The dominance of the word

I really should be quoting this to get it right, but the thought is familiar enough that how eloquently it's expressed is really a matter of pitch not substance, but I've been thinking about an idea of communication linguist Steven Pinker puts forth when marvels about how the arrangement of bursts of air from our mouth or marks on a page and accurately and successful transmit an idea from the brain of one person to the brain of another.

While it would be wrong to take the miracle of language for granted, it would be, I think, equally wrong to assume that all communication must be based on this assumed outcome - that what is going on in the head of one person is transmitted accurately to the head of another. This notion seems especially troubling in art. (Maybe I'm just depressed because I get bummed every time I hear someone say he or she wants to 'make a new language' in his or her art - what's wrong with the ones that already exist? Who are you going to talk to in this new language? - and I heard that one in one form or another a half dozen times as I met with the first year grad painters yesterday). It's troubling because it defends an idea of stability of message that threatens some of the most important things art can do.

Art perhaps ought not so often be viewed so much as form of conversation, but perhaps more like a relay game. An artist observes something or invents it. She displays it (there is something etymologically suggestive about display, as if it were to cut off from play, but it's not that at all). Another person sees it. That person is now in the position of the artist, able to make through conversation, literature, or creative practice another thing. And on and on.

Of course the conversation model can't, and shouldn't, be utterly abandoned, but perhaps its dominance should be questioned a little more thoroughly. As if all conversations you’ve ever been invoved in went the way you wanted them...