The catalogue of this show contains a reproduction of the invitation to Jürgen Partenheimer’s show at Artists Space in 1982; it pinpoints the deeper meaning of his work. In this photograph, the artist himself, standing at the center of a primitive seesaw, is shown matter-of-factly balancing a typewriter and a picture. The photo suggests that Partenheimer is nimbly maintaining an equilibrium between the two poles of verbal and visual language. However, as he lucidly demonstrates in his drawings, with their manifold inclusions of free or bound letters of the alphabet, his goal is not to pit verbal

Wittgenstein is one of those philosophers who has not yet been totally demolished because in the ’40s he was already performing deconstruction on his own system. Now the Wiener Secession has celebrated the centennial of Wittgenstein’s birth, not by pursuing a historical transfiguration, but by taking seriously the philosopher’s potential for contemporary relevance. Joseph Kosuth curated an homage to Wittgenstein that was one of the few bright spots in the disaster area of European group shows. Naturally, Kosuth’s tribute requires some clarification. It was neither an exegesis in the academic