Museum-Quality Text Messages

Tervaert said she organized the exhibition after noticing that many of the artworks in the museum’s permanent collection had some connection to poetry, philosophy or just language more generally. Most of the works in the show are from the museum’s own trove.

“I started to look at the question, ‘When did artists start using words or typography or language in art?’” she said. “These were forms that weren’t linked to each other in the past, but you see that in the 20th century they do become linked.”

Until about 1911, she explained, fine artists used text in paintings only for practical purposes, to convey the name of a person in the portrait, for example, or occasionally to show the title of the work. The cubists were the first to start to use text for other reasons, she added. One of the earliest examples of this in the show is Juan Gris’ 1916 painting “Cartes à jouer et siphon” (Playing cards and siphon), in which the words “Le Journal” (the newspaper) appear in a cubist still life of a card table.
Later, cubists and Dada artists used newspaper clippings or text torn out of other printed matter to create collages with what at the time would have been considered jarring juxtapositions. Text continued to be present in art through the surrealists, but became commonplace in the middle of the 20th century, with the rise of conceptualism.

A 1966 short film, “Word Movie,” by Fluxus artist Paul Sharits, presents the viewer with a fast-changing series of random words, such as “duck,” “hormone” and “chrome,” while a male and a female voice alternate speaking one word each, composing a language of gibberish. If each voice were heard separately, the museum’s description informs us, each would make sense. But spliced together, they lose coherent meaning.

As with this work, others highlight the fact that while we think of language as a way of conveying meaning, it can also be a tool for disorientation.
“He’s playing with our senses,” Tervaert said of Sharits. “As a human being, we want to understand things. When we see text we want to read it, but in a playful and humorous way, he wants to shake up our desire to comprehend things.”

Artists from the 1960s and ’70s used text so frequently that it is now considered a “normalized” part of visual art, said Tervaert, such that when we see one of Jenny Holzer’s wall text one-liners such “If You’re Considered Useless No One Will Feed You Anymore” (1983), we no longer question whether it qualifies as art.

Holzer has explained in the past that she “used language because I wanted to offer content that people — not necessarily art people — could understand,” and she has printed her truisms, as she calls them, on posters, T-shirts and even condom packaging. For at least some contemporary artists like her, text is not a radical element that moves us away from our traditional notions of art but rather helps art become more accessible.

Three of the works in the exhibition are newly commissioned, bringing us up to present-day uses of text in art.
A long black pen is suspended by an invisible thread over a table. It dances over a sheet of white paper, making tiny black marks. Underneath, the table vibrates like a drum, responding to what is coming out of a speaker mounted to its side.

This work, “Vocode,” is creating a visual record of 86 nearly extinct languages that are listed in UNESCO’s atlas of the world’s endangered tongues. Even, Chontal, Trumai, Waima’a and Savosavo are a few of the languages the artists chose.

Created by Fillip Studios — or the art duo Roos Meerman and Tom Kortbeek — the artwork is the most recent piece in the exhibition and perhaps the most compelling. In it, we find ourselves boomeranged back to the beginning of the narrative: Text is once again converted into a visual art.