I want to talk about this poster briefly

• July 16, 2022
• shorts  

So I want to talk about this poster briefly (it’s from Michèle Provost’s installation at the SAW gallery)¹.

Mainly, I want to talk about why I dislike it.

The text on the poster was “Words will always be this clumsy approximation of something that can be best explained through drawing.” I’m not including the actual photo, because it looks terrible.

The first time I saw the poster it wasn’t even at the show – it was on a picture my friend took of the installation on her phone so she could tell me about it, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

I’m not a fan of the word “always” in that poster. Saying that any form of expression is always going to be superior is a pretty bullshit opinion to be defending, and while it might be true for her and she has every right to say that, it still made me pretty mad. Maybe all the stuff that exists in her head is better suited to a drawing, but that’s definitely not my experience, and I think making sweeping generalizations like this can be dangerous.

The more I think about the poster, the more unhappy I am about her phrasing. Like, what do you mean by “something”? What is the “something”? Is this to say that words don’t exist outside of the something, or that when they do, they’re not resigned to being clumsy approximations anymore?

Not to mention, the entire show is comprised of posters with words on them, and I suspect that’s in part because sometimes images are just clumsy approximations of things that can be best explained with words.

I think if she had used the word “sometimes” I probably wouldn’t be as unhappy about it, but she didn’t. And I get it, sometimes you want to have a hot take because it’s easier than nuance. I do it too. Still, books and video games and films and songs all exist for a reason. If you try to write your picture book as a song it might work, but most likely it won’t, because songs and picture books are different forms of communication that lend themselves to different types of content.

And lastly, here’s my own experience: generally speaking, any time I share something there’s some emotional vulnerability involved, because that’s how it works when you make something and show it to people. But functionally, while I can, to some extent, hide behind a picture or a drawing, I find it very difficult to hide behind words. If I write something, I have to own it, and if I’m not ready to own it, it doesn’t go anywhere.