What role should text play in my work?
For Barbara Kruger, it serves as another layer of disruption accompanying other forms of disjuncture to disturb the clichéd perfection of the mass-media images she uses, transmuting them from a fantasy of perfection to something closer to Real-I lack.
W.J. T. Mitchell refers to complicity between image and text; an ‘…inextricable weaving together of representation and discourse, the imbrication of visual and verbal experience.’ He posits that the relationship between the visible and the readable may be an infinite one; put alternatively, that word and image may be ‘…simply the unsatisfactory name for an unstable dialectic that constantly shifts its location in representational practices, breaking both pictorial and discursive frames and undermining the assumptions…’ that underwrite ‘…the separation of the verbal and visual disciplines…’ (1)
I think he has a point; the existence of either pure text or image is pretty much impossible. Even as I contemplate a picture, my thoughts cannot avoid conjuring associated words and phrases, as much as I may strive to suppress this. And any act of reading is accompanied by the inevitable involuntary invoking of image.
The notion words and text can be separated is a flawed assumption:
‘The image you bring enters the text, and finally the text, at a given moment, ends up bringing out images; no longer a simple relationship of illustration, and this allows you to exercise your capacity to think and to ponder and to imagine, to create.‘ (2)
Image-text used as a deliberate act of conjuncture – a montage of disparate influences that force the viewing experience apart to enter an arena of thought, reflection, imagination and creation; it acquires a readability. Two options are possible; one where picture and words work together in a unified way to offer mutual support, or another where one hits out in opposition to the other, undermining and subverting it.
To date, I’ve avoided working with text – it makes me uneasy. Even naming an art work in anything approaching a meaningful way has seemed impossible. But, I already appropriate material into collage – extending this approach to find ready-made names to title each work seems a valuable direction to head. I can also see possibilities for completely text-based work – something I’ve never considered before – also acts of appropriation, from various mass-media sources, but where I enact a simple switch of gendering positions. Will anything interesting happen?
(1) Mitchell, W.J.T. (1994). Picture theory. London: The University of Chicago Press Ltd. p:83
(2) Didi-Huberman, Georges. (2008). Images in spite of all. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Translated by Shane B. Lillis. p:139
