sadie
plant
ENGLISH
DEUTSCH
FRANÇAIS
Foreword to Art and Writing
Word and image; text and texture; letter and line.
There are so many levels on which writing and art
come together, so many ways in which they interact,
so much to be said about this interface that it is
difficult to know where to start and when to stop.
Sometimes the connections are very loose, as in texts
which are illustrated or simply adorned by imagery,
or images supported by text: the essays in a catalogue
accompanying an exhibition, the titles - present even
for "untitled" works - which, according to convention,
are printed on small white cards and mounted
discreetly on the gallery wall. More complex and
interactive conjunctions come with comics and
graphic novels, illuminated manuscripts, and the best
of children's illustrated books. There are rare but
compelling examples of adult illustrated prose such as
that produced by WG Sebald, whose use of
photographs as indeterminately fictional documents
parallels the dream-like nature of his texts, or Tom
Phillip's glorious Humument, which brings text and
images into a unique and dense relationship, or much
older experimental publications such as Laurence
Sterne's Tristram Shandy.
The modernist interest in artists' notebooks and
manifestos gave a new role and prominence to artists'
writings, elevating them to the level of the art work
itself. Art criticism and theory spawned their own
genres, sometimes of simple commentary, sometimes
of striking value in their own right: Klee's Angelus
Novus is both the occasion for Walter Benjamin's
exploration of the very idea of an "angel of history",
and also a painting transformed by this critique.
Cubist painters experimented with the use of
newspapers, tickets, and other everyday items in
painting, and with their collages and photomontages,
as well as their experiments with typographic poetry,
the Dadaists really began to integrate images and text.
The drawings of Adolf Wölfli, the "outsider" artist actually a true insider, locked up as he was for much
of his life - who covered the backs of his drawings
with wild writings and filling every space of his
images, in what is said to have been his horror vacui,
with words, sentences, sometimes long, spiralling
texts, demonstrate the power of more intense
interactions between the image and the word. Works
like Rene Magritte's Ceci n'est pas une pipe or Roy
Lichtenstein's Whaam, and those of artists such as
Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer make the
connection undeniable.
When Paul Klee wrote of drawing as "taking a line
for a walk", he might just as easily have been
describing the work of the poet as that of the artist.
Indeed Klee's work is an interesting example of an
artist using letter-like formations without regard for
writing itself: an audience unfamiliar with the
Western alphabet might assume that his forests and
cities are populated by words. But artists who use
words - as Klee also did from time to time -which
carry all the meaning and resonance of language in
their works are clearly doing something else. They
are, at their most interesting, using text as a dense
kind of image, an image which has a richer, or at least
very different, function and effect than, say, the patch
of colour next to it. A painting which uses words has
an additional string to its bow, an extra means with
which to communicate, something which detractors
might even feel allows it to cheat by taking a short cut
and making an unmediated appeal to its audience.
But why not use whatever materials are to hand? A
text which relies on the use of italics or capital letters
rather than using the words themselves might also be
said to be cutting corners to produce its emphatic
effects. But all writing is inescapably visual, and the
contemporary sophistication of advertising and
graphic design has left no doubt about the power of
fonts and colours, even handwritten styles, to shape
the impact of a text. What happens to a poem by
William Blake when, stripped of its colours and
images, it appears in the Baskerville print of a cheap
paperback, or can be shifted between fonts on a
screen?
The use of writing, whether hard, impossible, or easy
to read, is now a common feature of contemporary
art. It was, in fact, the prevalence of textual material
in so many of Ikon's recent shows that prompted us to
explore this theme. The notebooks, sketches, and
texts scrawled on the wall of the gallery - and even its
toilets - by Nedko Solakov; the postcards and dated
boxes painted with such precision by On Kawara; the
almost legible masking tape writings stuck with such
abandon on the wall by Matias Faldbakken: as artists
become increasingly free and bold in their use of
materials, media, and themes, it seems that word and
image, text and texture, letter and line, are coming
together as never before - at least, that is, in the
context of Western art and languages. Elsewhere,
they have never been so far apart: Chinese script,
itself composed of pictograms rather than letters in
the western sense, has always been incorporated into
traditional Chinese painting, and the Islamic desire to
avoid representational forms has given a complexity
to calligraphy which has long blurred distinction
between letters and images in Arabic, Farsi, and
Urdu. Artists like He An, whose Mandarin text ran
across the top of a Birmingham car park, or Shahzia
Sikander, with her abstract lines dovetailing into Thai
and Urdu scripts, or Shuruq Hulub, whose Book of
Signatures brought Arabic into the gallery, have put
some very different relations between image and text
on show at Ikon too.
Those who cannot read the script, whether because of
their own linguistic ignorance or the deliberate use of
illegibility by the artist, may of course miss out on
swathes of meaning and affect. But such loss can also
be a privilege. Scripts which are scrambled, obscured,
incomplete, or simply unknown to their audience can
give writing a chance to break free of the imperatives
of meaning. And even at its most legible, the presence
of any writing in visual art is less about
communication than the decontextualisation of text, a
deterritorialisation which both reduces and elevates
writing to the status of drawing: a matter of taking
lines for a walk.
Sadie Plant, Birmingham 2012
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