Playing with Words: The Spoken Word in Artistic Practice (review)

In this collection of thirty-nine essays, textual installations, scripts, and scores, editor Cathy Lane has produced a book that is at once beautiful, thought-provoking, frustrating, and instructive. Playing with Words: The Spoken Word in Artistic Practice might be most accurately described as an exhibition catalog for an imaginary all-star poetry, composition, design, sound art, and performance extravaganza. Indeed, as an interdisciplinary showcase for this impressive array of artistic experimentation with, and exploration of, the spoken word, it will be of great interest to anyone invested in pushing the limits of the spoken word as sound in all aspects of creation. As a textual manifestation of sound art, sound design, linguistic experimentation and ethnography, experimental theatre, and performance poetry, this collection's greatest strength is its massive (and impressively international) scope, an eclecticism that compels the reader to imagine productive intersections among graphic design, sound design, performance, and composition. Here, the spoken word is the platform for interdisciplinary improvisations, and, as the title suggests, these essays and installations reveal that artistic practices based on playing with the spoken word are always already ludic experiments in polymorphous writing and performance.

Sound artists and scholars will find here thirty-nine models for how to render what Lane calls "that most difficult and elusive medium to represent in print—sound" (8). However, while Lane and many of her contributors foreground the possibilities and impossibilities of rendering into print experiments with the spoken word that exist primarily as oral and/or digital performance, I am not convinced that this dilemma of translation has been resolved here. It is, of course, difficult to imagine what many of these scores and scripts sound like in performance, and I want to hear (and see) in performance many of these contributions. Although I have been annoyed by similar requests made by readers of my own work, I found myself repeatedly wishing for an accompanying DVD or audiovisual website, thinking that this kind of additional material would increase the usability of the text, especially its pedagogical applicability.

Just as my own response to readers' requests for audiovisual accompaniment for print explorations of spoken-word performance has been to encourage my readers to seek out the artists I study, Playing with Words has certainly piqued my interest in many artists formerly unknown to me, and has increased my regard for the artists with whom I was already familiar. To satisfy my need for sound, I found a good deal of the artists' materials on their personal websites, which Lane provides, when available, at the beginning of each entry. (For example, the websites for Dirk Huelstrunk, Tomomoi Adachi, Joan La Barabara, and Pamela Z lead a reader/listener to their sounds.) Enthusiastic readers might also find themselves revisiting Kenneth Goldsmith's Ubu-web.com to explore another impressive collection of sound experiments (which include installments by several artists included in Playing with Words).

In her brief introductory essay, "Acts of Translation," Lane explains that her curatorial dictum to the contributing artists asked that they "engage with two separate but intertwined issues: on the one hand, the motivating ideas and artistic concerns that inform their work along with the creative methods needed to bring them to fruition, and on the other, how best to translate something of their inspiration, concerns, methods and the work itself on the printed page" (8). This essay also provides an exploration of Lane's sense of play in her own compositions, a playfulness I find reflected in her curation.

The book is not separated into sections or organized by genre: essays slide into interviews, into graphic art, into scripts into scores. Each installation/ contribution both stands on its own and participates in the larger exhibition of the book, and while a reader might sometimes feel a bit of generic whiplash from the jolts between each short piece, it strikes me that any imposition of "order" on this collection would have necessarily constrained the openness...