Another way with words : language as twentieth-century art practice

Abstract

The use of language, both as a subject and as a means of making artworks, has been a defining feature of twentieth-century art. This thesis examines the vivid heterogeneity of this practice, representing the range and richness of image/text with such diverse works as Mallarmé's poem 'Un coup de Dés', 1895, and Patterson's Underground map 'The Great Bear', 1992. Within this study, consideration is also given to the contextual influence of the art museum. The author's reading presumes that 'text' cannot be understood apart from 'book' itself, especially in regard to its performative potentiality. She makes particular reference to the commonplace book, which she uses as a model for this thesis, because the function of commonplace methodology is to maintain not a single and exclusive meaning (by excising all others), but the simultaneous existence of multiple meaning - a method appropriate for the interpretation of the artwork as an open site of meaning. The conculsion this thesis makes is that the practice of image/text is not primarily about the materiality of words, though this is important; nor does it function solely to turn an image in a 'text' so that it may enter the field of discourse. The practice of image/text investigates mechanisms of meaning, such as metaphor, irony and genre, which operate differently from the procedures of formal logic; thus enabling the artists cited here to work within, to take as the subject, the complexity of social and cultural change