George Miller

George Miller Language Bars & California White Walls

cover image

Cirrus 1972 & 1974

George Miller

Jan-Mar 1972 First Edition 1974

Cirrus 1972 & 1974

Cirrus White Walls

by Travis Diehl

The historian was preparing to write an anthology about artists that had lived in Los Angeles. The idea of the book was to give present artists a sense of their own history and its tradition. As he went into specifics, his friend mused to himself over the curiosity of the book, like knowing that Washington slept here; the presence of history but not the history itself.

George Miller, California White Walls George Miller finds himself in the early 1970’s in a textual moment.

The same year as his 1972 show at Cirrus Gallery, Miller teaches a course called “Meaning in Communication” at the nascent California Institute of the Arts. Miller is there in Southern California for the aftershocks of a paradigm shift away from the object, towards “texts” of all kinds— indeed, a pervading textualization of the lived environment. In 1974, Miller produces a small book titled California White Walls; the spreads pair photographs of white walls with short narrative vignettes, oblique yet personal, largely autobiographical.

For, while this semiotic fever has reached the point where one might attempt a reading of the “texture” of a blank wall, the bittersweet futility of these theoretical attempts, like that of poems and deconstructions alike, is not lost on Miller. So much for conceptual rigor. So much for systems. His work is and will remain inextricable from the chaotic and inelegant world he inhabits. His small book hinges on the tender insufficiency of language, as even the era of text is illegible. He visits a bar “back home” called Larry’s. He walks, just walks, on the beach. He stands in

a browning orchard in Newhall Ranch and thinks about snakes—their fangs, his flesh; their probability, and his, in this instant—an innocent calm before what he calls an “impending disaster of ideas.”

Time passes. The dictums of conceptual art curl back on their authors. The walls (white) close in. And here we can’t help but read Miller’s white walls as a framework, a series of enclosures particular to the artist, artists, art. The narrator of Miller’s book (barely not Miller) drifts from room to room, interior to interior. A hometown bar, a classroom, a house.

Or, pointedly, a gallery. A creviced blankness is the only constant. And even this, splintered into specificity by angled sunlight, is cast into pale absence each evening.

No large jump, then, and more or less the style of the period, to treat the gallery wall like another blankness: the page. The artist transmutes text into artwork and vice versa. Miller’s work is text but also distinctly referential and ready-made: a restaurant menu, as in The Pier; or the neon sign in The Arcade. Miller re-presents text not as the garbled transmission

Untitled 1972

of ideals but as something endlessly embedded in everyday imperfection. Accompanying these and other semiotic props, snatches of conversation are transcribed, etched, into the clear acrylic of Miller’s “language bars.” The artist gathers as text the simple experience of chattering crowds, waiters, balloons popping— pop / ahahahaha / pop / oh god —the flailing poetry overheard while moving through the world—the world in which Miller finds himself, in California in the early 1970’s. Today, in 2012, Miller’s era occupies a romantic distance.

His are the glory days, when textart was young. And for Miller, too, these sculptures, comprising texts gleaned from places as wholesome as piers and nickel diners, are already nostalgic for a time when words were just words, when your friend ordering

coffee or your sweetheart licking ice cream was—only this... But there was never such a time. The snakes were always already in the orchard.

Meanwhile, these conversations, real or imagined, traverse the length of Miller’s language bars from left to right. These sculptures are timelines on a subjective, imprecise scale. Legibility echoes time. And illegibility, accordingly, loses time in both directions. The abstracted white finishes in Miller’s book expand into edgeless planes beyond the frame.

For, confronted with this unloosed, self-perpetuating textualization, where could art go? Miller takes this problem to heart. As an artist, he is evidently never satisfied with a contained semiotic abstraction— indeed, never quite satisfied with the art world as such. The art world, in its

role as abstract framework, returns his ambivalence. Miller remains at once very much of his time, but also beyond it, behind it, beside it, forgotten by it—in his day, not an iconoclast or a spokesman but a sensitive practitioner—already adrift in history.

California White Walls prefigures this distance, describing moments when history glances off a man, a man off history. Miller’s last few works are paintings of paper fragments covered with the Runes of the Enchanted Alphabet. At the end of his life, he turns to a more ancient, more mysterious semiotic order—a discipline, furthermore, uninvested in the circuitous discourses of conceptual art. Rather, these works belong to the practical magic of ritual, concerned with the transfer of

meaning between cultures and across time. This legibility goes beyond style to a sign more basic, more essential than those of conceptualism: the man propelled outwards in time through his own image.

From the hills of the first CalArts campus to the walls of the original Cirrus, we know that Miller slept here. But where is here? The gallery itself has moved; its white walls are pockmarked with the illegible evidence of a history that is no longer Miller’s. This is no art-history but a meditation—on a man out of time; on another life, another era; on other walls, lost and irrecoverable: the white walls where some still hang their texts.

Arcade 1972

The Pier 1972

California White Walls (artist book) George Miller 1974

cirrus gallery Š 2013

Cirrus 1972

cirrus gallery Š 2013