SESSION: Word Acts: Text in Visual Art at the Intersection of Histories and Geographies
Text has become a familiar presence in contemporary art, in various media and forms, yet its function often goes under-discussed. Historical frameworks, including modern and pre-modern art, offer important references and can help to understand the complexity of how language is used, also in current artistic practice.
This session begins with a simple question: what do we still not know, or not yet ask, about the role of text in visual art? Text is not simply something to be read or interpreted, but something that shapes how the work unfolds and how viewers engage with it.Language can be central to the work, even when it is unreadable.
This session invites papers on the under-recognised or under-theorised uses of text in the histories of visual art. It is open but not limited to (1) Text as image, code, score, or embodied gesture; (2) Language as spatial material in contemporary and historic sites; (3) Legacies and re-workings of historical text-based art; (4) Multilingualism and the use of different writing systems—alphabetic, ideographic, or hybrid; (5) Voice, silence, or the refusal of language in text-based art.
The session encourages contributions on diversified historic periods and geographies, and on their intersections. It aims to open up new conversations about what remains materially, methodologically, and critically underexplored in the use of the written word in historic and contemporary art.
Session Convenors:
Lulu Ao, Loughborough University
Giovanna Guzzi-Rossetti, Cambridge School of Art, Anglia Ruskin University
Session Speakers:
Farah Taleb
Deconstructing, Reconstructing, and Reimagining Worlds Through Words
This paper examines the use of script in modern and contemporary arts from West Asia and North Africa, exploring how artists have engaged with the written word beyond its aesthetic dimensions. The use of script in visual art from the region has often been interpreted as a continuation of Islamic artistic traditions. Such readings, however, risk flattening the intellectual and artistic complexity of these practices and overlooking the historical, social, and political conditions that shaped them. Moreover, they pay little attention to the conceptual distinctions between traditional, modern, and contemporary approaches.
This paper focuses on the shift in the use of the written word from the modern to the contemporary artists. Mid-twentieth-century movements such as Hurufiyya and Saqqakhaneh, shaped by discourses of nationalism, independence and originality, marked a turning point in regional modernism through their engagement with the letter. Contemporary artists, on the other hand, reincorporated the letter through various prisms. Instead of a linear development or continuity, they present a reconfiguration, deconstruction and reconstruction of narratives of authenticity, modern nationalism, originality, and identity constructed by earlier generations.
By tracing these transformations, the paper argues that, beyond its content and readability, contemporary artists use of the script often conceals as much as it reveals. It operates as a tool to engage audiences with questions of perception, translation, memory, and belonging while redefining their relation to both modernist heritage and global contemporary art.
Karen von Veh, University of Johannesburg
Picturing language: The work of Willem Boshoff
I discuss work by South African artist and ‘wordsmith’ Willem Boshoff (b.1951), framed by my response to an exhibition of Chinese contemporary art held at the Metropolitan Museum, New York, in 2014. Titled ‘Ink Art: Past as Present, ’ the exhibition featured many works that used the written word but in ways that both continued and subverted Chinese traditions. Zhang Huan’s Family Tree (2001), and Xu Bing’s Book from the Sky, for example, use characters and calligraphy that refer to the historic cultural value of the written word, but by reinventing traditional calligraphic forms, they fundamentally alter both the medium and the context in a way that responds conceptually to a global contemporary ‘zeitgeist’.
Boshoff similarly engages with the deconstruction of language and its reinvention as an aesthetic visual experience. Through analyses of selected works, I show how words become ‘concrete poems,’ provocative conceptual art pieces, sculptural manifestations of definitions for blind people, and a means to reconcile and integrate different cultures. Boshoff’s obsession with words and meanings has made him unique in South African art, but his oeuvre aligns with the approach taken in many of the works in the New York exhibition. I suggest that Boshoff’s work similarly resonates with a tradition in which writing may exist in visually aesthetic terms on one level, as knowledge dissemination on another, and ultimately may produce complex semantic reinterpretations through the combination of visual presentation and conceptual meaning in its new context as a work of art.
Jonathan Shirland, Bridgewater State University
“Words from Walks”: Textual intersections in the work of Hamish Fulton
Hamish Fulton has declared that “there are no words in nature”, but words play complex roles in his work that operate at the intersection of what he maintains are “two entirely separate activities: walking and art” Drawing on archival research, interviews with the artist, the field of walking studies, and direct experience re-walking routes central to Hollow Lane and Song of the Skylark, this paper explores the deployment of words in his ‘walk-texts’ that shift between factual data, code, image, ambulatory rhythm, token and counting system. Derived from walking in 25 countries, his walk-texts traverse histories and geographies as they are repeatedly shuffled into new groups, configurations and modalities. Attention will be paid to his experiments with Sanskrit and Kanji in his efforts to honour indigenous knowledge and advocate for the rights of nature without resorting to facile acts of prosopopoeia. The relationship between Fulton’s restrained walk-texts and the abundant but fragmentary word acts of his walking journals and essays will also be considered as part of his efforts to convey the “blending of mindbody with land,” whilst refuting overly literary modes and highlighting the myopia of art-historical references and categories. Fulton’s walk-texts assert the untranslatability of walking as embodied experience whilst refusing to “provide the relief of wordless abstract art” to articulate strident political concerns. As such, words act upon the tensions between legibility and opacity in Fulton’s practice, opening up productively unstable sites of negotiation between the artist, the viewer, and the more-than-human world.
Susie Beckham, Yale Center for British Art
“The PRB was here”: invasive text as cipher in John Everett Millais’s Isabella (1848-9)
The act of inscribing one’s name on an object or site of historical relevance is a way to commune with the past, enabling one to bridge disparate times through a shared mark of personal presence. The graffitied name can thus be seen to give the marker the power to transcend temporal boundaries and forge anachronistic connections.
A traditional artist’s signature, typically tucked away in the lower corner of a picture, declares the artist’s authorship of the material work. However, in works of art where the artist has embedded their signature within the pictorial composition, the signature assumes a graffiti-esque character. The artist has left their mark on a space where they do not belong.
In John Everett Millais’s painting Isabella (1848-9), set in quattrocento Italy, he attaches the initials of his secret group, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, as a monogram to the end of his artist’s signature. However, the “PRB” letters were also added to the narrative scene, located as a carving on the titular’s character’s seat. Through this addition, the PRB trespass on a temporal and narrative space that is not their own; their presence here marked with a graffiti-like “tag” to obscure their identity and hide from retribution. In this paper, I explore the narrative implications of this English nineteenth-century group’s self-insertion within an Italian medieval scene. Far from being an innocuous detail, the initials are revealed to be cipher for the group’s aims at their debut public showing, saliently communicating the PRB’s manifesto and commitment to intertextuality.