The paradox of "insisting" that words have no "fixed or stable set of meanings."

If you really believed what you are insisting, you wouldn't be insisting, you'd be, perhaps, entertaining a suggestion or toying with a notion or musing about the possibility, now wouldn't you?



And how can you inscribe a suggestion/notion/possibility like that on a big solid wall in a place called an "institute." It's the Art Institute of Chicago — the new Modern Wing — and when I voiced these thoughts (to Meade) the museum guard overheard, laughed, and nodded knowingly.

Here's a closeup of the artwork that supposedly expresses the fancy-schmancy idea that words have no fixed meaning:



You're not supposed to take video, but if this were video, you'd see that the words blink on and off. There is a tapping sound that corresponds to the rhythm of the blinks, and beyond the wall, in a dark room, there is a black-and-white video playing of a man tapping his feet from one side to the other along the sides of a square marked by tape on the floor. I decided the neon was the sign on the Store of Life, and the stepping, tapping man inside is the reality of what you get in that store — according to the artist (Bruce Nauman) who has not committed suicide, surprisingly.

The piece is called "Human Nature/Life Death."