Tuesday, December 05, 2006

Text Art as Public Space

If art is a culturally, historically and theoretically constructed concept, constantly changing – what the general community understands as being art is probably what artists were concerned about, in an emerging way, 10 years ago, and was an unknown concept two hundred years before that.

We come to know and identify art through language. Things and actions can exist, but they need language to transform them into art. It is written text more than image or object that defines what we regard as art.
As Dave Beech writes in Words and Objects After Conceptualism, “The illusion of art’s independence from language in general and ‘supporting’ texts in particular is finally put to bed by Conceptualism.”

“Art objects are inert without their texts…..Similarly, art objects without texts are impossible, but there is no good reason to exclude the opposite. Text is a condition of possibility for art but there is no logical incoherence in an art of texts without inert art objects.
Conceptualism’s insertion of text into the field of the art object – of presenting text as art – has destabilised the customary distinction between art objects and the various texts that accompany, frame, explain, promote and name them. That is to say, the normative idea that the artwork should ‘speak for itself’ can no longer be sustained after the historical emergence as art of the catalogue, the magazine ad, the private view card, the essay, the slide talk and so on –
strictly speaking, it never could. It was not so much that Conceptualism elevated text to the status of art, exactly. The significant transformation here is how Conceptualism pressed art up against the institutional, historical and social conditions of art, including the linguistic conditions for art, without which there would be no art at all, never mind art ‘speaking for itself’.”

The fluidity of language and digital text, subject to social and psychological forces within a geographic and historical milieu mirror many concepts that constitute the “space of flows”.

Some interesting examples of text-as-art in/as public space can be found on these sites.
Free Words
Walking in Place
Urban Screens
Chirag Mehta
Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries

If you know of others, please let us know so that we can add them to the links.

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