An Indigenous Manifesto (1999)
Charles Gaines
American, born 1944
2013
A large-scale pencil drawing that transcribes a political text—"An Indigenous Manifesto"—into musical notation, asking viewers to experience language as an encoded score.
At a distance it reads like a precise, oversized page of sheet music—neat horizontal staves filled with faint, meticulous pencil notes beneath the spare title—so regular and small that the work pulls you close to try to decipher its hidden text.
Gaines uses the rules of musical notation as a conceptual system to expose how meaning and authority are constructed, linking conceptual art’s procedural strategies to questions of language, identity, and political representation.
Medium
Pencil on paper
Dimensions
Frame: 86 x 55" (218.4 x 139.7 cm)
Classification
Department
Credit
Acquired through the generosity of Jill and Peter Kraus, Jerry I. Speyer and Katherine G. Farley, and The Friends of Education of The Museum of Modern Art
Accession
1206.2013.2
Palette
Art Terms
Exhibitions
