The Brooklyn Rail

Encounters between the verbal and the visual have a long history, dating back to the fluid interweaving of text and images in ancient Egypt or the illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages, and arriving at the height of beauty in William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1789/94). But it was not until the twentieth century when the step of fully integrating the word with the image was taken. With the advent of Cubist collage, letters and words became part of an aesthetic vocabulary that privileged form over meaning. Of course we can read—and if we speak French, understand—the newspaper fragment pasted on the lower left corner of Picasso’s 1912 collage that says “La bataille s’est engagé[e]” (The battle has begun). And surely that is why Picasso chose that particular piece, but only as part of a larger pictorial operation that appropriated materials from everyday life, including news clippings, but also bits of sheet music, wallpaper, or even coarse rope, in order to disrupt the traditionally indisputable domain of painting.

The Italian Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti carried the idea of using words as visual elements even further. In works like his Tumultuous Assembly (1919), all sorts of typographic elements appear scattered across the surface of the page to create an unprecedented visual effect: that of parole in libertà—words freed from the rules of language, ready to catch the eye of the beholder. This comes in the wake of Stéphane Mallarmé,¹ for whom the unusual arrangement of the lines of the poem meant a way of forcing other reading behaviors, but ultimately it was still about reading. Here, there is no grammar, there are only shapes—what we see is an object in and of itself, as paintings are.

This radical line of research, one that seeks to deactivate linguistic sense and reinforce visual expressiveness instead, gained particular momentum with the arrival of the post-World War II Conceptualisms.² In the 1960s, for example, the Brazilian artist Mira Schendel produced a series of drawings where the “utmost redundancy,” wrote the poet Haroldo de Campos, “begins to produce original information.”³ However, this is the kind of information that brings no more certainty than a landscape would. For her so-called “Graphic Objects” Schendel chose a very thin Japanese paper, whose translucency was heightened by presenting them hanging from the ceiling. The works had neither front nor back; as they floated, they became constellations of signs, “of bee-like letters swarming” around, as Campos wrote. Their semantic value was thus replaced by starry patterns that here and there unveiled hints of words, or quasi-words.

Since then, words have never left the visual sphere, and the work of many contemporary artists can be placed, albeit temporarily, in this territory where the enunciable and the visible converge. Some of them use words merely as a form of texture or pattern—as Jasper Johns did with his “Alphabets.”⁴ Others are known for their thought-provoking use of language, where slogans and striking phrases engage viewers and prompt them to think about social, political, or cultural issues—Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, and Lawrence Weiner immediately come to mind here.

And there are also the ones who have developed a very personal visual notion of graphic space. In Gurgles, sucks, echoes (1992), artist Roni Horn presents us with a drawing of three bright orange words—“gurgles, sucks, echoes”—against a black background. Again, we are able to read those words as sounds, but why would we do that, if they lead us nowhere? Or do they? Those “were mostly just pictures of words,” Horn said once in an interview.⁵ “I don’t really think of them as visualizing the content of the word, necessarily, or the meaning of the word,” she added. The image is already delicious as is—but it becomes even more so, because, as the artist remarked, “every time I use that phrase, it’s like eating, like savoring something.”⁶

Some artists, then, choose to include animals, houses, portraits in their works; this allows them to talk about themselves and the world they live in. Others use words as images, because sometimes, as Campos wisely observed, “a whole metaphoric cosmos is contained in a single word.”⁷ 

1. Stéphane Mallarmé is considered the father of experimental poetry. His work “Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard,” created in 1897, represented a revolution in the world of poetry because it completely broke with traditional typographic conventions.
2. In the plural form, because there was not one, but many, throughout the world.
3. Fragment of Haroldo de Campos’s untitled poem that appeared in the catalogue Mira Schendel (Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, May 1966).
4. He did the first of these paintings, where colored letters, displayed alphabetically, fill the space completely, in 1956.
5. Published on Art21.org in November 2011.
6. Ibid.
7. Haroldo de Campos, “A Obra de Arte Aberta” (São Paulo, 1955).