Since 2009, there has been an increased presence of group exhibitions in public institutions in the UK and the US which address the ways contemporary artists in the past two decades have used text as a material, a subject, and a conceptual device. Significant amongst these exhibitions are Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. held at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London in 2009, and Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2012. Within their curatorial strategies, and independently from one another, both exhibitions draw a binary of the genealogy of text in art practice as emerging either from the international movement of concrete poetry of the mid-1950s to 1971 (including the work of Décio Pignatari, or Haraldo de Campos), or from conceptual art of the mid-1960s-early 1970s (including the work of Joseph Kosuth, Art & Language, Robert Smithson, or Mel Bochner). Such group exhibitions have overlooked how feminist, second generation conceptual artists embraced language as material. Artists of this second generation of conceptual art were critiquing conceptualism by introducing subject matter which looked outward from art and which demanded the audience to engage with language as a material through their use of the printed word, typography, written language, and methods of printing. For these artists, such as Mary Kelly, language was not presumed natural, and the materiality of text was necessary in order to engage an art audience in questions of power, representation, gender, and socialisation. With the rise of the digital age, the materiality of the linguistic signifier offers artists today something different than it did in the 1960s. Since the late 1990s, there has been a proliferation of works by contemporary artists in the UK and US that I refer to as text art, made by artists such as Fiona Banner, Janice Kerbel, Shannon Ebner, Pavel Büchler, or Paul Elliman. Part of my original contribution to knowledge is to explore the ways contemporary artists use text, to interrogate how this is different from work seen before, and to question the demands it places on the audience who reads it, as well as the challenges it places on the act of reading an artwork made of words. The literature emphasises a turn away from looking or the visual to a turn towards reading which occurred in conceptualism (Kotz, 2007; Blacksell, 2013). I explore the binary of this turn in the conceptual art period of 1966-1973 and I suggest that artists are engaging with text today not only to challenge how an audience encounters written language as art, but the very act of reading text in a digital world. The first three chapters explore the materiality of text in a historical genealogy of conceptual art, conceptual art in relationship to concrete poetry, and the feminist critique in second generation of conceptual art. The latter three chapters explore the materiality of text in contemporary art practices. This is the focus of the thesis, which builds on the foundation for materiality of text argued in chapters one, two, and three. I argue not for a cohesive movement of contemporary text artists, but rather, that diverse, contemporary artists’ practices are making similar investigations across text in art, and that this warrants attention to explore how we consider text as a medium today.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:707525 |
| Date | January 2017 |
| Creators | Dhillon, Kim |
| Publisher | Royal College of Art |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://researchonline.rca.ac.uk/2765/ |
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