“By emphasizing the common letters and sounds of three disparate, even contradictory words, Nauman reveals how very slight variations in the arrangement of letters can yield profound differences in meaning. Works such as Violins, Violence, Silence lead to the provocative suggestion that human language, and therefore our communication with one another, is not only complex and nuanced, but unsettlingly arbitrary.”
– Baltimore Museum of Art
and the violence
of the silence when the violins
stopped was shocking, like the sudden
plunge underwater–silence so total,
so cut, that he was driven to madness.
violence,
like silence, is loud, and silence,
like violins, makes its best noise on cold,
clear nights, the violence of the deaths
among the barren stars echoing
like a tin can echoes in the thick
silence of a gymnasium.
and if the
silence of the war would ever
end we would maybe hear the
violence but we don’t,
we hear only the violins.
violins, violence, silence:
bruce nauman’s discovery
by Anna G. Richardson
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