The Wolfson Syndrome

Louis Wolfson is an American writer best known for his contributions to language. After escaping an asylum in the 1950s, he dedicated his life to developing his own language to counter a deep-rooted fear of English. Faced with words he feared, such as ‘ladies’, he might consider the German ‘Leute’ before settling on the Russian ‘Lyudi’. Through this reappropriation of other languages, Wolfson found a way to communicate within his own.

Wolfson’s condition stems from a desire to reject a reality he perceives as vulgar and repulsive in favour of a new and unfamiliar language. In The Logic of Sense, Gilles Deleuze describes this language as the foreign ‘expressive’ rather than the ‘alimentary’ mother tongue. The mechanism allows Wolfson finally to exist and interact, albeit with some limitation.

During correspondence about his Cabinet Magazine article ‘Good-night Lyudi’, writer Kevin McCann observed: ‘Borrowing from other languages helps to transform the familiar, enchant what habit has made dull and familiar and therefore invisible.’

The exhibition considered what The Modern Language Experiment termed ‘The Wolfson Syndrome’. Its artists borrowed from the languages of mediums other than their own, while some reappropriated languages from music, ASCII code and cartoons to convey the nature of their expression. Others demonstrated through their own processes the same struggle that existed for Wolfson.

Artists: James Brooks, Gary Colclough, Gia Edzgveradze, Rainer Ganahl, Tina Hage, Gerard Hemsworth, Mark Lewis, Jon Moscow, David Rickard, Nicola Reed and Barbara Hoogeweegen.

A catalogue with a foreword by Kevin McCann was available during the exhibition. The exhibition was open Wednesday to Saturday, 11:00–19:00, with a special Sunday opening on 29 May and visits by appointment. The nearest Underground station was Holborn.