by Jon Lackman | 1 November 2010 | Books, Theory
Recently published: the well illustrated volume Art, Word and Image: 2000 Years of Visual / Textual Interaction, edited by John Dixon Hunt, David Lomas, and Michael Corris. In their overview essays, Hunt surveys the pre-1900 period, Lomas 1900-45, and Corris post-1945. Hunt also contributes a general introduction. He’s uniquely well qualified for the task, having edited the superb journal Word & Image since its founding in 1987. A variety of other authors contribute sub-chapters on individual artists — Blake, Klee, Schwitters, August Walla, Colin McCahon, Horst Haack, and Raymond Pettibon.
The book is obviously tilted toward the modern era. Preface writer Michael R. Leaman observes, “The story of the twentieth century and beyond involves an accelerating and intensifying engagement with the textual and the verbal in the visual arts.” As for the book’s approach, Hunt writes, “The theme of this book is the use of words in visual arts. It is not, therefore, about its converse: literary descriptions of visual things, or any such ekphrastic endeavors.”
Hunt proceeds to create a rough taxonomy of artistic uses of words:
1. Explicitly: when words, decipherable and meaningful by their own account outside the graphic medium, are included in or on the visual artwork. This is the main focus and stimulus for enquiry in this book … It is only [through these works] that we can become aware of and appreciate their other, less direct presences …
2. Implicitly: when visual art invokes, relies on or indeed even seems to depend upon words …
3. Additively or supplementarily: when actual, discernable and legible words are added by way of supplement …
4. Collaboratively: when it would be difficult to adjudicate which of the three categories so far listed applies … because word and image are so interdependent …
“These four modes,” he notes, “are not clearly self-contained. They can merge and can even usurp each other’s function, as when a title like Mona Lisa or Tempestà has so identified itself with the image we see that might as well be inscribed on the surface.”
