Christopher Wool; Untitled (2001)

Silkscreen ink on linen

(measuring approx 228.6 x 152.4 cm)

• What happens when text and image overlap?
• The event of the process
• Grasping a reality – the things seen and be recognisable, he moment of an experience and this ‘detachable’, but yet, relatable to the experience
• Naming/categorising language
• The dimension of death and the transparent of an object

Magritte, The Treachery of Images (1929)

• the more you need an image you recognise it is not the thing presented.
• the text is within the image.

Notes:

The picture shows a pipe. Below it, Magritte painted, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” French for “This is not a pipe.” The painting is not a pipe, but rather an image of a pipe,

This masterpiece of Surrealism creates a three-way paradox out of the conventional notion that objects correspond to words and images.

The Treachery of Images belongs to a series of word-image paintings by Magritte from the late 1920s. The artist laid out his rationale for word-image paintings in an illustrated text called Words and Images. Like the other artists and poets associated with the Surrealist movement, Magritte sought to overthrow what he saw as the oppressive rationalism of bourgeois society. His art during these essential years is at times violent, frequently disturbing, and filled with discontinuities. He consistently interrogated conventions of language and visual representation, using methods that included the misnaming of objects, doubling and repetition, mirroring and concealment, and the depiction of visions seen in half-waking states-all of them devices that cast doubt on the nature of appearances, both in the paintings and in reality itself. The persistent tension Magritte maintained during these years between nature and artifice, truth and fiction, reality and surreality is one of the profound achievements of his art.

Marcel Broadthaers 

Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (A Throw of the Dice will Never Abolish Chance)

Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira Le Hasard (A Throw of the Dice will Never Abolish Chance) is a poem by the French Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé. Its intimate combination of free verse and unusual typographic layout anticipated the 20th century interest in graphic design and concrete poetry.

The poem is spread over 20 pages, in various typefaces, amidst liberal amounts of blank space. Each pair of consecutive facing pages is to be read as a single panel; the text flows back and forth across the two pages, along irregular lines.

The sentence that names the poem is split into three parts, printed in large capital letters on panels 1, 6, and 8. A second textual thread in smaller capitals apparently begins on the right side of panel 1, QUAND MÊME LANCÉ DANS DES CIRCONSTANCES ÉTERNELLES DU FOND D’UN NAUFRAGE (“Even when thrown under eternal circumstances from the bottom of a shipwreck”). Other interlocking threads in various typefaces start throughout the book. At the bottom right of the last panel is the sentence Toute Pensée émet un Coup de Dés (“Every Thought issues a Throw of Dice”).

• words as spatial objects
• words that carry an infinite amount of ideas

…there is a difference between the two

The work is a close copy of the first edition of the French Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem of the same name, published in 1914, but with all the words removed, replaced by black stripes that correspond directly to the typographic layout used by Mallarmé to articulate the text.

“Broodthaers reduces Un Coup de Dés to its structure – or to put it another way he elevates the structure of the work to a concept worthy of study in its own right, thus acknowledging Mallarmé’s own fetishistic attention to this aspect of his work. Rendering the structure concrete, visible, almost tactile, Broodthaers offers a conceptual analysis of Mallarmé’s poem across the distance of a nearly a century…It would be hard to imagine a more subtle treatment of Mallarmé’s work, or one more capable of demonstrating its essential properties, than this reworked book by Broodthaers.” Johanna Drucker

Often included in exhibitions tracing the history of the artist’s book, the work is seen as a seminal example of the European post-avant-garde. It is often referred to simply as Un Coup de Dés.

Broodthaers (1972) Tableau écran

(mixed media) measuring 161x210cm

• repititon order to undermine the (normal) logic of numbers and symbols
• The act of ‘not telling, but showing’ (turning sight into knowledge)
• An image of general thought
• Linear form within an image
• Reading something that is decidable in language – Fiona Banner (The Bastard Punctuation)

The Bastard Word, 2006-7

In The Bastard Word, the drawn letterforms are made up of imagery of war planes found in magazines. The alphabet again has the potential to communicate but this is undermined by the imagery: use of military force being the result of a failure to of other means of communication.

Banner has extended this approach (and the neon one) to punctuation, creating symbols that seem both alien and familiar. Through an alphabet is always immediately recognisable, though it gives structure to the written word, punctuation takes on a strangeness when isolated from its intended purpose so the symbols seem quite abstract until we deliberately remind ourselves of their role

The Bastard Word (detail), 2006-7

Edward Ruscha, Eye (1970)

(Gunpowder on Paper)

• An drawn image of paper, drawn onto paper
• The paper then drawing out the eye (the name of the piece) in paper, drawn onto paper
• ..many fundamental contradictions of the image
• context pre-decided for you

Ed Ruscha, Quit, 1967

Ed Ruscha, Ram, 1970

Ed Ruscha Sin (With Olive), 1970