More Than Words: Text as Visual Form in Artistic Practices
Text in art has had a significant impact throughout history, from antiquity and the middle ages to the modern and contemporary eras. Its significance in artistic expression has been particularly emphasised since the 20th century, evident in movements such as Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, Constructivism, Surrealism, Conceptualism, and more. The interplay between textual and visual expressions has profoundly influenced cultural narratives and intellectual discourses.
This session explores the dynamic relationships between visual and textual forms in artistic practice and investigates how they reflect and redefine one another across diverse cultural contexts and historical periods. By examining these intersections, we seek to understand how artists use text not merely as an adjunct to imagery but a fundamental component of artistic expression.
We will present a diverse range of themes concerning the role of text in art: (1) Aesthetic Integration, how various forms of text create visually compelling works; (2) Conceptual Art, how text communicates complex ideas and narratives; (3) Political and Social Commentary, how text critiques societal norms; (4) New Media and Interactive Forms, the impacts of emerging technologies on the visual representation of text; and (5) Cultural Diversity, how artists incorporate texts in different language scripts, reflecting diverse cultural identities.
Session Convenors:
Jun Zhang, University of York
Lulu Ao, Loughborough University
Speakers:
Matthew Bowman, University of Suffolk
The Vietnam War Did Not Take Place! Experience in, and Experiencing, Fiona Banner’s The Nam
First displayed the previous year in the Hayward Gallery’s Spellbound exhibition, Fiona Banner published her artist’s book The Nam in 1997. Consisting of 1000 pages, The Nam is a frame-by-frame description of five Hollywood films depicting the Vietnam war: Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Hamburger Hill, and Born of the Fourth of July. Converting moving image into text, The Nam reflects upon Banner’s status as a British artist born in the mid-1960s fascinated by films replaying a conflict that she could not experience first-hand.
And yet, The Nam indicates that, in some sense, Vietnam was experienced; not as direct experience, but through layers of mediation. One aim of this paper, then, is to elucidate how Banner’s use of text functions as an endeavour to experience the war. More strongly, it proposes that the act of writing, of attaching words to perceptions, is the basis for experience rather than a retrospective account. And if trauma—war, for example—is often comprehended psychoanalytically as the evacuation of language and the near-suspension of experience, then The Nam’scompulsive textualization moreover constitutes an exploration into the traumatic.
This paper also contends that question of experience become deeply fraught after the 1991 Gulf War. Jean Baudrillard notoriously claimed that the Gulf War “did not happen,” by which he meant that its mediation through cameras and transformation into televisual spectacle precluded any experience of its actuality. In that case, Banner’s The Nam can be read as an effort to reclaim experience through and as mediation, freed from the alienating effects of spectacle.
Bill Balaskas, Kingston University, London
Reading the “polycrisis”: text-based art as an interpretative tool for the 21 st century (an artist’s perspective)
The 21st century has been regularly described as an age of “polycrisis” due to the unprecedented number, interconnectivity, and – most important for visual culture – visibility of concurrent crises. These crises have varied significantly in nature since the turn of the millennium: from the “war on terror” to international economic turmoil; and from the revived threat of global and nuclear conflict to climate crisis and the rise of new pandemics. The complexities of this social, political, and cultural environment have made it increasingly difficult for artists to offer a thorough demystification of today’s world through their works and public engagement activities. This paper will use a personal artistic perspective to argue that text-based art may constitute such a tool of reflection, interpretation, and resistance. Over the last two decades, text has played a key role in my artistic practice across different media, subjects, locations, and exhibition formats. By using this experience as a starting point, and by combining it with the work of other contemporary artists exploring similar issues, my paper will analyse the capacity of text-based art to reveal the roots of the collective uncertainties that reside within the “polycrisis”. At the same time, the paper will argue that text-based art may problematise the very terms and concepts used to describe our current situation by taking advantage of the deconstructive poetics of language.
Fangxu Sun, University of Exeter
Challenging the Monopoly of Naming Rights: The Toponymic Political Art Intervention of the Work “Ge Yu Road” (葛宇路)
Street renaming is not merely a matter of administrative management; it has become a battleground for power struggles, collective memory, and social change within the public realm. When the renaming of streets sparks public debate, it enters the public sphere, prompting reflections on and critiques of how various political regimes use street naming as a tool to maintain ideological hegemony and symbolic power.
This paper examines artist Ge Yulu’s provocative street artwork as an intervention in the context of contemporary Chinese urban governance and public space management. In 2013, Ge, without official authorization, installed a street sign bearing his own name on a previously neglected, unmarked road. This was a clever design choice, as the character “Lu” in Ge Yulu’s name also means “road” in Chinese, adding a playful twist to this work. This work of conceptual art appears not only to challenge bureaucratic procedures surrounding place-naming but also to expose the underlying power structures that govern public memory and urban spaces, while, further, revealing the broader urban management issues caused by China’s rapid urbanisation. Ge Yulu’s project could be interpreted as a form of radical art activism in which, private symbols are introduced into public spaces, thereby disrupting public memory. Over a four-year period, this performative artwork constructed a fabricated public memory, reinforced through public infrastructure, and culminated in a government response that obscured this micro-historical narrative in local memory.
While Ge’s actions might be seen as an innovative and impactful form of social intervention, demonstrating art’s potential in promoting urban governance reforms, they have also been criticised for disrupting established naming conventions and public order. By analysing “Ge Yu Road”, we uncover the role of grassroots street art in influencing the distribution of power within China’s public realm and explore its potential to drive reforms in urban space and governance.
Asia Benedetti, Ca’ Foscari University, Italy
Written on the Body: image and text as feminist identity
The Headless Woman or the Belly Dance (1974) by Nil Yalter is a seminal mixed-media work that examines gender, cultural identity, and the body through a feminist lens. Yalter skillfully integrates text, photography, and drawings, presenting fragmented images of the female torso, devoid of the head. This headlessness symbolizes the objectification and erasure of women’s identities, particularly within cultural narratives.
By incorporating handwritten notes and typed passages, Yalter creates a powerful dialogue about the pressures women face from societal expectations. The work encourages viewers to reflect on the objectification of women, especially Middle Eastern women, and challenges stereotypes associated with belly dancing. Yalter’s innovative fusion of text and imagery transforms her art into a platform for activism, prompting engagement with personal and collective histories while emphasizing art’s potential to inspire social change and amplify overlooked perspectives.
Marta Zboralska, Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford
Frances Stark Reading
I must explain, specify, rationalize, classify, etc. is a 2008 work on paper by the American artist Frances Stark. In the image, a person, perhaps the artist herself, balances precariously on an office chair, holding a spirit level to a wall of text taken from the novel Ferdydurke by the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz. Her confrontation with the excerpt is thus as much formal as it is semiotic: at the same time literal and metaphorical. The way that Stark works with text as her material – how she builds it on a page – is fragmentary, decontextualised, in progress. This paper will ask what it means for an artist to be a reader – especially a shaky one – and a ventriloquist, remaking the words of someone else.
Ronald R. Bernier, Wentworth Institute of Technology, USA
Then as Now: Word and Image in the Art of Ken Aptekar
Paris and New York-based contemporary artist, Ken Aptekar, combines painting –specifically, reimagined quotations of historical art – with text – words and phrases inscribed onto glass panels affixed to the surfaces of the images. The artist’s borrowing from painting’s past, or more accurately fragments of paintings past – the cribbed details themselves subjected to manipulation in scale, orientation, and colour – press the questions of authority and influence, copy and originality. Yet, as if to complicate the anachronism still further, bolted to the front of his paintings are thick glass panels sandblasted with fragmented text, hovering and casting shadows over the image – sometimes private, autobiographic narratives about his own artistic genealogy, and his gendered, religious, and ethic identities; in other examples, he inscribes the voices of self-reflective contemporary viewers; while in still others the text remains more ambiguous, indirect, or redolent of meaning. It is the combination of word and image in Aptekar’s painting that activates a temporal shift in our picture-viewing, just as meaning itself shifts from source to copy. The text in Aptekar’s painting at once distances us, standing between us and the image, forcing a different modality of attending – reading over viewing; and draws us closer by slowing our lingering gaze, holding us in temporal suspension and heightening our urge to look through the marked and reflective glass to the paintings’ surfaces. Viewer response, then, is no longer an aftereffect – supplementary – to the primacy of authorial meaning; rather, it is the very constituent of meaning at the moment of its making and beholding, and a challenge to the notion that art has intrinsic meaning accessible only to the initiated. In the end, we are left with the presence of multiple voices, compound realities in the single image, and a plenitude that depends upon our own behaviours and situations to create meaning, such that meaning itself is not conferred by the work but performed within the relationship between the text/picture and the reader/viewer.
Marco Pasqualini de Andrade, Federal University of Uberlandia, Brazil
Nuno Ramos: texts as matter and image
The purpose of this paper is to discuss the work of Brazilian artist Nuno Ramos (São Paulo, 1960), who emerged on the artistic circuit in the 1980s, linked to neo-expressionist tendencies, but who transformed his production by incorporating issues of materiality and complex narratives, culminating in the practice of large-scale installations. In such proposals, he uses three-dimensional objects made of noble materials, such as granite and marble, but also other soft or fluid materials, in addition to appropriations of objects and the use of texts written on the floor or walls. With a background in philosophy and linked to the literary world, such texts are of great significance for the construction of his poetics. The aim is to analyse the use of texts in his work, in their material and imagery aspects, in order to understand both his connection to a tradition of Brazilian artists and his particularities. To this end, artists such as Mira Schendel, Rubens Gerchman and Cildo Meireles will be discussed, in dialogue with philosopher Vilém Flusser, who believes that in the current post-historical era, texts have been devoured by images.
Sonia Arribas, Pompeu Fabra University, Spain
Irene Valle, University of Granada, Spain
Something completely mad and extraordinary: Text as Pictorial Form in Charlotte Salomon’s Life? or Theatre?
We will concentrate on one essential element of Charlotte Salomon’s (1917-1943) work Life? or Theatre? that until now has not been properly investigated: the use of text as visual form. At the level of its content, we will take the text in dialectical confrontation with the paintings and will argue that the work is mainly dedicated to the remembrance of her love for Alfred Wolfsohn, her stepmother’s singing teacher. Taking into account her own words, we will show that writing serves to give Salomon stability to prevent her from madness under harrowing circumstances. Her text can be read as a reaffirmation of love in all of its facets, including the dark passages which are found behind the entire enterprise of Life? or Theatre?.
At the level of the calligraphy itself, i.e. how the text itself is a pictorial form, we will show how her handwriting develops in multiple interactions with the images, often challenging the meaning ascribed to them. It conveys subjective conflicts and moods with its fine and fierce brushstrokes in capital letters and in different colours. It also works, as in a comic, as the words of the characters; other times it functions as an expression of subjective destitution and recovery, with letters and colours that gradually increase or fade. Other times it appears on a book, a self-reflective mode in which the artist draws a book or a painting and writes on it, and other times the text forms a shape, as in a graphic poem.