Word: syntax
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This process begins with Frank's preferred material, clay. Her larger recumbent figures, like Lovers, 1974, are pieced together from a dozen separate elements, each made of a clay sheet fired in the kiln. The manipulated sheet, rather than the solid lump, is the basis of her formal syntax. The clay can be molded. It sags in pleats and thick drapes. It can be rapidly scratched, poked and cut. It retains an air of spontaneity, for Frank knows where to leave a shape before it loses its sketchlike character. Harder sculptural materials, like wood, metal or stone, connote resistance...
...that is conceptual and learned from humans. A parrot that asks for a cracker is only mimicking a human or another parrot. But a chimpanzee who can "speak" in Ameslan (American sign language) or Yerkish by striking combinations on a keyboard of color-coded symbols seems to be creating syntax, a property of human language. It is not the voice but the process that is critical...
...unpublished studies of theory that are displayed as art objects. But the hints are as frustratingly vague as they are tantalizingly interesting. In a study for his work "Reconditioned Eggbeaters," Davis scrawls, "Only a Marc is a Noun. Only an Operative Scar is a Noun. Art exists as a Syntax of Scars." Pages from one of his studies of color begin to explore the relationships between different colors and the impact of different series of colors. The chronology explains that Davis had a "desire to achieve intellectual clarification of the problems he found as a practicing artist...
...drawings, being governed by the radius of the hand, cannot be very large. "The nib has an elasticity meant for writing, and that is why I have always used pen and ink: it is a form of writing. But unlike writing, drawing makes up its own syntax as it goes along. The line can't be reasoned in the mind. It can only be reasoned on paper." Steinberg's drawing, in all its varieties, is a form of thought...
Riesman said that the graduates of the best parochial high schools tend to write well and read thoughtfully. He attributed this in part to the separation of sexes in these schools, and also to the teaching of Latin which "increases one's knowledge of vocabulary and sensitizes one to syntax...