Painted Words

This paper was delivered as the keynote to the Typotage conference at the Museum für Druckkunst, Leipzig in 2011 and subsequently published in the design journal Slanted

The introduction of words into pictures is a characteristic phenomenon of 20th century art. Dialogues between the contrasting codes of visual representation and linguistic description, proliferate across the early 20th century avant-garde, and inform many aspects of current fine art practice.
Letters, print and the urban condition
We can trace the origins of this development to the nineteenth century and the emergence of an urban culture in the wake of the industrial revolution.
The emergence of a popular culture of print and promotion, redefined the urban landscape and thus significantly altered society’s relationship to the visual form of language.
During this time we can see the printed word getting out from the covers and the page, and onto the street, becoming an element of the social environment through advertising, promotion, and the development of ephemeral print and a popular press for a growing literate population.
Out of a period of mass urbanisation, the city emerges as a metaphor for the human consciousness in early 20th century art. During this time, the printed word becomes a defining feature of the urban environment; an environment increasingly defined by the action of machines.
As the invention of the typewriter narrowed the difference between writing and printing, mechanisation prompted a more direct involvement in the visual form of text in the pages of manifestoes and poems.
We can trace the origins of this interaction in Stephane Mallarmé’s ‘Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard’, a dense and complex symbolist text animated by the articulation of indents and margins to form a visual composition. This references the ancient tradition of the figured poem and anticipates subsequent developments in the ‘Calligrammes’ of Guillaume Apollinaire
The early 20th century avant-garde used language as a visual strategy, while opening up visual art to include the graphic language of words and letters. From this point onwards we can see the visual arts increasingly adopting language, not only as a motif but as an instrument of enquiry.
We might characterise this by two metaphors: language as a mirror and language as a lever.
(As we consider work from later in the century, I will propose that we add a third category: language as a field)
Language as a mirror: Graphic vocabularies of the city in the machine age
Early 20th century art was characterised by the search for new visual vocabularies to represent the condition of modernity, and thus to reflect the sensibility of urban man in the machine age. From the nineteenth century the visual environment of the European city dweller was pervaded by the printed word, and representation of the modern age reflected an urban environment rich in the ephemeral typography of advertising, packaging and promotion
Type thus becomes emblematic of the modern condition, as reflected in the work of painters including Fernand Leger and Robert Delaunay, and in the interaction between writers and artists such as Blaise Cendrars’ collaboration with Sonia Delaunay-Terk, The Transsiberien Railway.
An enthusiasm for the energy of machines and industry drove the work of Futurist painters and writers, while Gertrude Stein said her prose ‘imitated the sound of the streets and the movement of the automobiles’
For the first time, European artists in the inter-war years were to look at the developing culture of the USA as a model for modern life. This is particularly evident in the careers of Francis Picabia and Albert Gliezes (European painters transformed and redefined by the impact of American popular culture) while the development of a modern movement in the USA refracted the possibilities of the European avant-garde through the particular characteristics of the American experience, in a quest to develop what Wanda Corn has called ‘The Great American Thing’. The emergence of a distinct American identity in painting, reflecting the typography of urban spaces, can be seen in the work of Gerald Murphy, an American expatriate in Paris, and of Charles Demuth and Stuart Davis in the USA. While this work builds upon the European precedent for the introduction of letters into pictorial space, we can see important differences in Murphy or Davis’s use of type and language when compared to Delaunay or Gleizes. Where Delaunay fragments the message to render it abstract or at least to integrate it with the environment, the American Precisionists represent it in its entirety; embracing the slogan, logo or found sign not simply as found visual matter but as language; organised as linguistic documentation rather than by purely visual values. In this their work interacts with the craft of the signwriter or billboard artist and prefigures the use of language by the pop artists of the 1960s, notably the former billboard painter James Rosenquist
Language as a lever (1) The interrogation of space
In the ‘synthetic’ cubism of Picasso and Braque, the introduction of a flat scrap of printed paper throws down a challenge to the conventions of illusionistic space. The introduction of an actual object disrupts the idea of ‘representation’, while the unequivocally two-dimensional nature of this object confounds the viewers’ expectation of perspective and spatial illusion. Printed surfaces are used as an instrument to challenge the conventions of dimensionality.
Not only is the printed word being introduced into the environment of the canvas, but our relationship to the canvas is being radically revised; as it becomes something we read as well as something we view.
Here, language material is being used to test visual space, and to critique the conventions by which dimensionality is represented, identifying them as culturally relative rather than physiologically absolute.
Language as a lever (2) Words against language
Introduced to subvert pictorial space, the actual words and phrases in cubist still lives were largely arbitrary or random. Concurrent with this was the emergence, from literary origins, of visual Interventions in language, seen in the work of Guillaume Apollinaire, a key commentator on cubism alongside his seminal role as experimental writer and visual poet.
The disruption of the printed word has its own transgressive resonance; evoking the dynamics of subversion and willed chaos. FT Marinetti had argued for the destruction of grammar and syntax, for a ‘Parole in Liberta’, a convulsive typography characterised by deliberate misalignment, mixed typefaces and a departure from the gravitational field of the baseline and the page grid. Russian Futurist writers used the idea of a meaningless word; Zaum, originated by Aleksei Kruchenykh in 1913. The Dadaists in Zurich and Berlin adopted as their title an ambiguous child-noise which was phonetic rather than linguistic, while Kurt Schwitters applied to all his extraordinary cross-media output the prefix ‘Merz’, a term which is itself the product of a visual intervention (derived from a collage fragment, torn from the word Kommertz)
Random intervention was a key characteristic of dada and surrealist practices across both visual and language-based work. In Tzara’s ‘To make a Dadaist poem’, random process shifts language into the physical world; the sequencing of the words is driven by a physical process rather than an intellectual and linguistic one.
Schwitters’s visual poems and sonic performances detach and fracture the component parts of language, treating letter and sound as self-sufficient entities, abstract and self-referential. Language and linguistic structure can be read as symbol of political order and social control, against which disruptive typography becomes a visual metaphor for revolution and anarchy.
If Braque and Picasso were using the printed word as a lever to test the conventions of visual space, both Marinetti and Schwitters used visual space and physical intervention to test the authority of language. In this context language is used not as an instrument of meaning, but rather as a tool for questioning the concept of communicable meaning itself.
Debates in popular culture – type in pop art
The 1950‘s and 60s saw a number of cultural tendencies grouped as ‘Pop Art’ They had in common a reappraisal of the subject matter of art in relation to postwar popular culture, and an implicit challenge to the prevailing modernist ethos of the time. The origins of the concept can be dated to Paolozzi’s collage I Was a Rich Man’s Plaything from 1947, possibly the source of the term ‘pop art’ and more certainly the first instance of the use of this word in a major artwork. In its re-evaluation of ephemera, Paolozzi’s ‘pop’ is continuing the project initiated by Schwitters’s ‘Merz’, making art-works from materials outside the normal scope of critical approval. A key difference is that Paolozzi is making a specific cultural claim for the materials he is using and proposing a re-evaluation of the products of a predominantly American popular culture from the perspective of postwar Britain.
Both popular print and language itself were important components of the visual vocabulary of pop art, which made extensive use of the vernacular phraseology of advertising and comics. Set in contrast to the prevailing culture of abstract expressionism, which invested the gestural mark with auratic resonance, pop art embraced type as a key element in a culture of multiplicity and mass communication.
Pop art challenged prevailing orthodoxies at several levels: in the adoption of subject matter and idiom from banal popular sources, and in the dislocation of physical relationships in the making of art; intervening between the artist’s hand and the product through delegation (screenprints carried out by assistants) a preference for inert surfaces and the minimisation of gesture, and, crucially, the idea of the multiple as against the unique. Pop artists adopted the graphic typography of the ephemeral, as a device against the orthodoxies of the fine art scene; the inert graphic language of the commercial multiple as a counter to the mystique of autographic, individuated mark making.
Type and lettering play a crucial part in this argument, both by referencing the banal and ephemeral but also by reinstating the idea of referentiality, the idea that paintings may have readable meanings and relationships to ideas outside themselves; that they need not be mute records of creative struggle but may be a medium of commentary, argument and visual wit.
In the post-expressionist debate around the status of the unique art object, type takes on a further resonance since a typeface is by definition a multiple work. The typography of soup tins, banknotes, packaging provided a model for affectlessness and the negation of gesture.
Jasper Johns, Jim Dine and Larry Rivers all introduced type and language into the canvas using commercial letter stencils, a multiple tool mediating between writing and painting. It is also found in much of the work of Tom Phillips. Phillips’s O Châteaux, a painting which is about the idea of Paul Cezanne, as a poem or song might be, is surrounded by a stencilled text in which a sequence of monophones serves to expose the irrational behaviour of language:
Phillips’s book work A Humument is a (Human) docu(ment) but also an argu(ment) between visual and linguistic form; an argument brought about by visual intervention into language. This is a project which reflects practices from experimental writing as much as from the visual arts.
Concurrent with the development of visual enquiry into language, was the emergence of concrete poetry and book art; areas of multiple production, where language and visual practices converge.
Type as critique of language: the act of naming
Larry Rivers’s French Vocabulary Lesson from 1961 articulates a tension which has preoccupied not only the visual arts but much of western thought; the contradictory and problematic relationship between description and actuality, between signifier and signified.
The ambiguity of language is most clearly demonstrated in the act of naming; the name is an ‘arbitrary signifier’. Neither its shape nor sound actually ‘represent’ the subject in the way that a painting or drawing does. This is one of the reasons that introducing written language into the painting is both disruptive and resonant.
The idea of names is critiqued in the ironic ‘naming of parts’ in Rivers’ painting, establishing a theme which occurs across postwar art from the pop period onwards. Ironic ‘labeling’ heightens the tension between object and noun, between language and actuality.
This reflexive juxtaposition of naming and showing is extended in works which encompass the viewer’s own experience, providing ironic commentary upon the process of observation and interpretation, speculating on the relationship between the canvas and the spectator.
Much of the work of Lawrence Weiner interrogates the role of the viewer, replicating in written language what we are seeing or doing. In the work of Joseph Kossuth, language expressed through type becomes an instrument of philosophical enquiry, visually articulating arguments around representation characteristic of 20th-century art but also of 20th century philosophy.
Language as Field: Type as surface
Synthetic cubism reinstated the flat surface of the picture plane as an attribute of the painting, rather than a constraint to be transcended through the illusion of space. This informs the ‘high modern’ values which elevate the painting as a self-referential object, autonomous, mute and cleansed of any descriptive or interpretative function. Flatness and ‘medium specificity’ were key preoccupations of critics like Clement Greenberg in the 50s. Ironically, it is language, the very mechanism of interpretation which high abstraction aspired to transcend, that provides a mechanism for doing this. Type and letters are inherently two-dimensional media whose use presupposes a flat surface. For Paul Klee in 1918, as for Jasper Johns in the 1960s, language provides a rhythmic surface which is explicitly non-representational. Composed of the material of description (words) it provides a field which explicitly denies a dimensional reading as illusionistic space. This visual argument was to be playfully explored and critiqued at the peripheries of pop art. Jasper Johns’ number paintings use the numerical sign to provide boundaries that have a common understood value but no representational function, which therefore and resist any descriptive reading. The numerals are a surface of signs abstracted beyond function, a neutral, non-representational motif highlighting the idea of materiality and paint.
Tom Phillips, in the painting Here we Exemplify, explores the idea of painting as text, or in Phillips’s terms ‘thesis as object’. Phillips’s full title defines a polarity between ‘Thesis as object’ and ‘artwork as residue of process’, neatly articulating the condition of an artist working at the cusp of modernist and post-modern critical values. It is a grid of letters, only intermittently readable, in which the title is repeatedly overlaid to form a kind of compositional polyphony in which language is submerged in its own pattern.In a related painting The Message Digests Itself, Phillips describes as testing the hypothesis:
‘…that the title of the picture could become the picture and that the picture would consist only of a description of the method of its making which would form that title… ‘
‘…Once again the techniques of musical composition (catches, rounds, canons, fugues) were not far away.’
Words and public spaces: language and sculpture
Removing words and letters from the two dimensions of the page, dislocates them from the context which gave them meaning; repositioned in space they present a contrary aspect as pure form, their abstract characteristics illuminated by their repositioning within a sculptural space.
In the work of the Catalan sculptor Jaume Plensa, letters drawn from multiple language systems, form the material substance of a sculpture; a ‘skin’ of language that encloses space and gives it readable meaning. Jenny Holtzer’s installations set up a tension between language and environment by placing ambiguous, poetic or rhetorical text within spaces commonly associated with public information or instruction. Joan Brossa’s Transitable poem in three parts proposes the act of walking through architectural letterforms in a predetermined sequence, as a reading of the poem’s three parts. (birth, path with pauses and intonations, and destruction)
The letters and punctuation marks which make up the sculpture are transposed into the realm of the sculptural and architectural, but retain a poetic sequence of ‘reading’ fulfilled by walking the poem in correct sequence.
Conclusion
In the progression from the cubist cityscape into the exploration of graphic abstraction, words have remained a significant instrument of visual enquiry. The 20th century has seen language and picture, description and representation, sometimes locked in an embrace, sometimes wrestling one another to the ground. Written language has given the visual arts a mirror to reflect upon itself, and a lever to critique and examine its underlying precepts.
Now, in the digital environment, as well as the physical one, words and letters coexist in a more closely integrated form than at any time in the preceding 500 years; sharing a common space on desktop and user interface.
As the artists of the early 20th century explored the typographic environment of the city, so we now begin to explore the typographic environs of a virtual culture. The marriage of image and language continues to offer two ways of explaining the world, in which each provides us with a means to a deeper understanding of the other.