Reading the Gallery:
On Art & Text
“Words, text, art, text art, artists’ text, art writing.” Mike Pinnington on the intersection of and relationship between art and text…
When we speak about art, we often refer to the ‘story’ of art, about ‘reading’ a painting, or of an exhibition’s overarching ‘narrative’. Critics, in turn, have spent countless hours and millions upon millions of words – aiming to, but certainly not always – elucidating such things. The intersection between art and text makes its presence felt in various ways, and the history of artists using text is as complex as it is rich.
Opting to use text as a medium can be a choice made on the basis of its communicative potential – from phrasing down to typographical selection (more of which later); it has contained and continues to contain within it a tapestry of meaning. Language systems, whether written or visual, are rarely merely denotative delivery methods, after all. At the dawn of modernism, artists such as Hannah Höch, along with her fellow Dadaist and partner, Raoul Hausmann, introduced newspaper clippings in subversive, satirical photomontage; cubists, and later, pop artists and conceptual artists, would also incorporate or, indeed, foreground wordplay.
The association between language and the visual arts continues to manifest itself in gallery settings, suggesting a symbiotic – if not always obvious – relationship. Many artists operate at this intersection; among them, Glenn Ligon, whose work, referring to writers such as James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison and Zora Neale Hurston, addresses issues including identity and authorship. His 2006 painted neon work, Untitled, spells the word AMERICA. Painted black, it is heavy with implication and can be read in manifold ways.
In 2012, he revisited and further complicated the proposition with Double America, addressing the conflicting viewpoints of a country that, three years previously, had elected its first Black president in Barack Obama. It was, in-part, inspired by Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, which famously begins: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times… One can’t help but wonder what a contemporaneous iteration from Ligon would look like, as the so-called American Dream and that nation’s heroic myth of itself is further obliterated.
The list of those leaning into text, or texts, and their uses by now seems endless. Conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth’s work is permeated with his interest in linguistic anthropology and the effect language has on the way we interpret and represent the world; Cécile B. Evans’ Sprung a Leak (2016), was inspired by a soliloquy in the 1634 play, Two Noble Kinsmen (Shakespeare and Fletcher); neo-conceptual artist Jenny Holzer has long used language as a means to generate debate around social conventions and clichés. Her words, as new platforms have developed and emerged, have migrated from her early use of fly posters, to employ electronic and digital media (and in the heady days of Twitter, an unsanctioned Jenny Holzer ‘bot’, gave new life to her aphorisms).
That we use terms such as ‘narrative’, ‘visual language’ and ‘vocabulary’ to describe and discuss artistic practice, works of art and exhibition rationale, shouldn’t be surprising. As mentioned, since the early twentieth century, the written word – either painted, inscribed, appropriated or otherwise – has been a significant feature of many artists’ outputs. Equally, many artists have and continue to make work in response to literary stimuli. This is nothing new, but, in our digital, post-internet age, more than ever before, different meanings are prone to develop when ever more images and more words meet; the ramifications are global and immediate.
Writer, editor and curator Shumon Basar has said: “We’re interested in the exponential way meaning develops when an image meets words. A third space emerges. It’s also simply how we are literate today on social media and the Internet. Images come with captions, and texts are illustrated with images. Our artists are the experts but increasingly so is everyone on the planet.”
But language, text – and who wields it – isn’t neutral; words are powerful tools; how we use them matters. Ideally, this would be with respect, care and consideration. But we know this isn’t (and certainly hasn’t always been) the case. 2021 Bluecoat exhibition, A Look Inside, included large-scale depictions of Word documents (or similar), by African-American artist Deborah Roberts in her Pluralism Series (2016); they make for a stark depiction of the power of text to other, to dismiss.
Writing on the occasion of the exhibition, Kadish Morris said: “In Roberts’ text work, Pluralism (2016), typically Black feminine names are listed in a serif font, but many appear misspelled and a zig-zagged red line below asserts that they are erroneous. This work reveals the ways in which racial biases are coded into systems. Keshia, Latifah, Shanice are all unrecognised by the computer software, thus rendering their identities not only invalid, but corrupt. These are some of the ways in which Black girls perpetually oscillate between states of invisibility and hypervisibility.”
Currently at the same gallery, in The Moveable Scene of the Page, Birmingham-based artist Joanne Masding brings various mediums and genre to the fore in an exploration of how we read artefacts and objects, with writing and sculpture presented as live, ongoing, processes. In the case of the former, Masding includes pages from her novel, Mermaid’s Taxonomy (which she has added to during the show’s run); visitors will find and are able to take away an additional text, Saying Something/Reading Something – a rumination on the acts of reading and speaking; and a new font based on Monster Munch crisps, making letters tactile and – especially to a certain section of audiences – nostalgic.
Adding yet another layer to proceedings, and at least for this sometime writer of gallery interpretation, among the most interesting is the decision by the artist to include ceramic labels (as opposed to card) for works. It’s smart, playful, and poses the question: are they to be considered works in and of themselves? They have no labels of their own, but hand-crafted objects they nonetheless remain, meaning they take up space on the wall and in your mind in such a way traditional labels don’t. Masding, while certainly not the first or only artist to employ this tactic, recognises that it remains a fascinating, worthwhile one. It opens the door to questions regarding the attention we pay in galleries: to artworks and their attendant texts; whether or not a hierarchy exists between them, one in which words trump the objects they are written for and in response to, without which they wouldn’t otherwise exist.
In any case, words, text, art, text art, artists’ text, art writing, none of these things are going anywhere. At least not while they continue to provoke such questions as those above. Like language itself, they will continue to evolve and adapt depending on culture, politics and society; their syntax, grammar and meaning as dynamic, fluid and rich as ever. And yet more words will follow, from critics, essayists and cultural commentators, who will continue to write new chapters in the story of art.
Mike Pinnington
Joanne Masding, The Moveable Scene of the Page, continues at the Bluecoat until 11 May
Images, from top: Joanne Masding, The Moveable Scene of the Page, installation view, © Roger Sinek; Untitled (2006) © Glenn Ligon, courtesy Thomas Dane Gallery, London; Cécile B. Evans: Sprung a Leak 2016, at Tate Liverpool. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Emanuel Layr, Vienna; Deborah Roberts Sovereign #2, 2016. ‘A look inside’ installation view at Bluecoat Liverpool. Courtesy the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London. Photography: Harry Meadley; Joanne Masding, The Moveable Scene of the Page, installation view, © Roger Sinek
