The ‘Art and Language’ Category of Conceptual Art
Art is its own language separate from written language. But from the 1960s onward, some artists began to introduce words and letters into their work quite aggressively. What was the reasoning behind this? It had to do with testing the boundaries of words and concepts—letters are shapes after all. And what was the difference between an idea written down and when that idea was rendered in some way? In other cases, when organized in the right way, words and images could work of each other with a special kind of friction and dynamism.
Words, Signs, Symbols
By the 1960s, the Modernist need for art to diverge from the written word had relaxed. Artists began to explore how words infiltrated the visual field.
An artist who has always been difficult to categorize, Jasper Johns, made paintings out of numbers and letters which, like his flag paintings, sought the threshold between the image as a linguistic sign and the physical assemblage of paint, line, and colour.
A significant part of Johns' work also uses numbers and letters. These are distributed as a grid, or the letter or number is given just singularly. The humble numbers and letters were subjected to all kinds of textural and gestural marks and changes.
tate.org.uk. Jasper Johns’ Works Using Letters or Numbers. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/johns-0-through-9-t00454
There are many ways that Johns' work can be interpreted. One is how it explores the line where a sign begins and a different kind of sign ends. In other words, when you see gestural markings around a letter, you begin to question the status of that letter: you might begin to see it as just the armature, the clothesline if you like, for the sake of marks.
The obverse is also the case: the signification of the number of the letter begins to undermine the aesthetic effects of the abstract mark-making, but to a degree, that is impossible to measure.
Numbers are there to signify something concrete: 1, 2, 3…, while abstract marks are just that, abstracted from the concrete, made into something indefinite. Johns effectively brings these two categories, or meanings, together in how friction and harmony also seem to coexist in some blissfully perverse way.
To be sensitive to these ambiguities and plays makes just examining and considering his work a great deal of fun.
Performing Language: Directions and Plans
Most art begins with an idea. Depending on how you want to define it, all art does. The intention to make a work of art is already an idea unto itself. An intention to make an abstract work for which you don't have a pre-determined idea is still an idea. It is merely different from one where you might say you intend to paint an apple or a tree.
More often than not, ideas can be quite complex and involved, and they involve language: running through options in your head, writing ideas down in a workbook or diary, discussing the idea with a colleague or friend.
One key aspect of conceptual art is taking the linguistic starter, or template, as a premise, knowing that there is always a difference between the verbal plan, the initial intent, and the outcome as a physical work of art. Exploring linguistic or semiotic thresholds was enormously important for this generation of artists.
One of the ways is to explore the verbal through the body. To say 'tap your head' is straightforward enough, but it is revealed to be an abstraction when confronted with the act itself. The phrase is universal, but when one person does it, the smallest details of the act make it unique.
In a series of film and video experiments in 1971-2, Idea Demonstrations, the Australian conceptual and performance artists Peter Kennedy and Mike Parr physically enacted a simple action or problem that had previously been written down. Items include:
12. Sit up and down as fast as possible in front of a movie camera. Continue until exhausted.14. stare at a strong light without blinking21. sitting before an audience … bare your shoulder. Let a friend bite into your shoulder … until blood appears.
Peter Kennedy and Mike Parr. In a series of film and video experiments in 1971-2, Idea Demonstrations, physically enacted a simple action or problem that had previously been written down. http://scanlines.net/object/idea-demonstrations
As well as being landmark works in the development of experimental film and video art, such instructions epitomize the methodology of concept and body art. Conceptual art relies to a greater or lesser degree on a linguistic framework, usually found in a written directive, to seek out the limits of words as seen in its translation into action, at which point the action and time take over—or does it?
The conceptual artist is always interested in the degrees of encroachment of the written idea.
From another standpoint, the relationship between the written schema and the enacted event [[gives birth to non-equivalence despite being, in theory, the same. This examination of the limit, or liminal point, between language and event, also accounts for the incorporation of pain.[\]climits are paralleled to the impossible and unrepresentable limits of thought and language.
Language vs. Space
The limits of thought are an ongoing preoccupation of the two seminal Conceptual language artists, Joseph Kosuth and Lawrence Weiner. In his 2000 installation at the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin Nach Alles/After All, Weiner referred to the university's namesake across the road, Alexander von Humboldt, the naturalist who is one of the fathers of taxonomy and modern science.
Reference to be provided…
As is characteristic of Weiner's work, polished, graphic lines and texts were applied directly on the gallery walls. They referred to the exhibition of natural elements in a manner that echoed the ordering of objects according to their shape, size, density, genus, thereby reflecting the systems that underpinned how and what was seen.
The words also had elements that complemented and interfered with such ordering, like the display cabinets and vitrines. When equipped with this knowledge, Weiner's installation becomes highly poetic and creates the space for imagination.
The words are conceptual moderators between an exhibition external to the exhibition proper and the mind of the viewer.
It is worth comparing this work with one by Weiner's contemporaries, Steve Reich (b. 1936). For Different Trains (1988) for string quartet, Reich used the recalled speech-patterns of his governess—who accompanied him in extensive east-west coast train travel as a child—together with testimonies of Holocaust survivors about their journey to the concentration camp.
Speech transforms into a melodic pattern, which the strings then imitate. Language is thus embedded into the work's process and effect. Reich uses the preformed material of words to build an elaborate conceptual and emotive structure that attempts to do justice to the incommunicable memories behind the stories.
Text as a Readymade
Another way of thinking of this process is that the artist uses language as a readymade (think Duchamp’s snow shovel or urinal), no different from using a prefabricated object and assigning to it a more abstracted purpose in a sculpture or an installation.
Brad Buckley. Every Great Idea Begins as a Heresy. Anna Leonowens Gallery, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University, Halifax, Canada. 2005. Paint, vinyl text, continuous audio, dimensions variable. https://bradbuckley.com/archives/64
Brad Buckley. Every Great Idea Begins as a Heresy. Anna Leonowens Gallery, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University, Halifax, Canada. 2005. Paint, vinyl text, continuous audio, dimensions variable. https://bradbuckley.com/archives/64
In this shot and detail of an installation by the Australian artist, Brad Buckley, text, colour (the room was painted blood red), and graphic image are combined to make a highly synthetic theatre, a schema of lines and signs much like language itself.
Here the artist uses an excerpt from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to mount a critique on the 2003 American invasion of Iraq.
Buckley uses an older, famous text to interrogate the historical recurrence of imperialism and hatred, from the Belgian Congo to America and Vietnam, pinpointing the hypocrisy of strong states that intrude on weaker ones with the presumptive intention to improve them, only to cause lasting devastation.
Dispensing with images and references to images altogether, US artist Jenny Holzer uses aphorisms to explore the emblematic nature of words and how they impregnate themselves into consciousness in the manner of ideology or belief.
In other words, there are slogans like 'never a borrower nor a lender be', 'the early bird catches the worm', 'He who hesitates is lost', which many of us utter unquestioningly, are subliminal laws that in effect govern the way we act and respond in our everyday lives.
dazeddigital.com. Jenny Holzer’s Truisms. https://bit.ly/34wPPes
Near all of her slogans derive from a personal lexicon of statements, what she calls her ‘truisms’ which began in 1979 and are the Postmodern equivalent of Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas in which preposterous class prejudices are presented as moral laws.
They range from lapidary cliché such as A LITTLE KNOWLEDGE GOES A LONG WAY to statements that curiously merge irony with wisdom: YOUR OLDEST FEARS ARE THE WORST ONES.
Holzer has beamed her pithy phrases on buildings or illuminated them with commercial street neon as well as exhibiting within the museum setting. Beaming lights were used as early as the Nazis, and neon is indispensable to night-time street advertising—both are mass-media tools of audience manipulation, which Holzer both embraces and subverts.
In 1982, on a Spectacolour board in Times Square were Holzer’s slogans, ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE and MONEY CREATES TASTE.
At their most effective, Holzer's statements cause a double-take: they fit squarely within their commercial milieu but somehow miss a register. You may be unsure on whose behalf it speaks.
Is the joke on you? Then, in that reflection, you may also then be led to ponder on how seldom we reflect on the innumerable other statements we absorb as fact. We may go so far as say that Holzer’s work begins as physical text and ends as a mental image.
The use of text is now a mainstay of contemporary art. But like the readymade, it has opened up new possibilities in art on the one hand while opening the floodgates to a whole lot of rubbish on the other. In the hands of skillful artists with a capacity for nuance, words in art can be powerful, poetic, and affecting. In the hands of less capable, they can be dull and didactic, declaring the message of the work of art. Thankfully, the work of the better artists tends to drown out the dross.
