Because many language-based works were conceived in a context commonly associated with journalism and publishing—gallery announcements, newspaper and magazine ads, posters and broadsheets, articles, flyers, and various other insubstantial and impermanent documents—they are easy to overlook. This ephemeral quality encouraged artists to be experimental and let their imaginations range widely. The result was a sort of laboratory of language that let artists rethink what sculpture could be, leading to the multidisciplinary welter of possibilities comprising its practice today.

Many of the artists included in this show defined their text work as sculpture and referred to it as such in their titles. Moreover, all of these works were concerned with the physical and conceptual place of the art object in the real world. At the same time, their unassuming physical character—papers that could be mechanically printed and, just as easily, discarded—was part of their appeal as sculpture, and as conceptual art.

The strategies by which the featured artists generated “sculpture” were as varied as the processes of making sculpture itself. They encompassed instructions given to the viewer, who then became a participant, or even maker, of a work, as in Alison Knowles’ Proposition: Make a Salad. Artists like Richard Serra and Bruce Nauman also used texts to describe actual installations as well as purely conceptual objects, while others, such as Vito Acconci, Lawrence Weiner, and Robert Morris investigated language’s fundamental role in our very ability to conceive, and reflect upon, art. Other artists in the exhibition include Carl Andre, John Baldessari, Joseph Beuys, Mel Bochner, Dan Graham, Gilbert & George, Walter de Maria, Bruce Nauman, Yoko Ono, and Robert Smithson.

Sculpture in So Many Words: Text Pieces 1960–1980 was organized by independent curator Dakin Hart.  A condensed version of the exhibition was initially exhibited at ZieherSmith Gallery, New York.