Words in Images

Figure 1John Baldessari, 1967

That is metadiscourse; I had never seen photographic metadiscourse before. Not only did he use a dumb photo, he made a point of it by sticking a word on it, because of course words were forbidden in photography.²

How many times in the twentieth century has the ban on words inside the frame been breached by avantgarde artists? Such a move was a leading feature of many programs and movements, though it was made for different reasons and with different effects:

• Cubists and Futurists introduced words to highlight the visuality of the written and printed word--it's Janus-like double facing toward visual shape and abstract content;³

• Dadaists glued in bits of newspaper and other lettering into their photomontages and collages in part to claim and remake the look of the illustrated magazine, catalog, newspaper, and other new commercial media.

• Pop art continued this struggle, focussing on the popular mixed medium of the cartoon;

• Conceptualists almost inverted the ban, filling canvases with words as they reoriented art toward ideas.

• Some, like Baldessari, use words reflexively to highlight art as a signifying system;

• Others, like Rene Magritte, Victor Burgin, and Rosler herself, play off visual signification against certain kinds of verbal signification, thus creating a kind of hybrid art form.

These groupings are anything but clear and well established, but they do suggest how the discovery and excitement of putting words inside the frame could occur over and over and probably does not mean just one thing. General likenesses and particular comparisons have been argued for. Just to take Magritte for example, Robert Pincus-Witter expends some effort to link Baldessari to Magritte, mainly via Magritte's most reflexive of works ("The Treason of Images"--that is, the famous This is not a Pipe). Tony Godfrey links Magritte to the Conceptualists generally, even to the point of including a partially translated reproduction of an illustrated article by Magritte ("Les Mots et Les Images") as a work of art in his book on Conceptualism.⁴ This is truly a remarkable moment in the long and complicated history of text and image: a document generally listed as an article in a journal (La Révolution Surréalist⁵) is modified by translation and slides imperceptibly into a set of illustrations, all of the rest of which were exhibited as works of art. Such is the power of Conceptualism to frame anything as "art"! And, too, many of the artists in these groups have been linked in one way or another, usually fairly loosely, to Wittgenstein or Saussure.

We are far from being able to say what a balanced and comprehensive account of the relations of words and images in twentieth century art might look like, but it will not be a simple, triumphal one of the rise of "multimodalism." Many, theorists as well as artists, have come to feel that there are good reasons for keeping these two great signifying systems apart, or at least inside and outside the edge of the canvas or print. As Foucault noted in his little book on Magritte, the two systems tend to struggle for dominance the one over the other, and in the empire of letters and learning, it is clear which system is predominant.⁶ Roland Barthes talks about our using language to provide anchorage for the image, which would otherwise be intolerably multiple in its possible significations.⁷ Visual art almost always calls forth analysis, discussion, and commentary, but it is rare indeed that one encounters a visual commentary or explication of a learned treatise (except for the series of Introducing ___ books published--cheaply--by Totem Book (as in Derrida, Postmodernism, Semiotics, Foucault, Barthes, Baudrillard ...). The considerations all suggest that visual artists should be wary of inviting words into their works. Further, we associate the co-presence of words and images with with books for beginning readers and the early grades, and with the mass media and advertising.⁸ These are sources of resistance toward and contempt for the Web as a medium for serious intellectual and artistic exchange. And it is true that many of these artists who very eagerly used and developed the possibilities of hybridization stopped using words in their pictures (including Baldessari and Burgin).⁹

One might suppose that the emergence of the Web as hybrid from the first Mosaic browser on renders these questions moot and immeasurably strengthens the hand of images simply by making them so much easier to include and replicate than they have ever been before. In addition, the extremely widespread practice on the Web of using small images (icons) to represent the main points in the computing environment and as link anchors to hypertext links seems well on the way to creating de facto a universal set of graphic signs (though for a restricted domain) like the one envisioned by Otto Neurath for his ISOTYPE shapes.¹⁰

When artists work with ideas, however, they are not interested in solving questions of theory, so one would hardly expect the "issue" of words in pictures to be resolved by artists--used, yes, very much so as we shall see, but not solved, resolved, best modelled, or what have you. What these artists were looking for were tensions and intricacies that would engage the viewer. For the artists we will look at closely, there was perhaps no better topic.