Text and Image

What have you learned about Text & Image?

I learned that artists utilize text to make a statement, and draw out a certain emotion that they want their audience to feel while looking at their art piece. These artists use letters, numbers, and words as their major modes of communication by employing text as the central communication vehicle in their artistic expression. The versatility and power of the written word encourage the viewer to reflect, from projectors to paintings, sculptures to public murals. Clever wordplay, political activism, advertising subversion, and form appropriation are just a few of the features shared by great text art. Also, in more of a definition, The process of transmitting a message or notion through visuals and words is known as visual language. It necessitates a seamless blending of words and pictures. The remaining communication is ambiguous if the words or graphics are removed. Vocabulary, grammar, and syntax are all part of visual language.

How do contemporary artists use the concept of Text & Image in their artwork?

Barbara Kruger's work is a conceptual artist from the United States who utilizes catchy slogans over images to question themes of power, identity, and sexuality. Her art, which is based on sensational news headlines or advertising slogans, pushes the viewer to consider how these traditional media outlets affect our perceptions. Barbara Kruger developed her characteristic propaganda-style in the early 1980s, using cropped, large-scale black-and-white photographic pictures juxtaposed with boisterous, snappy, and frequently sardonic aphorisms printed in Futura Bold font against black, white, or deep red text bars. She uses the same vocabulary as the media in order to direct the viewer's attention and thoughts away from the media, to awaken the people from their consumerist ways of living, and to compel them to interact and participate in their surroundings and the environment in which they live.

How might you be able to use Text and Image in your own art?

In my first film idea, I am planning on making an old public access type of video. Many public access shows have many graphics that include text to show the audience what segment of the show is happening and of course, there will also be title cards at the beginning. Though for my film there won't be any deeper meaning behind the text, it is still text that goes along with the images that are being shown, or more accurately, the video that is being shown. This is how I might use text and image in my own film.

Is there something that you found in your investigation that specifically interested or inspired you?

I learned that text and images have been put together for a very long time. In art, combining textual text and visuals has a long history. To produce layered meaning and verbal/visual puns, medieval manuscripts in Christian Europe are interlaced with pictures that live in a rhetorical connection with the written word. William Blake, an eighteenth-century British poet, published books of his work with his own illustrations and immediately discovered that the synthesis aroused connotations that words and pictures alone could not. Early twentieth-century European Dadaists and Surrealists used scraps of found text with appropriated photographic pictures to create an alternate, sometimes illogical, modes of communication that they felt were missing from traditional art. The text's meaning interacts with the images to produce thoughts and sensations that neither could generate on its own. We're forced to confront the inexplicable gaps between the two "descriptive systems," as Rosler puts it, and come up with a variety of ways to fill them. However, we are compelled to confront our completely unproven faith in both text and image.