29 August 2025
Another thing Olivia's work prompted me to think about: how Ed Ruscha says he was originally attracted to words because “words have no size.” Wanted to know what she would think of that, and further if she regards words as having weight, because “RHYME” and “BAROQUE” are almost like sandbags in the context of the paintings they appear in in her show. They drive the paintings down, the bisection of their circular wooden bases made even more emphatic. Perhaps this is a good place to mention the 2007 MIT study I recently learned about that concluded that Russians, who have two different words for lighter blues (“goluboy”) and darker blues (“siniy”) were able to discriminate between colors faster than English speakers when tasked with describing blue stimuli that spanned the siniy/goluboy border. In this way, language quite literally is color. Or at least is key in our cultural understanding of it. So perhaps the connoted size and weight of words changes with their cultural context, which is an interesting idea to investigate.