Quote/SIGNS / Walker Evans / Andrei Codrescu


The twentieth century is- or maybe I should say was- the American century: demotic, technological, robust, full of bluster, simultaneously naive and cunning. The first half of it was ruled by the newspaper and the cinema. It was aso the time of popular writing, of huge advertisements, of lettering that invaded every nook and cranny and even wrote the skyline. America wrote big, with bold new alphabets, in lightbulbs, in neon, in smoke.
Walker Evans pursued this text in all its variations, from modestly scrawled shopkeeper advertisements of the 1930s to the purely abstract graffiti of the 1970s. /P5

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At the same time, to the recently Paris-imbued traveler, it must have been an aesthetic gesture, as well as a homecoming. While language itself is turned into an image, other pieces of the landscape are turned into language. The early New York pictures find endless pleasure in uncovering shapes produced by anonymous industrial-age artisans, as well as random instances of city life. Letters, grids, scaffolding, fire escapes, windows and window shutters, chains, lunch counters with their repeated shapes of cups, plates and saucers, rows of people, smokestacks, P7

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America's signs in their sophistication or awkwardness inscribe the story of a giving, an urging to partake in the constant overproduction of goods. And it may be precisely in exploring the gap between the cheerful optimism of advertising propaganda and the reality of Depression-stricken America the Evans found his art. / P10