The Eloquent Spaces of Silence: D.A. Prigov's Visual Art

This paper focuses on D.A. Prigov's work in the visual arts and argues that the surprising and surprisingly stable iconography of his art complicates and challenges the understanding of “Project D.A.P.” that he promoted during his lifetime in numerous interviews and theoretical texts. I argue that rather than contributing to the “flickering” persona that Prigov created in his poetry and performance practice, the visual allowed Prigov to treat earnestly the metaphysical questions that conceptual art typically dismisses, but to do so in a deliberately silent fashion, by showing rather than telling his audiences about a realm of existential mystery that he felt an insistent, life-long need to explore.