Art as a communicator

Tell me three words, Bennett Lieberman used to say to his younger cousins, and by the end of the day, he would transform their responses into short stories. This playful family ritual inspired Lieberman to start seeing potential narratives in other unusual places as well, like in the paint swatch display at hardware stores. The descriptive names of the colors on the paper strips brought narrative fragments to his mind, so for decades he would inscribe the strips and give them as gifts to friends and family.

In the past few years, though, Lieberman has been expanding his ideas about the relationships among color, image and language and constructing larger and more complex representations of the paint swatches. A dozen of those are on display at The Honolulu Museum of Art Spalding House through Jan. 10, in an exhibition titled "TXT / MSG," which includes several other commentaries on the communicative nature of art.

This is the second language and literary arts exhibit at Spalding House since director Aaron Padilla, who also curated this show, began emphasizing education-oriented topics at the site in 2011, at the time of the merger of The Contemporary Museum with the Honolulu Academy of Arts. The other exhibit was "A Thousand Words and Counting," from August 2012 to January 2013.

Focusing on semiotics, Padilla said, is not about the specific meanings of the words, or a particular interpretation of them, but about the process of interpretation.

"If I look at the color green, that color can evoke different memories and emotions in me, and someone else can come up and see that same green and have completely different interpretations," he said. "There are a lot of really tough and complicated works on view in this exhibit, and they beg for people to really look at them deeply to understand them."

Padilla even went so far as to purposely leave labels off certain works to avoid impressing an authority figure’s ideas about the art, to just let patrons create their own first impressions. They can find the labels later, he said, if they want. Besides Lieberman’s paint swatches, the exhibit also includes Aaron Noble’s deconstruction of comic book imagery, satirical and political cartoons by Honore Daumier and Corky Trinidad, plus a collection of cut-out paper words and phrases created by Brittany Powell and Tae Kitakata.

"Our vision," Kitakata said, "was to take what you normally can’t see and make it visible and loud and chattery in its own way. Chatter normally just comes out of a person’s mouth and disappears, never to be seen. This is a way to make something permanent out of something that is very impermanent." Powell and Kitakata recently offered a workshop for Spalding House patrons, in which they could cut out their own words and take them home for display.

As part of this exhibit, patrons also will get a chance to participate in Lieberman’s meaning-making process, by choosing one of the various provided paint swatches and giving the colors names and stories via a nearby typewriter. After the exhibition ends in January, Lieberman said he plans to re-appropriate the color names that patrons provided in this exhibit, as seed words and inspiration for his next set of color poems and next exhibit.

The names, as the muse for the stories, Lieberman said, connect back to his original story-making process with his younger cousins. In those days he was just passing time in the summer between college semesters. Yet as he worked on these color poems for years and years, he began to see something deeper in them, even though they rarely surpass 50 words.

"When I look back at them, I’m first taken by the color, then drawn into the text," he said. "Whether it’s beautiful and mysterious or funny or haunting or deep, I like to see how the text concretely has grown from the color names themselves. That relationship is how the idea appears and gives it order and meaning."