Archie Rand
Letter Painting
1971
32 x 88 inches
The 613 by Archie Rand, published by Penguin Random House, 2015
Archie Rand, born 1949, lives and works in New York
“I used to feel that artists who used words needed a legitimizing poet collaborator but artists now approach language as an inheritance that needn’t be subject to the hazing of aesthetics. Recent word-based work can be delightful or a profound epitaph to language’s previous positioning. There is no trespass. We consent to misspellings, grammatical nonchalance, instant abbreviations and anagrams. Language morphs and it cannot be held to standards that no longer have domain and we reap the visual distillate of that change. Conversely, an independent interest in, and the proliferation of an audience for, poetry appears to be on the upswing. Those questions of belief that surfaced in the 1970s are demanding pay-dirt answers in the face of an excluding art market. With a choice of many havens poetry and language are being approached to provide that mooring.”
– Archie Rand, interview with Samuel Jablon, The Brooklyn Rail, April 2014