tattoos of questionable

interpretation. To me, this Korean-language menu was

formal abstraction on a laminated board. To those who

understood the language, it meant lunch.

At that moment, and with Cairo, Yucatan, Judd,

Stella, Kruger, Turing, Wiener, Kosuth, Haring and

Basquiat in mind, I determined to make the English

language as unfamiliar as the words on that menu. I

would render it as abstract, and yet readable, by

conjuring a new set of rules.

My research quickly revealed that creating a

logographic system (such as Chinese characters) was

not tenable. I didn

develop an entire constellation of unique glyphs

associated with single concepts.

Instead, I re-imagined the alphabet. I created

letters that are discernable by their edges and arranged

them in a nested manner to form words, each letter

inside the one that precedes it. I call this system,

Englyph. Englyph is not a new language, but a writing

system made with the specific intent of introducing a

fresh visual form to text-based artwork, while still

conveying meaning.

Much has been made recently of

visualization,

information are visualized in such a way as to clarify,

streamline and make it understandable. Englyph is a

reverse of that process: a means of

obfuscation.

As for the meal of bibimbap I ordered from

the English translation of the menu, it was the best

I