Matthew Buckingham
by Kimberly Lamm

Resisting Definition

While previous generations of artists practiced institutional critique, exposing the museum’s complicity with capitalist machinery and thereby debunking its sanctified aura, Matthew Buckingham’s Definition draws from Conceptual Art’s scrutiny of language to investigate abstract and ubiquitous institutions such as language and history. But Definition doesn’t attempt to examine language and history as such—an ambition to rival Samuel Johnson’s—instead, historical facts and objects are read as metonymic fragments densely layered with ideological formulations. Unfurled, these formulations can elucidate how ideas and institutions inform and reproduce each other, and together becoming the stubborn image that limits all that can be thought or imagined about a subject. Definition loops back in time to tell the story of one man writing and composing the first standardized English dictionary, in one room, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, but it also moves to the present of contemporary pertinence, as English mutates from the site of U.S. Imperialism to the continuously recycled logo language of the globalized economy. Definition describes the dictionary as "a world in miniature," and the allusion to Malcolm X’s dogged and thorough study of the dictionary in prison reveals the power and knowledge packed within the dictionary’s seemingly benign ordering of the world.

Definition offers the possibility of seeing both the heroism and the hubris of Johnson’s project. Compared to the number of years and people necessary to produce the standardized French and Italian dictionaries, Johnson’s book is a miracle of productivity. At the same time, Johnson’s Herculean project of "pierc[ing]," "inquir[ing]," and "limit[ing]" all that can be known and representing it into one book is a prodigious example of the eighteenth-century’s propensity to regulate and command the world through human omniscience. Combined with the fact that it was used in colonialism’s "exportation of the English language," the dictionary becomes a dense emblem of a repressive order, though it is an order English speakers inherit. The English spoken today is by no means identical to the English Johnson standardized, but they both function within the syntax—that is the order—of standardization.

The visual, aural, and spatial experience Definition composes subtly works to reinforce the difficulty of finding a point outside of standardization from which to critique it. First of all, the narration of Definition doesn’t mark a clear beginning and ending. The story seems to circles in on itself, which adds to Definition’s portrayal of Johnson as a man thoroughly saturated by his project, to the point that the phrase "a man of letters" becomes an amusingly literal evocation of Johnson merging completely with what had become his "medium"--language. So it is important to note that Definition doesn’t portray Johnson through a visual image—say, a portrait engraving or a silhouette. His absence in the photograph of the watchtower in which he worked suggests a defined and purposeful self that had dissolved into ever-receding levels of passivity. Furthermore, this single photograph manages to evoke both the imagined plentitude and fragmented compromise of a project such as Johnson’s that attempted to capture and transcribe all that can be known. Definition represents the garret workshop, but only part of it; a chair, but only part of its arm and leg. It is the room where Johnson worked, but also where the dictionary wrote him. The yellow Vermeer-like light filling the window expands to suggest the light of rationalism, the light of transcendence, or even the light of a divinely sanctioned calling, and the window suggests the symbolic form of Cartesian perspectivalism. Combined with the single insistence of this one photographic image, the "vision" of Definition appears to be deliberately fixed to propose a relation between a standardized language and habitual viewing.

And yet, the darkened gallery space has been transfigured to only loosely align the spectator with the perspective the photograph emblematizes. The speaker’s voice that narrates Definition cuts across the space that would make this alignment possible, and at certain points, undermines the certainty his impersonal and authoritative tone suggests. While Johnson worked to stop "the wandering history of meaning," the speaker narrating Definition wanders into reflections on his—and anyone’s— provisional ownership of language. Once he refers to himself and the spectator in the statement, "I don’t know if you are hearing what I am saying," his authoritative hold on what the photograph represents becomes uncertain: "I can’t say for sure, but this room may be the place where Johnson composed the first standardized English dictionary." I can’t say for sure, but Definition may propose that representations of history that call attention to themselves as representations made possible but also limited by language, can inform a resistance to the voices of authority that supply standardized historical definitions.

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