Kay Rosen: No Noose Is Good Noose

Alexander Gray Associates in association with Yvon Lambert, New York and Paris

Exhibited was Kay Rosen’s 1983 text-based installation, No Noose is Good Noose, and a related unpublished artist book Mined, both of which are key works in Rosen’s development as an innovator with text as image. The exhibition ran concurrent with the solo exhibition Scareful, featuring new works by Rosen at Yvon Lambert Gallery’s spaces in New York and Paris.

No Noose is Good Noose (1983) is a multi-paneled installation, hand-painted on sheets of board and Plexiglas, combining figuration with language. The children’s word game Hangman is a jumping-off point for Rosen’s exploration of how language is widely used to motivate, organize, and execute political revolution. Made at a peak of the Reagan-era, the piece conflates motion and movement—literal and metaphorical—building a circular narrative in which declarations are transformed into policy. As Rosen’s linguistic universe illuminates, words are not only tools for manipulation, but also for democratic and open-ended possibility, depending on the positioning of the messenger and the recipient.