Words of Art: The Puzzling Work of Matthew Gehring

Abstract

Growing up in Indiana, where the state's legendary obsession with basketball undoubtedly overbalances if not eclipses conversations on contemporary and conceptual art, Matthew Gehring shot hoops and dreamed of art. Fascinated, but far removed from the production, promotion, and theorization of a major art center, Gehring found the monthly and quarterly cycle of art magazines and publications his primary entry into and experience with contemporary art. Spongelike, he soaked up content and theory; he observed how publications—and their strategically selected essays—analyzed and advanced ideas and influenced the conditions of success in the art world. With growing insights into the conventions, confusions, and cadences of art language and theoretical rhetoric, he began to make word-search games based on art essays he had read. Gehring would select an article, extract and edit a list of words, and then painstakingly construct a text-specific word-search puzzle on graph paper. As he described in a recent e-mail, “Spelling words forward and backward and through three other words for a few hours produces the same effects as drinking about two full pots of coffee.”1 Many of us have experienced or witnessed the similar state of wired exhilaration that can occur while reading a challenging and dense (or occasionally exasperating or inscrutable) text.