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

The German-born Schuldt, who goes by just a single name, began his career as a poet, but since the early 1960s he has been using performance, typography and sculptural works he calls "textbodies" to explore new approaches to language. This show gathered a wealth of material from throughout Schuldt's career, including books in German and English, typographically dazzling posters, photo documentation, printed ephemera and several of the textbodies, including Ivory Textbody and Glass Textbody, both of which were made in London in 1965.

Ivory Textbody is a 4-inch-long ivory object shaped a bit like a faceted hourglass (although planned as an edition of 10, only 2 were actually completed). Engraved into each of its sides are black-letter lines of English text, three to four words long; hemispherical indentations at each end carry more engraved words. The object is designed so that the text it carries can be read in countless ways by someone turning the sculpture in his or her hands. For Glass Textbody, which exists in both an English and a German version (most of the two 10-work editions have been lost), Schuldt had 18 lines of text affixed to a roughly 6-inch-long, 5-inch-diameter glass cylinder. Half of the phrases are printed in reverse so that they are legible only when read from the other side of the cylinder. In late-1960s performances, Schuldt read aloud from this vitreous volume, weaving together seemingly nonsensical but 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 computers and the Web made them ubiquitous. At other times his word games have anticipated the work of text-based artists such as Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger, though with attention to the comic intricacies of language in place of any moralizing tendency.

In more recent projects, Schuldt has used self-crafted lexicons, including terms that appear identically in both 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 a lingerie line and a door manufacturer. The most dramatic appearance to date of the trademarked terms was Branded Stairwall, a three-floor-high wall-text installation at the Dusseldorf Kunsthalle in 2000 (represented here by computer-modified photos of the installation).

It was with the advent of Conceptual art in the mid-1960s that text-based art emerged as a genre, but perhaps the real birth of text art came a few years earlier, in the concrete poetry experiments of young European artists such as Oyvind Fahlstrom and Dieter Roth. By including materials dating back to 1960, this show made clear that Schuldt was also a pioneering text artist; the more recent examples of his work testify to his continuing innovations.

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