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THE USE OF TEXT IN ART, 1988 - 1999
By

Christian John Gerstheimer

A THESIS
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
Department of Art

1999

ABSTRACT

THE USE OF TEXT IN ART, 1988 - 1999
By

Christian Gerstheimer

Previous studies of text an do not take into account identity politics or the technology
of the intemet. The studies of Jessica Prinz, Russell Bowman, and Andreas Hapkemeyer
with Peter Weierrnair contain several interpretive similarities, some differences and
omissions. The books The Return of the Real, 1996 by Hal Foster and Avant—Garde and
Aﬁer, 1995 by Brandon Taylor and several other sources reveal two new factors
inﬂuencing the use of text in art from 1988-1999; identity politics and the technology of
the intemet. .

Works by Lorna Simpson, Jimmie Durham, Xu Bing and Victoria Vesna will be
discussed in order to substantiate the influence of these new factors and to indicate the
need for their inclusion with the interpretations by Prinz, Bowman, and Hapkemeyer with

Weiermair, thereby producing a critical synthesis.

Copyright by
Christian John Gerstheimer
1999

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to acknowledge the help of several people in the writing of this thesis. First of
all, my thesis committee chairperson Prof. Phylis Floyd; second, the members of my
thesis committee, Prof. Susan Bandes and Prof. William Kilboume; and third, Prof.
Kenneth Haltrnan, Tracy Speaker, John Finlay, John Henry and my parents who all gave
me friendly encouragement and constructive criticism along the way.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF
FIGURES ............................................................................................ vi
INTRODUCTION .................................................................................. 1
CHAPTER 1

POSTMODERNISM AND THE TEXT IN CONTEMPORARY VISUAL

ART ................................................................................................... 4
CHAPTER 2

THREE

INTERPRETATIONS ............................................................................ 12
CHAPTER 3

IDENTITY

POLITICS ........................................................................................... 20
CHAPTER 4

A REALM WHERE ART AND INFORMATION

MEET ................................................................................................. 42
SUMMARY AND

CONCLUSIONS ................................................................................... 57
APPENDIX .......................................................................................... 60
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................. 69

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure l — Lorna Simpson, You’re Fine, 1988, Four color Polaroids, 15 engraved
plastic plaques, ceramic
letters .................................................................................................. 61

Figure 2 — Lorna Simpson, Untitled (2 necklines), 1989, Gelatin silver prints, 11
engraved plastic plaques ........................................................................... 62

Figure 3 - Jimmie Durham, Red Turtle, 1991, Turtle shell, paint, paper,
wood .................................................................................................. 63

Figure 4 - Jirmnie Durham, I Forgot What I Was Going To Say, 1992, Gun, wood,
metal, screw, canvas ................................................................................. 64

Figure 5 — Jimmie Durham, Untitled, 1992, Wood, paint, glass eyes,
paper ................................................................................................... 65

Figure 6 - Xu Bing, Cultural Animal, A Case Study of Transference, 1996-99,
Performance installation, video projection ....................................................... 66

Figure 7:- Xu Bing, New English Calligraphy, 1999, Ink, paper, brushes, chairs and
tables .................................................................................................. 67

Figure 8 — Victoria Vesna, Bodies INCorporated, 1996-1999, Ongoing online art
project ................................................................................................ 68

vi

INTRODUCTION

It is in vain that we say what we see; what we see never resides in what we say.
-Michel Foucault ‘

Jessica Prinz, Russell Bowman, Andreas Hapkemeyer with Peter Weiermair are four
scholars who have examined the use of language in the visual arts of the past thirty years.
All four of these individuals identiﬁed a number of factors that inﬂuence artists to include
text in art. However, two new factors have appeared in art from 1988-1999 that were not
readily recognizable when their studies were being prepared. These factors, identit
politics and the technology of the intemet, are related to simultaneous changes within the
art world and society. These factors should therefore be included in any interpretation of
the art‘of the past ten years that includes language. I aim to fully explicate these two
factors so that they may be critically synthesized with previous interpretations of text art.

In an effort to clarify how and why these factors are important, I will ﬁrst examine in
chapter one the concept of postmodernism that will be used here. Several books inform
the view taken here on postmodernism. These books include Hal Foster’s 1996 The
Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century, Brandon Taylor’s 1995
Avant-Garde and After: Rethinking Art Now, Linda Weintraub’s 1996 Art on the Edge
and Over: Searching for Art’s Meaning in Contemporary Society 1970 ’s-1990 ’s, and

Irving Sandler’s 1998 Art of the Postmodern Era: From the Late 1960’s to the Early

 

1 Michel Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, Trans. James Harkness, Berkeley: University of California Press,
1983. 9.

1990’s. In the chapter devoted to postmodernism, no oveniding viewpoint has been
established, therefore numerous, varied sources will be utilized. The discussion of
postmodernism will be followed in chapter two by a review of three literature
interpretations given for the language in art from 1960-1990. Next in chapters three and
four I will examine the two new factors combined with examples by four artists working
in different media. These examples will be used to substantiate the claims made and to
give the reader a more concrete idea of the art under discussion.

The four artists included in this thesis: Lorna Simpson, Jimmie Durham, Xu Bing and
Victoria Vesna, produce text art. They have been chosen because they exemplify in
numerous, but varied ways the updated version of postmodernism I am trying to
establish. These artists also make it evident why the technology of the intemet and
identity politics should be critically synthesized with previous interpretations of text art.
Their work is not qualitatively better or worse than any of the thousands of other artists
that might have been selected, but is unique in the way that it addresses either identity
politics, the technology of the intemet, or both of these aspects.

If a “look and label” deﬁnition must be used to describe the art under investigation it
would most likely be “Text Art” or “Word Art,” although these labels do not clarify
much. Given the limitations of language this thesis arrives at its meaning of text art from
two, related deﬁnitions currently in use. The ﬁrst used by Jessica Prinz, the author of Art
Discourse/Discourse in Art, deﬁnes textual art as “a category of work consisting of a link
to literature as well as photography etc.” For her “textual artworks are neither one thing
nor another, but many things in new combinations.” Prinz uses the label "hybrid art" to

refer to "liminal works which intersect or balance precariously between disciplinary

modes."2 The second deﬁnition on which I rely is that of W. J. T. Mitchell, who deﬁnes
something that approximates text art. For him this is the “imagetext,” which he deﬁnes as
composite, synthetic works (or concepts) that combine image and text”3

The text art considered here may include spoken text as part of its content, but must
have a visual component as well. Text art shares with literature the use of language,
however, my thesis is concerned with art and language as related concepts, not with the
relations between art and literature.

In an attempt to map out the formal variations, and technical categories of text art,
discovered that there are four varieties and three categories Of text art. The four formal
variations include: text as image, textual images, images combined with text, or either of
the above with the spoken word. And the three technical categories include handwritten,

mechanically reproduced or printed, and electronic or digital. Where necessary all the

works of art discussed here may be identiﬁed according to their variety and category.

 

2 Jessica Prinz, Art Discourse/Discourse in Art, New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press,
1991, 8.

3 w. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory, Chicago: University

Chicago Press, 1994, 89.

Chapter 1

POSTMODERNISM AND THE TEXT IN CONTEMPORARY VISUAL ART

A word is worth a thousand pictures.
A picture is worth a thousand words.

This section will present a working deﬁnition of postmodernism so that it may be
used as the framework for further discussion. This deﬁnition draws heavily from the
works of Jean-Francios Lyotard, Arthur C. Danto and J ﬁrgen Haberrnas. In addition to
Lyotard, Danto and Haberrnas I am going to discuss two additional factors, identity
politics and the technology of the intemet, that have greatly inﬂuenced contemporary art.
Therefore, these two factors must be included or seen as part of the overall framework
that I am constructing.

FrOm Lyotard, Danto and Habermas I have found three, not completely different,
characteristics that will serve as the basis of this working version of postmodernism.
These are: ﬁrst, an end to master narratives that made modernity appear synonymous
with progress; second, a preference for elements that are hybrid rather than ‘pure’ giving
us heterogeneity without hierarchy, better known as “pluralism;” and third, a challenging
of the modern notion of originality.4 Each of these features is found in the art of Lorna
Simpson, Jimmie Durham, Xu Bing, and Victoria Vesna; and a sampling will be

considered in detail in chapters three and four.

 

4 The idea of “the end of master narrau'ves” is based on Jean- Francios Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition
(1979), the concept of “pluralism” may be found in Arthur Danto’s After the End of Art (1997) and the
“challenging the modern notion of originality” is derived from Jiirgen Habermas’ Modernity — An
Incomplete Project (1983).

Several aspects of the three characteristics of postmodernism should be mentioned so
that these characteristics are more clearly understood. The ﬁrst of these aspects is “posts
colonial theory,” a discourse that should be integrated into the ﬁrst characteristic of
postmodernism and also an integral part of identity politics.

What is known at the end of the twentieth century as “postmodernism” is now closely
aligned with what has come to be known as “post-colonial. ” Postmodernism and
postcolonial theory are “inconvenient labels which cover a wide range of overlapping

literary and cultural practices.”5

Because these two theories overlap and are so difﬁcult
to distinguish between, important attributes of each should be mentioned. Both post-
colonial and postmodernism perspectives emphasize the decentering of discourse, an
interest in what is called the “cultural Other” and a policy favoring “ hybridity.”
“Hybridity” is thought to release the power generated by a “clash of cultures.”6 Favoring
hybridity allows both postmodernism and post-colonial theory to move on to a new
identity that embraces rather than rejects difference and globalization.

Post-colonialism is not simply a kind of postmodernism with politics, but rather it,
or this perSpective, seeks to deconstruct narratives that hold power over its adherents. 7
Postmodernism is thought to allow “the other” a cultural space of his or her own, while
post-colonial theory seeks a space of its own. The “cultural Other” is a term originating in

anthropology and refers to “women, people of color, inhabitants of the so-called “Third

World,” lesbians, and gays, i.e. all groups that have traditionally been denied economic

 

5 Bill Ashcroft and others. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and practice in post-colonial literatures, New
Yorlc Routledge, 1989, 163.

6 Bill Ashcroft and others, eds. Post-Colonial Studies Reader, New York: Routledge, 1995, 183.

7 Bill Ashcroft, The Post-Colonial Studies, 117.

and political power.” 8 Post-colonial theory opposes “both cultural pluralism with its
spurious egalitarianism - different cultures in the same time (“The Magicians of the
Earth,” Pompidou Centre, Paris, 1989) — or cultural relativism — different cultural
temporalities in the same “universal” space (“The Primitivism Show,” MOMA, New
York, 1984).9 Postcolonial theory advocates active “changing of the narratives of our
histories and transforming what it means to live, to be, in other times and different
spaces, both human and historical.”10

Multiculturalism, an aspect of the second characteristic of postmodernism, needs
to be mentioned next. Multiculturalism is connected to postmodernism and postcolonial
theory through the philosophy of heterogeneity without hierarchy. “‘Multiculturalism’ is
the opposite of ethnocentricity and rejects the vestiges of colonialism embodied in
tendencies to regard art from other cultures either as ‘primitive’ or as the exotic products
of “cultural others.”ll “According to the multicultural model, the best one can

hope to do is try to understand how people within a given cultural

tradition appreciated their own art. One cannot, from outside that

tradition appreciate it as it is appreciated from within, but one can at least

attempt not to impose one’ s own mode of appreciation on traditions to

which it was alien.”12
Prior to multiculturalism, at least in the United States, non-Europeans were not always
considered part of “high” culture, given open access to it or invited to participate in it.
Post-colonial theory and multiculturalism deconstruct modernist assumptions of aesthetic
quality and hierarchical purity. The postmodern accepts the crOss-fertilization implicit in

multiculturalism and tries to expose the constructedness of dominant cultural discourses,

 

8 Robert Atkins, Artspealc A Guide to Contemporary Ideas, Movements and Buzzwords, 1945 to the
Present, 2““ Ed. New York: Abbeville Press, 1997, 138.

9 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, New York: Routledge, 1994, 245.

‘° Bhabha, The Location, 256.

recognizes the “cultural Other” as an object of consumption (fetishism) as well as a
difference to be lessened with acculturation. “Multiculturalism,” is encouraged by “the
instant transmission of information and ideas across national borders made possible by
contemporary technology.”l3 Opposing “cultural pluralism” does not mean that
characteristic two is invalidated because Arthur Danto views “pluralism” as art in a
“postnarrative” era in which anything is possible, aesthetic goodness is not the only
criterion of quality and no deﬁnition of art is static.”

The topics of postcolonial theory and multiculturalism, subcategories of both
postmodernism and identity politics brings us to a problem with my thesis, that other
historians and critics have already mentioned identity politics, so this factor is not entirely
new. Russell Bowman mentions “words as socio-political commentary” in his 1990 Word
as Image catalogue.15 Prinz, Hapkemeyer and Weiermair also discuss identity politics in
their texts. However, by investigating the forces and issues contained in the politics of the
omen-their inﬂuence on the use of text in art will be clear and their reiteration should not
be deemed unnecessary.

An aspect of the third characteristic of postmodernism that should be mentioned is the
relationship between artists and technology. Acknowledging that the Enlightenment
project of modernity is “unﬁnished” Jiirgen Haberrnas noted: “from the time of the
dispute between the “Ancients and Modems” the term “modern” has regularly expressed

the consciousness of an epoch that relates itself to the past of antiquity, in order to view

 

11 Atkins, Artspeak, 122.

‘2 Danto, After the End, 94.

‘3 Atkins. Artspeak, 122.

1‘ Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History, Princeton, New Jersey:
Princeton University Press, 1997, 198-199.

15 Russell Bowman, Word as Image, Exhibition Catalogue, 15 June - 26 Aug. Milwaukee Art Museum,
1990, 130-133.

itself as the result of a transition from the old to the new.” ’6 Modernism’s emphasis on
originality and innovation led avant—garde artists (Constructivists, Futurists and Dadaists)
earlier in this century to conﬁdently embrace new technologies in their work. 17 But as
Walter Benjamin argues in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
(1935-36) “technical reproducibility” withers the “aura” of art, its uniqueness,
authenticity and authority. Modern technologies then, were not always beneﬁcial to
artists and the public alike.

“The advance of technology is no longer a grand notion,” given that the
Enlightenment’ s faith in science and reason led to two world wars and a holocaust instead
of progress and freedom.18 However, now there are direct connections between artists and
technology given that electronic communications are a bigger part of people’s lives.
Drawing upon the ideas of Lyotard - who believed that technological change would have
a major impact on knowledge, and that “the transmission and storage of information will
no longer depend on individuals but on computers,” one begins to see why many
contemporary artists use the technology of the computer in their work. 19 This establishes
a connection between artists and technology and technology’s ambiguous future. As
culture becomes daily more intertwined with electronic media, artists such as Nam June
Paik, Bruce Nauman, Lynn Hershman, Jenny Holzer are responding by incorporating

video, L. E. D. signs, neon and computers into their work.20 Many contemporary artists

 

’6 In The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster, Port Townsend, Washington: Bay
Press, 1983, 4.

’7 Margot Lovejoy, Postmodern Cunents: Art and Artists in the Age of Electronic Media, 2"“. ed. New
Jersey: Simon & Schuster, 1997, 53.

1‘ Foster, The Return, 205.

'9 Jean-Francios Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, Trans. Bennington and Massumi. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1984, ﬁrst edition 1979.

20 Frank Popper, Art of the Electronic Age, London: Thames and Hudson, 1993, 54-77.

use advanced technologies in their work but do not believe that technology can “save
them.” On the contrary, some artists use new technologies while simultaneously
critiquing them.

Depending on their individual agenda, artists who use new technologies such as the
artists mentioned above and others such as Laurie Anderson, Guillermo Gomez-Pena,
Gary Hill and Gretchen Bender, may mix elements from “high” and “low” culture
creating interactive or neo-conceptual art of many forms and varieties. New media art
exempliﬁes the continuing bond between art and technology and of the growing
importance of the media at the end of the twentieth century.

There is, however, a problem in considering the technology of the intemet as a factor
inﬂuencing the use Of text This problem is that the newness of intemet technology may
have prevented the four historians under consideration ( Prinz 1991, Bowman 1990,
Hapkemeyer and Weiermair 1996) from including online art in their studies. However,
the intemet is an extension of media culture which includes television, video, sound and
text simultaneously, but the speed with which it has transformed perceptions of reality
with its power to simulate has made it an alienating medium as well as a liberating one.
The unfamiliarity and unpredictability of intemet art might also be considered. As
recently as 1997 Margot Lovejoy wrote “The widespread rapid development of Internet
communication especially since 1994 is forcing cultural change. How will it affect art

Can we control it?”21

The newness and unpredictability of the intemet are the reasons for
this problem with my thesis, however despite any difﬁculties its growing complexity and

ubiquity warrants attention.

 

21Margot Lovejoy Postmodern Currents, 213.

My thesis considers Simpson, Durham, Xu and Vesna as neo-avant-garde artists.
Neo-avant-garde in this case is based upon the deﬁnition given by Hal Foster in The
Return of the Real. His deﬁnition of the avant—garde is based upon two key works from
which he derives his deﬁnition of the neO-avant-garde. Foster labels these two texts the
“formalist avant-garde” according to Clement Greenberg and the “historical avant—garde“
according to Peter Biirger. For Greenberg, in “The Avant-Garde and Kitsch,”
(1939/1961), “the aim of the avant-garde” was “not at all to sublate art into life but rather
to purify art of life.”22 The Greenbergian emphasis on formalism delayed artists
attempting “to destroy the institution of autonomous art in order to reconnect art and
life,” the deﬁnition Of the historical avant—garde given by Peter Biirger in 1974.23 To
Burger the historical avant-garde, were Marcel Duchamp, André Breton, Louis Aragon
and John Heartﬁeld. Biirger also identiﬁed the artists And Warhol and Daniel Spoerri
as the neo-avant-garde, but claimed their project was “inauthentic” “since now the protest
of the historical avant-garde against art as an institution is accepted as art.”24

For Foster there have been two neO-avant-gardes. The ﬁrst he deﬁnes as originating
in the 1950’s (Robert Rauschenberg and Alan Kaprow), and the second as beginning in
the late 60’s and early 70’s (Marcel Broodthaers and Daniel Buren and others).25 Foster

agrees with Biirger that, both the historical and ﬁrst neo-avant-gardes failed to destroy the

institution of art, but differs from Burger in his view that “this failure enabled the

 

22 Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” in Art and Culture, Boston: Beacon Press, 1961, 3-21.
23 Peter Burger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 2"d ed. trans. Micheal Shaw, Mineapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1974, 15- 34.

2‘ Ibid., 53. All Subsequent references to Biirger are to this text.

25 Hal Foster, The Return of the Real, 56-57.

10

deconstructive testing of this institution by the second neo-avant-garde.”26 Since then
critiques from other areas such as feminism and post-colonial theory have tempered the
once radical, macho neo-avant-garde. Now revolutionary language is avoided and new or
neglected discourses are included. 27 According to Foster “the avant-garde is

differentiated from forrnalist, modern art by its redeﬁning of aesthetic categories and its
testing of art’s discursive rules and institutional regulations.” 28 Further, he claims that
“this general shift from formalist ‘quality’ to neO-avant-garde interest” began with pop

and minimalism.”29

Last of all, Foster claims neO-avant-garde artists work with both
formalist concerns and avant-garde “interest” in critical coordination.

Postmodernism, post-colonial theory, multiculturalism, and the use of new
technologies in contemporary art, offer new tools with which to make critical judgements
about art, values of progress, etc. Through these theories and new technologies, global
perspectives are replacing Western perspectives. Lorna Simpson, Jimmie Durham, Xu
Bing “and Victori Vesna exemplify many of the characteristics of the postcolonial,
multicultural version of postmodernism presented here. Each thinks critically about the
future and may be considered a part of the second neo-avant-garde. In their work these

four artists make it evident that identity politics and intemet technology should be

considered as new factors inﬂuencing the use of text.

 

2°Ibid., 25.

27 Of importance here are works such as Linda Nochlin’s “Why Have There Been No Great Women
Artists?” in Nochlin, Women, Art and Power and Other Essays, New York, 1988, 145-178., and Lucy
Lippard’s “Naming, ” in Lippard, New Art in a Multicultural America, New York: Pantheon, 1990.

28Poster, The Return, 58.
29

'Ibid.

11

Chapter 2

THREE INTERPRETATIONS

In this chapter the critical analysis of three books/literature dealing with the use of
language in art from 1960-1990 will be conducted. The analysis will cover the works of
American scholars Jessica Prinz and Russell Bowman, and European scholars Andreas
Hapkemeyer and Peter Weiermair. Prinz and Bowman are referred to as the “Americans”
because both live and work in the United States and their texts were published here about
artists that live and work mostly in the US. Hapkemeyer and Weiermair, on the other
hand, are curators who organized an exhibition that took place at the Museion in Bozen,
ItalyJand the Franldurter Kunstverein in Frankfurt, Germany. Their exhibition catalogue
was published in Switzerland in Italian, English and German, therefore they are referred
to as the “Europeans.” It may be more precise to call their viewpoint the “Italo-
Germanic” vieWpoint, but the subject of concern here is not whether or not these art
historians are from Eur0pe or America, but what differs or is similar between their
interpretation and those of Prinz and Bowman.

The analysis of these three interpretations has four parts. First, the most prevalent
reasons each identiﬁes for the use of text in art will be explored. Second, the extent to
which each interpretation takes into account identity politics and intemet technology as

related to the use of text in art will be identiﬁed. And third, why each does or does not

12

include the two new factors contributing to the use of text will be considered. In
conclusion, additions to previous interpretations will be offered so that a critical synthesis
may be achieved.

Beginning with the similarities between the three interpretations, the ﬁrst is that the
four historians are unanimous in their agreement that during the years 1960-1990 the
blurring of boundaries separating disciplines such as: art, music, literature and theater led
artists to include text in art. They also agree about two particular interests shared by the
artists they consider. These are a return to narrativity as a motivation for the use of text in
art and a return to the possibilities offered by the Duchampian “readymade.” The latter is
fu'st attributed to the neO-dadaists but has since been taken up by nee-conceptual artists as
well.30 These historians also agree that the mass media, (television and printed matter)
and these media’s inﬂuence have been very inﬂuential in neo-conceptual artist’s use of
text. Because the media, where images often appear with text, control much of how
society represents itself (the images and texts), its representations became a subject for
these artists.31 A ﬁfth commonality shared by the four historians is their view of the
relationship between Conceptual art and the artists they consider. As is well known, in
Conceptual art ideas are art and the art material is language.32 Artists using a conceptual
approach may let words stand in for concepts or actions or art, and because of the
ambiguity of language these words may have more than one meaning.

The sixth and last similarity that these historians agree about is that semiotics and the

serrriological writings of the French critic Roland Barthes in some way inﬂuence the

 

3° Peter Weiermair’s essay mentions Brandon Taylor’s 1995 book Avant-Garde and After and speciﬁcall
lists these two strategies. Phototexttextphoto, 33-35.
3‘ Sandler, Art ofthe Postmodern Era,319-330.

l3

artist’s awareness of the ﬂuid relationship between images and texts and the present
intangibility of meaning separating the two related concepts. Each scholar does not claim
that every artist considered is known to have read Barthes, but rather they mention that
many artists knew his writings. Andreas Hapkemeyer tries to differentiate between
image and text by quoting Micheal Titzmann who states, “As we know, the basic

differences between the semiotic systems of images and texts consists in the

lesser degree of coding of the primary signiﬁers [i.e. the simplest elements

capable of bearing meaning] in the pictorial and the higher degree of coding

in the linguistic form.”33

While images are different from texts, they also have much in common. It is this
enigmatic relationship that continues to interest artists and to which Barthes refers when
he states “Today, at the level of mass communications, it appears that the linguistic
message is indeed present in every image: as title, caption, accompanying press article,
ﬁlm dialogue, comic strip balloon.”34

With this last shared similarity of semiotics and the semiological writings of Roland
Barthes we shall begin to assess the differences between the three interpretations.
Ironically, the ﬁrst difference is that regarding the recognition that twentieth century
European critical and theoretical inﬂuence receives. Both Prinz and Bowman, in contrast
to Hapkemeyer and Weiermair, regard this century’s inﬂux of writing from EurOpe as
one of the biggest inﬂuences on artists who use text in art. Starting with the language

philosophy of Ferdinand Saussure and Ludwig Wittgenstein and continuing with the

ideas put forth by the French “poststructuralists,” including Barthes, Foucault, Derrida,

 

32 H. H. Amason. History of Modern Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, Photography. 3'“. ed. New
York: Harry N. Abrams, 1986, 562.

33 Micheal Titzmann, ‘Theoretisch-methodologische Probleme einer Semiotik der Text-Bild—Relation,” in
Wolfgang Harms ed., Text und Bild, Bild und Text, DFG-Symposiums, 1988, Stuttgart: Metzler, 1990, 371,
quoted in Andreas Hapkemeyer, Phototexttextphoto,10.

14

Lyotard and Baudrillard, both Prinz and Bowman describe the impact of continental,
theoretical discourse on American artists of the postmodern period. Hapkemeyer and
Weiermair do not mention the inﬂux of European writings into the United States nor do
they claim that these writings inﬂuenced artists to use text in art.3‘5 The fact that Prinz and
Bowman acknowledge the inﬂuence of European theory and Hapkemeyer and Weiermair
do not leads me to question whether or not this should be considered an inﬂuence at all.

The second difference between the three texts concerns the types of art assessed.
Based upon the work included in their studies, the type of art that Hapkemeyer,
Weiermair and Bowman concentrate on is more object oriented than Prinz’s. Of the four
historians only Prinz writes about performance art and its use of language. Bowman,
Weiermair and Hapkemeyer include documentation of the work of performance artists
such as Vito Acconci, Joseph Beuys, Gilbert & George and Alan Kaprow, but their
discussions are lirrrited to descriptions of the documentation accompanying the
performances. Prinz, on the other hand, devotes almost an entire chapter to how
traditional theater uses language and a full chapter to the work of the performance artist
Laurie Anderson and her use of language, thus acknowledging the inﬂuence of an anti-
Object art mentality.

With reference to art theory and philosophy, a third difference between the three
interpretations considered is that both Prinz, and Hapkemeyer and Weiermair refer to
traditional enlightenment aesthetics, citing Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Laokoon (1755)

for example. Both Prinz, and Hapkemeyer and Weiermair indicate that Lessing separated

 

3" Roland Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image,” in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephan Heath, New York: Hill
and Wang, 1977, 38.

15

the arts of painting and literature in this essay by noting space-time divisions while
Bowman conﬁnes his essay to twentieth century references.36 Prinz, and Hapkemeyer and
Weiermair show that the use of text in art is more than just a twentieth-century
phenomenon; they thus provide an historical framework to their interpretations.

These differences and similarities are signiﬁcant because they show the range of
interpretations possible even when each covers the same period and nearly the same
artist. The critical, comparative analysis of these three interpretations also shows that
there is not a clear dividing line between what and who should or should not be included.
Performance artists, painters, photographers and computer artists all may use text in art.
However, the close exanrination of each text allows one to identify the most prevalent
reasons for the use of text in art, i.e. the six similarities between the various
interpretations cited above. Two of the most prevalent reasons are the media and renewed
interests in narrativity and the Duchampian tradition. These two reasons indicate that the
two factors that this thesis seeks to have recognized are emerging as inﬂuences.

Next how each scholar analyzes identity politics and intemet technology as related to
the use of text will be discussed. Jessica Prinz’s study while open to a dematerialized
sensibility of art acknowledges the role of politics of the Other in one area only: that of
feminism. Prinz does not focus on issues concerning other marginalized artists. She does,
however, mention Laurie Anderson’s “ alterity” and her use of “spoken and written texts

which help to shape an interdisciplinary art that is concerned with the limits and

 

35 This inﬂux of writings is something that Hal Foster also refers to as initiating the “textual” or “semiotic”
turn in culture. This was a time, Foster claims, “when theoretical production became as important as artistic
pgoduction” and that witnessed “the reformulation of the work of art as text.” Foster, Real, xiv-xviii.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry,
Trans. E. C. Beasle . London: Longman. 1953. First ed. 1755.

16

possibilities language offers for representing the self, for communication, and for cultural
identity and exchange.”37 Prinz also points out that it is signiﬁcant that Anderson is a
woman artist because she tells us that the artists she focuses on in her book are “the most
blatant examples of what is now a cross-cultural phenomenon.”38 Her book is more
concerned with philosophical understandings of language and its relationship to the art of
the later twentieth century than with identity politics, but acknowledges the importance of
multicultural viewpoints.

Hapkemeyer and Weiermair say almost nothing at all about the politics of identity in
their exhibition catalogue. Their exhibition was concerned with the complex
interrelationships between text and image. The two did, however, include several artists
whose statements and work deal with the politics of identity and with confronting
stereotypes. These include the gay, collaborative artists Gilbert & George, the feminist
artists Louise Lawler, Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, Karen Knorr, and Shirin Neshat and
the performance/conceptual artist Joseph Beuys. Hapkemeyer and Weiermair also show
an awareness of the politics of identity through their reference to the “narrating identity”
tendency mentioned by Brandon Taylor in Avant —Garde and After.

Russell Bowman in his study, Word as Image directly addresses identity politics.
One need only notice that his catalogue essay contains a section entitled “Words as
SociO-Political Commentary.” In this section he mentions artists such as Adrian Piper,
Martha Rosler, Sue Coe, David Wojnarowicz, Hans Haacke, Jenny Holzer and Loma
Simpson, and discusses some of the political issues underlying their work. Quite

correctly, he names women artists as “one of the strongest political ‘voices’ in the art

 

37 Jessica Prinz. Art Discourse/Discourse in Art, New Brunswic :Rutgers University Press, 1991, 125.
38 -
Ibrd. 159.

17

world since 1970.”39 In this chapter Bowman explored a range of artists who draw
attention to racism, sexism and other forms of prejudice based on bias, religion, ethnicity
and econonric standing.

Unfortunately, neither Bowman, Prinz, Hapkemeyer nor Weiermair included anything
about the use of text in online art in their studies. The World Wide Web as a site for art
was just assuming a place of importance for new media artists that it has today, although
by and large it remains on the margins of the contemporary art market."0

In addition to the omission of identity politics and the technology of the intemet, one
other omission found while critically analyzing these three works is, regrettably, the
failure of Bowman, and Hapkemeyer and Weiermair to consider the role of artist’s books
in relation to the use of text in art. Jessica Prinz discusses Joseph Kosuth’s Philosophical
Investigations and Robert Snrithson’s Quasi-Inﬁnities both of which were book form
“irnagetext” artworks, but even Prinz did not consider the implications of the artist’s book
as an individual art form that was of high interest from 1960-1990. Many would agree
that “Language is naturally associated with books, and artists have long accepted the
illustrated book as an art form.”"1 In fact, several recent exhibitions have considered the
declining sovereignty of the book in the age of electronic media."2

Why did this group of autlrors- Prinz, Bowman, Hapkemeyer and Weierrnar not
mention these critical factors that contribute to the use of text in art? If one thinks about

Prinz’s recognition of the intemet as a site for art, likewise with Bowman, Hapkemeyer

 

39 Russell Bowman, Word as Image, 132.

4° David Ross, Director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art , compares intemet art to early video
art. Reena Jana, “David Ross,” Flash Art, 1999, 34.

4‘ Deborah Wye, Thinking Print: Books to Billboards, 1980-1995, New York: The Museum of Modern Art,
1996, 83.

42 This refers to the exhibitions Bound and Gagged: The Sculptural Book, at Cranbrook Art Museum,
Bloomﬁeld Hills, ML, 1998 and A Book is Not a Book, at the Bett Rymer Gallery, Chicago, IL., 1999.

18

and Weiermair, this shows the speed with which technological changes occur and the
persistence of traditional deﬁnitions of art even among those most informed. Even for
Prinz, Bowman, Hapkemeyer and Weiermair it was nearly impossible to predict the
changes that would occur in the late eighties and the nineties. Prinz and Bowman mention
multimedia art and the use of some electronic art technologies such as video and LED.
signs, but they do not, at any point, mention online art.

The critical examination of these texts was necessary to ﬁnd out the differences and
similarities between them and to evaluate what has been left out. This critical
examination makes it clear how quickly things may change and how different these
changes may be. These omissions have been identiﬁed so that they may be incorporated
into future, critical interpretations of art that includes text. Viewers are not necessarily
prepared/informed to interpret text art that deals with the social issues of identity politics
or online art because these are all relatively new uses of text in art.

To ”conclude this chapter I will offer two suggestions to these previous interpretations
of text art so that a critical synthesis may be achieved. The ﬁrst is to recognize that
identity politics and the possibilities offered by the technology of the intemet contribute
to the use of text in art. The second is to consider artist’s books as a vital hybrid art form
not to be forgotten or excluded for not ﬁtting neatly in traditional categories of ﬁne art.

In the chapters that follow the two new factors that, I am arguing, simultaneously
contribute to the use of language in art from 1988-1999 will be presented more in depth.
Each factor is related to the view of postmodernism given above and will be further

substantiated by the work of the four artists to be discussed here.

19

Chapter 3

IDENTITY POLITICS

In this chapter the inﬂuence of identity politics will be clariﬁed so that it may be
assessed as one of the factors contributing to the use of text in art, and thereby critically
synthesized with the three interpretations examined above. First, two art-making
tendencies, which the use of text in contemporary art can be divided into, will be
presented. These two tendencies should indicate how artists use text to address issues of
identity politics. Then, a discussion of identity politics follows, along with its four main
divisions, which are demonstrated by examples. Finally, the work of Lorna Simpson,
Jimmie Durham and Xu Bing will be considered to Show through concrete examples how
identity politics contributes to the use of text in art.

The inﬂuence of the cultural “Other” on the use of text in the visual arts since 1988
may be divided into two related tendencies. These are based on growing ethnographic
and narrative trends in art making and are related because both build upon former
practices and both reﬂect growing interdisciplinarity as well as a general breakdown of
conceptual and national borders. Hal Foster identiﬁed the ethnographic tendency and
Brandon Taylor has discussed narrative interests. Both are based upon a Shift by the neo-
avant-garde “from medium-speciﬁc elaborations to debate-speciﬁc projects” or “from
formalist ‘quality’ to neo-avant-garde interest?” Included in this shift was an urge to

recontextualize through the use of text (projected, written, or displayed electronically).

 

‘3 Foster, “The Artist as Ethnographer,” in The Return of the Real, 170-203. Unless otherwise indicated, all
subsequent Foster references are to this chapter.

20

This urge to recontextualize may mean juxtaposing seemingly unrelated images and texts
or texts and environments in order to overturn traditional notions of originality or to
undercut the endless circulation of images of the world from within.

The ethnographic tendency is based on the model of the artist as ethnographer given by
Hal Foster in The Return of the Real. Here he proposes that this new paradigm is
structurally similar to the old model of the author as producer coined by Walter Benjamin
in 1934. In “The Author as Producer” Benjarrrin urges artists and intellectuals “to change

’9 6‘

the means of production, to overthrow the banier between writing and image.”
Speciﬁcally he counsels photographers “to give his/her pictures that caption which
wrenches it from modish cormnerce and gives his/her pictures revolutionary use-value?”4
According to Foster “the subject of association has changed: it is no longer a subject
deﬁned in economic terms, now it is the cultural and/or ethnic other in whose name the
committed artist most often struggles.”45
Those who practice what Foster is talking about are ethnographer artists. The
African-American artist Fred Wilson is one example. In 1992 at the Baltimore Museum
of Contemporary Art, Wilson took on an ethnographer’s role in a project entitled Mining
the Museum. In this project Wilson investigated the collections of the museum and
selected objects for exhibition. However, Wilson exhibited his objects with labels that
exposed the institutional repression and racial oppression of the museum. Without the
labels, which assumed the authority of the average exhibition label, Wilson’s critique of

the museum’s “unbiased” representations of history would have been too ambiguous. His

labels, the included text, made his point unavoidably lucid. For example, in a display

 

“ Walter Benjamin. Reﬂections, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott, New York: Harcourt Brace
Javonovich, 1978, 220-38. Unless otherwise indicated, all subsequent Benjamin references are to this text.

21

labeled “Metalwork 1790-1880” he placed a pair of slave manacles next to a set of ornate
silver goblets and teapots from about the same period.“5

The ethnographic tendency is also based on “anthropology as the science of alterity,
the discipline that takes culture as its object.”47 Artists aspire to this type of work in that
theory and practice seemed to be intertwined. Projects in the ethnographic tendency may
be site-speciﬁc, installation art, conceptual art or performances. They build upon
practices found in Russian Constructivism (agitprop) and the Dada of Duchamp
(readymades).

With various aspects of culture as their subject, Simpson, Durham, Xu and Vesna add
text (captions) to their pictures to change their context and thus they too become author-
producer-etlrnographer artists.

A second tendency that the use of text can be divided into is the “narrating identity”

trend. Brandon Taylor describes this trend as fulﬁlling an impulse, “In calling this

irnpulse ‘narrative,’ I refer primarily to its embrace of imagery that originates in

mass culture, takes its connotations to the ﬁelds of bodily experience, personal

and racial identity, and by importing “meaning” directly occludes the strategies

of the ready-made in most of its classic or recent forms. The most graphic contrast

is with Duchampian art, which proposes a critique of ideas of art— institutional,

authorial, or managerial — by means of devices of art alone?“
Artists “narrating identity” seek to add a tone that addresses identity through open
signiﬁcation, i.e. by adding handwriting and/or incorporating images from the mass
media with captions. By using a narrative technique artists can openly address issues of

race, gender and identity and escape a no-longer attractive aesthetic based on modernist

principles of formalism and abstraction. According to Brandon Taylor “Such work, that

 

‘5 Foster, The Return of the Real, 173.
‘6 Ibid, 191.
‘7 Ibid, 182.

22

elevates legible content over form and strategy, became the most general category of
advanced art in the decade to 1995.”49

Between 1988 and 1999 the utilization of the narrative and ethnographic tendencies
deﬁned above was part of a general shift in the roles of the artist and the purpose of art.
This does not mean that artists no longer were interested in formalism and abstraction for
some were and still are. However, ethnographer and storyteller artists, such as Mary
Kelly and Lotlrar Baumgarten, blur distinctions between disciplinary areas by working on
speciﬁc identity issues such as homelessness, sexuality and racial stereotyping. The
political content of text art in the narrative and ethnographic tendencies is plain to see and
helps to Show how politics is combined with art and is in many cases inseparable from it.
The four artists included in this thesis i.e. Simpson, Durham, Xu and Vesna work in
either or both of these tendencies sometimes simultaneously.

Both of these trends in artmaking are used to address issues of identity. To do this
artist's'often utilize both images and text, but what is identity politics and how is it
understood for this thesis? The politics of identity, which could just as well be called the
politics of the Other, is the term used to describe the complex social relations between
people differing from one another and the struggle for power and leadership between
them. The politics of identity can be divided into four basic categories based on gender,
race and ethnicity, sex and class and are variable and may be addressed using either of
the tendencies outlined above. The lines between each division are not deﬁnite and may

prove to be merely historical constructs, but for the purposes of this thesis shall be

 

‘8 Brandon Taylor, “Narrating Identity: the early 1990’ s” in Avant-Garde and After, 143.
”Ibid. 167.

23

adequate. In the following pages of this chapter, ﬁrst, I will relate some of the history of
identity politics, then give explanations of the four divisions with examples and ﬁnally,
discuss the work of Lorna Simpson, J irnrrrie Durham and Xu Bing.

Although discourse on identity politics has been around since the time of the Greeks
and the Persian wars, “in the modern world, the cultural Other, provoked a crisis of
Western identity.”50 In this century as European colonialism slowed down or relinquished
authority those colonized began to speak out and question relations of power. Demanding
recognition instigated a crisis of Western identity. Writers such as the anthropologist
Claude Levi-Strauss and the philosopher/psychoanalyst Franz Fanon, both at work in the
ﬁfties, wrote about the effects of colonization on those colonized and the colonizers, and
about the struggle of the cultural Other. Fanon wrote of the colonized native that seeks to
renew a national culture. Levi-Strauss wrote from the perspective of an anthrOpologist
ﬁrst contact with a tribe in the Amazon. Later, the post- structuralist Jacques Derrida too,
in his theory of “binary opposites” was concerned with the human inclination to cast
those who are different as “Others.” More recently the cultural historian Edward Said
wrote of “the Western artistic and scholarly portrayal of the non-West that organizes and
produces the Orient as a political reality that is opposite or Other.”51

According to Arthur Danto, multiculturalism was on the ascendant in 1984, and was to
overtake the art world, in America at least, in epiderrric proportions in the nineties.52
Danto is talking about a synonym for identity politics, which Robert Atkins explains in

Artspeak, “at the end of the 1980’s, numerous American museums began to mount

 

5" Foster, The Return ofthe Real, 1996, 217.
5‘ Edward Said, Orientalism, New York: Vintage Books, 1978, 31-53.
52 Danto, After the End, 94.

24

exhibitions organized on the basis of artist’s ethnic, racial, and gender identities. (This
approach has since come to be known as identity politics.)”53 While “identity politics” is
a recent buzzword, its concerns are more long standing. Today artists such as Lorna
Simpson, J irrrnrie Durham, Xu Bing and Victoria Vesna consider the implications of
“Otherness” from one of many possible perspectives. These artists therefore interpret and
comment on the hybridised nature of the contemporary, globalized world that includes
many elements of cultural diversity.

Not writing directly about identity politics, but rather about the contemporary avant-
garde, the art critic Arthur C. Danto describes the general public’s reaction to the
socially-oriented art of thel993 Whitney Biennial as “the audience. .. felt itself the true
victim of all the artists proclaiming victimhood on their own behalf.”54 The reaction that
Danto describes approximates the reception of such art by those “carrying within their
collective minds a Biedermeier aesthetic”. It also shows the general public’s unfamiliarity
with the social issues addressed by these artists. Many artists in the period being
considered, 1988-1999, deal with the politics of identity because of the importance of
certain issues to them and at times in doing so disturbs a dominant culture that depends
on strict stereotypes.

“From perhaps the mid-1960s artists often found themselves increasingly involved in
political causes.”55 Beginning with the civil rights movement and coinciding with the
Vietnam War artists from marginalized groups challenged the existing standards of white,

patriarchal, heterosexual, culture. This era of social unrest was paralleled in the art world

 

53 Atkins, Artspeak, 122.
5" Arthur C. Danto. “Why Does Art Need to be Explained?: Hegel, Biedermeier, and the Intractably Avant-
Garde,”in Art on the Edge and Over: Searching for Art’s Meaning in Contemporary Society 1970’s-I990’s,

by declining interests in purely formalist concerns and a renewed interest in
representational imagery.56 “Art was believed to be a means to social change” as “many
artists became more concerned with social issues than aesthetic ones,” speciﬁcally issues
of identity politics.57 Freedom from trying to fulﬁll any particular aesthetic agenda
allowed marginalized artists to utilize techniques they felt communicated most effectively
be they text, music, objects or images, traditional or non-traditional. The “cultural Other,”
because of their independence and experimentation are given credit for inﬂuencing an
alternative to the “purity” of modernism, commonly referred to as “Greenberg’s formalist
position”58
The alternative work by marginalized artists “looked beyond the frame of the work
of art to the social, economic, and political context within which art came into being and

whose institutions it served.”59

Those considered “other” as well as those no longer
interested in formalism and modernism began “to make clear the unique importance of
questiOns of gender, sexual difference, race and the Third World.”60 Using images and
texts in art is political and can be used to address either or all of the issues of identity

politics.

The ﬁrst category of identity politics is gender. For years feminist artists have been
particularly concerned with the topic of gender because they have been marginalized on

this basis by the patriarchal art world more than any other group throughout history. In

 

by Linda Weintraub, Arthur C. Danto and Thomas McEvilley, Litchﬁeld, Conn.: Art Insights Publishers,
1996, 16.

5‘ Ibid. 15.

56 Russell Bowman. Word as Image, 130.

57 Danto, Art on the Edge, 15.

5” Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” Art at Literature, Paris, No. 4, Spring, 1963, 198-206.

59 Irving Sandler. Art of the Postmodern Era, Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1998, 333.

26

this case, however, “marginalization” is not an accurate word because women make up
approximately ﬁfty-one percent of the world’s population. Some feminist artists such as
Nancy Spero, Judy Chicago and Mary Kelly rejected the aesthetic canon of modernism
because it assigned an objectiﬁed role to women and they challenged men to
reconceptualize aesthetic criteria.

Nancy Spero is a particularly pertinent example in this case. She uses images
combined with text to critique the historical oppression of women. A committed feminist,
Spero’s philosophy prohibits the representation of men (only women). In works such as
Marduk 1997, Spero presents stylized renderings of Greek and Egyptian goddesses.
Spero accompanies the images with lines of text relating the killing and resurrection of
the Babylonian mother goddess Tiamat, in order to present an alternative female
identity.61 Through similar “irnagetext” art Spero has been campaigning against gender-
based issues for years mostly unnoticed until recently.62

Through their revival of traditionally “craft” oriented art forms such as weaving and
quilting, women artists raised questions about “high” and “low” art fornrs, as did male
artists in other ways. By putting captions on these objects they also intuitively capitalized
on the revolutionary use-value mentioned by W. Benjamin. The second generation of
feminist artists, working in the eighties, (Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Jenny Holzer,
Sherrie Levine, and others) was often concerned with addressing the representation of
women in contemporary culture and the objectiﬁcation of women throughout history.
Many of the representations that these artists commented on were those found in the mass

media, which often included both words and images. As a matter of fact, the “second

 

6° Hal Foster, “For a Concept of the Political in Art,” Art in America, Apr. 1984, 17-19.
6’ Roger Green, “Exhibit Raises Consciousness,” The Flint Journal, 5 October 1997, sec. F, 4.

27

generation feminists maintained that human beings exist wholly in language rather than
biology.”63 One of the most popular and effective examples of a second-generation
feminist artist is the American artist Jenn Holzer whose “works use the structure of the
mass media and aesthetics of the current milieu to smuggle messages into the public
arena?“ Always ambiguous but provocative, Holzer’s works, such as Kriegszustand
(War Condition 1996 exemplify the use of text in art to address aspects of issues of
identity. Kriegszustand, an outdoor laser projection installation of the words “With You
Inside Me Comes The Knowledge Of My Death” on a war memorial in Leipzig,
Germany, also testiﬁes to the increasing use of electronic text-based media for artistic
purposes.65

In addition to feminism or gender based identity politics, issues such as race and
ethnicity constitute a second area of emphasis in recent text based art. This category
includes all artists from racial or etlmic minorities that are non-“Westem” or “Third
World.” Native Americans are part of the race and ethnicity area of identity politics as are
artists of Latino, Asian, Far and Middle Eastern descent among many others.

In the United States the largest group of artists who address the issue of race or
ethnicity by using text is the group descended from the African diaspora. For these
African-American artists the issue has not always been being considered an artist of great
talent, before it was just being admitted into a museum or program of higher education.66

Even as recently as 1990, artists of African ancestry, such as Alison Saar and Martin

 

‘2 Ibid.

‘3 Sandler, Art of the Postmodern Era, 359.

6‘ Astrid Wege, Art at the Turn ofthe Millenium, eds. Burkhard Riemschneider and Uta Grosenick,
Colonge: Taschen, 1999, 238.

65 Ibid.

66 Romare Bearden and Harry Henderson. A History of African-American Artists: From 1792 to the
Present, New York: Pantheon Books, 1993, xi-xvii.

28

Puryear have been forced to deal with comparisons to European movements and artists,
while African and African-American cultural references were ignored.‘57 This is further
complicated by the fact that African-American artists have been pressured since the
twenties to work in a “primitive” style and as a result much of their work has been
derogatorily labeled as “prirrritive.”68

A noteworthy example of an African-American artist whose work has been labeled
sophisticated “primitivism” may be found in the “grafﬁti” artist Jean-Michel Basquiat
(1960-1988). Basquiat was favored during the eighties by critics who identiﬁed him “as
part of a continuum of contemporary American art with a genealogy traced through white
males: Pollack, de Kooning, Rauschenberg, Twombly and so on to Andy Warhol.”69
Basquiat’s vandalism-inspired grafﬁti art “tended to be packed with written words, signs,
and symbols referring to his African and Hispanic identity, historical events and
contemporary black ﬁgures with whom he identiﬁed.”70 Basquiat, like many of the artists
considered here, dealt with themes of identity and pushed against the boundaries of
conventional (white) artistic tastes before multiculturalism prescribed embracing
diversity.71 Basquiat often included text in his work and whether the text was explanatory

or ambiguous or combined with Voodoo totems or skulls it helped “open art to the

‘Other?’72

 

‘7 Micheal D. Harris, “Toward Object and Verb: History, Dualities, and the African-American Artist,” c
Magazine, Tomato, 1992: 13. For more documentation and statistical evidence of racism in the New York
art apparatus Harris recommends, Howardina Pindell, “Art (World) & Racism,” Third Text, 3’4,
(spring/summer 1988, 157-90.

Bearden, History of African-American Artists, 123.
6” bell hooks. “Altars of Sacriﬁce: Re-Membering Basquiat,” Art on My Mind: Visual Politics, New York:
The New Press, 1995, 35-48.
7° Sandler. Art ofthe Postmodern Era, 266.
7’ Thomas McEvilley, “Royal Slumming: Jean-Michel Basquiat Here Below,” Artforum, Nov. 1992, 95.
72 Jean-Michel Ribettes, Art at the Turn of the Millenium, 62.

29

The third area that identity politics can be divided into is sex or sexual persuasion.
This refers to gay and lesbian artists who are marginalized on the basis of their sexual
orientation. When the AIDS epidemic started in the eighties, some gay and lesbian artists
began to campaign against the disease and the govemment’s lack of attention to its
spread. Unashamed of using imagery or narrative, artists such as David Wojnarowicz,
Felix Gonzales Torres, Luis Cruz Azaceta, Glenn Lignon and Keith Haring “mobilised
sign-systems explicitly in order to comment directly on prominent issues of the day.”73
One can be sure that some gay and lesbian artists addressed other topics in their work, but
in the eighties the AIDS crisis was a rallying point around which many gathered. One
major art project held at the time stands out to exemplify the importance the AIDS
epidemic. This is the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, which was made for those
who died of an AIDS-related illness. First shown in Washington during the 1987 National
March for Gay and Lesbian Rights, this quilt is made of three by six-foot panels
decorated with names, messages, pictures and mementos or bits of clothing. “Speaking
many voices, existing in no single place, movable, expandable, made both privately and
collectively, and able to remember an individual within an inclusive community, the quilt
may have succeeded in bringing together the political and human functions of art.”

A fourth area of identity politics just emerging in artistic debate is that based on class.
This concern focuses on economic differences and in most cases is based on a Marxist
critique of capitalism in which art often is seen as a market commodity belonging to the

upper classes. Somewhat altered in 1991 with the collapse of the U.S.S.R.. Artists using

Marxist interpretations previously recognized that art was something used by those in

 

73 Brandon Taylor, The Avant-Garde and After: Rethinking Art Now, New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.,
1995. 148.

30

power to subjugate the weaker classes. Artists such as Hans Haacke, Martha Rosler and
Jenny Holzer all have commented on marginalization based on economic difference. In
performances, installations and photographs using texts, images and objects these artists
have criticized global corporations, the United States government and abuses of capitalist
power that increase social dilemmas. “Socially committed art was hardly new at the end
of the eighties,” but what is not always spoken about is the use of text in such art.” One
socially committed artwork in which text seems to play an important part is Le must de
Rembrandts 1986 by the German born artist Hans Haaclte.76 Haacke’s Le must
installation investigated and exposed the business sponsorship of the arts by the Cartier
Company and the Rembrandt Consortium of which it is a part. Le must consisted of black
signs with gold inscriptions of corporate logos, booklets of background information used
as a long caption, neoclassical pilasters with lists of names and short narratives, and
mural sized photographs all situated inside the concrete walls of what was a World War
II bunker. Yve-Alain Bois claims that “the usual typed pages that accompany Haacke’s
pieces” are only “supplementary documentation. . ., not really part of the wor “ and that
Haacke’s work “cannot fail to be correctly interpreted without them.” However, the text
in Haacke’s “imagetext” art has more importance than Bois admits. Why else would Bois
mention Haacke’s “saturated information?” Haacke’s socially comrrritted art seeks to
expose the fourth area of identity politics- economic or class-based difference using text
in installations following the John Heartﬁeld tradition of photo-montage.

The number of artists worldwide whose work can be included in one of the four

divisions is large and cannot be repeated here. This total should indicate to some degree

 

7‘ Toby Clark. Art and Propaganda, 160.
75 Sandler, Art of the Postmodern Era, 550.

31

the potential found in such art and its popularity among artists, marginalized or not. It
should also rerrrind one, once again, of the words of Brandon Taylor who described work
“that wishes to speak directly of issues. . .” and “that elevates legible content over form
and strategy” as ”the most general category of advanced art in the decade to 1995.”77
Haacke, Holzer, Basquiat and Wilson are four of the most well known examples of artists
using texts in their work. They have been included here to help explain either of the four

areas of identity politics contributing to the use of text in art.

An artist whose work includes text for reasons inﬂuenced by issues of identity and
whose work incisively contains many elements of the updated, multicultural version of
postmodernism presented in chapter one, is the African-American Lorna Simpson, (born
1960). She was chosen because her text art combines conceptualist and feminist concerns
and typically deals with issues of racial and gender identity. Her neo-conceptual approach
testiﬁes to the ongoing importance of conceptual concerns to neo-avant-garde artists.
Through her work Simpson also questions the political efﬁcacy and limits of both
language and imagery and seeks to deconstruct the codes that support prevailing power
relationships.

Sirnpson’s usual medium is photography, but hers is a photography that does not
conform to the formal, modernist aesthetic of the hand-made print with its own “aura.”78
Simpson can be categorized with artists, such as Barbara Kruger or Louise Lawler, who

used to be called “photoworks” artists because they were less concerned with print

quality or the history of the medium than with simply being artists who just happened to

 

7‘ Yve-Alain Bois, “The Antidote,” October, # 39, 1986, 128-144.
77 Brandon Taylor, Avant-Garde, 167.

32

use a camera. Simpson is known for her “standard strategy of repetition that she uses to
inﬂate the image of a single ﬁgure into a collective persona that speaks to the
simultaneous oppressions of gender and race.”79 Her images are spare and she typically
presents her ﬁgures from behind or facing the camera with the head cropped out. Her
photographs may be combined in series or alone, in color or black and white, but are
often accompanied by text engraved on plastic or bronze mounts over, under, beside, or
on the photographs.

With her background in documentary photography, Simpson has “concentrated on
photography as a conveyor of enculturated codes.”80 However her photographs are on]
one part of the work. The remainder consists of words that allow her to speak directly to
speciﬁc issues. If one asks why Simpson uses language in her work and how she uses it,
one begins to see that this is what identiﬁes her as an ethnographer artist using a neo-
conceptual approach. According to the cultural critic and art historian bell hooks
SimpSOn’s language: “. . .brings a threat to the fore. It invites us to consider the
production of history as a cultural text, a narrative uncovering repressed or forgotten
memory.“81 Simpson states that she includes her
“own text or her speciﬁc reading of the image to give the viewer something they
might not interpret or surmise, due to their “educated” way of looking at images...
and that she “would start to interject these things that the photograph would not

speak of and that I felt needed to be revealed, but that couldn’t be absorbed from

 

78 Alan Artner, “Spare Power,” The Chicago Tribune, August, 24‘”, 1992, D, 3.

79 John Rapko, “The Feminine Masquerade: Works by Lorna Simpson at the Ansel Adams Center,”
Artweek, September 17, 1992, 20-21.

8° Chris Bruce, “Navigating the Hall of Mirrors,” in After Art: Rethinking 150 Years of Photography,
Seattle: Henry Art Gallery, 1994, 21.

8‘ bell hooks, “Facing Difference: The Black Female Body,” in Art on My Mind: Visual Politics, New
York: The New Press, 1995, 94.

33

just looking at an image.”82

Simpson uses phrases that are subversive because they undo their own seeming
innocence. “Throughout her work, Simpson’s intention is to redirect the viewer away
from culturally conditioned signs of the body to the self-deﬁned, authentic voice of the
texts.”83 For example, the text that Simpson includes on or near a photograph may seem
to directly refer to something about the photograph. Nonetheless, Simpson leaves the
ﬁnding of meaning to the viewer, suggesting that it lies between image and text, and thus
allows many interpretations. Because her ideas are more important than the media she
uses to convey them Simpson is therefore in the continuum of generations of the
Conceptual artists before her and she has been considered a neo-conceptual artist.

A work by Simpson titled You ’re Fine, 1988 (Figure 1) serves as a good example of
the artist as ethnographer using text for identity-political reasons. This work consists of
four Polaroid prints hung in a row so that together they form a single image of a reclining
woman, seen from behind, wearing a white shift. Above the photographs afﬁxed to the
wall white letters spell the words “”You’re Fine.” Below the photographs similar letters
spell out the words “You’re Hired.” To the left are gold plaques engraved with “physical
exam,” “height,” and “electrocardiogram.” To the right are two more gold plaques
engraved “secretarial” and “position.” The reclining posture recalls typical Venus or
odalisque poses from the history of art and also the uncomfortable passivity required in a

medical exam. Implied alienation and objectiﬁcation are not too far behind. Each viewer

 

82 Beryl J. Wright, Lorna Simpson: For the Sake of the Viewer, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago:
1992, 8.

33 Ibid. 9.

may see only a series of photographs which combined form the image of a reclining
woman accompanied by ambiguous words, but something else produces a tension that
cannot be entirely deﬁned. Simpson, as the other artists included here, mines the gap
between the signiﬁer and the signiﬁed, a gap that results when neither word nor image is
wed to the referent.84 Her work disturbs some because of its insistent political content,
but the issues it addresses- racial and gender identity need to be voiced. Because the
ﬁgure in Simpson’s work is anonymous it therefore refers to no one speciﬁcally and
inverts the objectifying structures of the dominant gaze.

A second work by Simpson that fuses current theory with her practice is Untitled (2
necklines), 1989 (Figure 2). Two circular black-and —white close ups of a woman’s neck
and shoulders with a vertical row of black plastic plaques in between bearing words
corresponding to acts or objects that encircle, among them “lasso,” noose,” and “collar.”
Were it not for the red plaque below them with the phrase “ feel the ground sliding from
underuyou” the viewer would be left ﬂoundering between several possible interpretations.
Kellie Jones sees in Simpson’s allegories of “the archetypal Black woman” a “suave
Innuendo of the Blues and the duality of use and meaning in the Black community (e.g.
bad 2 good).85

Most recently Simpson has ventured into single and multiple-projection ﬁlm
installations and is still concerned with the same issues.86 Her projections, such as
Interior/Exterior, F all/Empty, 1997 are examples of the urge to recontextualize through

the use of text because the projections in combination with the locations in which they

 

84 Foster, The Return, 86.

85 Kellie Jones, in Lorna Simpson, New York: Josh Baer Gallery, Oct. 1989.
86 Sarah J. Rogers, “Between Takes,” in Interior/Exterior, FulVEmpty, Loma Simpson and Sarah J. Rogers,
Columbus , Ohio: Wexner Center for the Arts, 1997, 9-16.

35

take place all contribute to the layers of meaning in the work.87 The “shock” once found
by confronting unfamiliar images, media or experiences so typical of historical avant-
garde art, exists still in the work of neo-avant-garde artists, such as Simpson, only the
effect is no longer the same. Minimal in nature, Simpson’s work invites the viewer to
produce whatever meaning he or she may ﬁnd in Simpson’s “imagetext” art Because her
work cannot be satisfactorily interpreted without considering the identity politics issues
she investigates, Simpson makes evident the necessity of including the factor of identity

politics into interpretations of contemporary text art.

The second artist whose work serves as an example for this thesis is the Native
American sculptor Jimmie Durham, (born 1940). Durham was selected because his work
stands out as a poignant example of the postcolonial and because he uses text in art for
reasons based on the ethnicity area of identity politics. Durham is best known as an
assemblage sculptor, but is also a poet and performance artist. Throughout his work
Durham confronts the stereotypes of Native Americans in white culture. Because his
artwork stretches or blurs the boundaries of orthodox formalism he shares with the other
artists presented here this feature found by the European and American historians
mentioned above. Durham’ s work is also known for its Dada connotations something
also mentioned by the historians in chapter two. This is shown by his tendency to use
‘found objects’ and recontextualize them in conjunction with legible content.

Durham’s work has certain ethnographic features, such as the tools by which cultures
deﬁne their identity, that give it an explicitly political content. These strategies also

locate Durham as an artist who utilizes an ethnographic strategy. Works such as Red

 

8’ Ibid.

36

Turtle, 1991 (Figure 3) “are meant to lead the observer to reﬂect on the misunderstandings
that are central to the confrontation between colonizer and colonized.”88 Red Turtle also
leads one to see that Durham’s work needs to be understood in the context of two
paradoxes. The ﬁrst is the invisibility of Indian history, a history of loss to which his
people, the Cherokee, were subjected and which was then forgotten under a wave of
ofﬁcial amnesia. The second is the image of ‘the Indian’ such as The Lone Ranger’s
friend Tonto or Pocahontas that proliferated in American popular cultrrre.89 In order to
further aid his message Durham often utilizes found or appropriated texts, written b
“ofﬁcial” governmental sources or by authors such as William Shakespeare and the
anthropologist Frantz Fanon. In many cases the source of the texts Durham appropriates
is an important part of understanding the irony of his work.

His 1992 piece I Forgot What I Was Going To Say (Figure 4) includes the words “I
forgot what I was going to say” on a piece of paper sticking out from a piece of rounded
wood-that separates a revolver from its trigger. 90 This is a small, rather unpretentious,
piece, however, the words which Durham wrote on a white piece of canvas, a sort of ﬂag
of surrender, evoke questions about possession. “Whose gun was this? “What is the
history of this gun?” In the context of how Durham uses this gun, every viewer who is
descendant of those who colonized North America is confronted with questions in the
discourse of primitivism. The handwritten text cannot be attributed to anyone in
particular, however, its message seems to indicate that the joke, according to Durham, is
on himself. The images carved into the piece of wood separating the revolver from the

trigger are Native American mythological beings that are part of oral traditions passed

 

8” Laura Mulvey, Dir Snauwert and Mark Alice Durant, Jimmie Durham, New York: Phaidon, 1995, 46.
89 -
Ibrd, 46-47.

37

from generation to generation before written language. Because of the implied narrative
and ethnographic elements in his work, Durham utilizes both the “narrating identity”
tendency as well as the “ethnographic” tendency.
According to Hal Foster Durham’s hybrid works “mix ritualistic and found objects in

a way that is preemptively auto—primitivist and wryly anti-categorical.” 9’ He should,
therefore, be seen as an artist whose ethnographic work exempliﬁes the post-colonial
effects of a clash of cultures and whose work is double-coded with modernist
juxtapositions and personal cultural references. These characteristics also are part of the
multicultural, postcolonial postrrrodernism that frames this thesis. The use of text in
Durham’s art is similar, not exclusively, to Simpson’s and indirectly leads to his work’
meaning. Only by thoughtfully contemplating the text, objects and images can one
understand the ironies about culture/nature and civilization/savagery found in his work.

Another piece by Durham that makes use of the “found object” concept is Untitled,
1992-(Figure 5). Untitled is basically a found branch painted red accompanied by a piece
of paper that Durham has written on. The letter gives some of the meaning of the piece
away. For example it explains in simple language that Jimmie found this branch and
proceeded to make a make a work of art out of it. After painting the branch red and
sticking glass eyes on it. Durham gave up and authored the note explaining why.
“Durham’s art words are not Apollonian Logos, nor the whines of today’s anti-logos
grafﬁtists, not text, not even Pop copy, but radical unravellings infected with the virus of

incommensurability.”92

 

9° Ibid. 70.
9’ Poster. The Return of the Real, 199.
92 Robert Mahoney, “Jimmie Durham: Art World Word Art,” Flash Art, January, 1993,84.

38

Durham, unlike many other Native Americans, was not conﬁned to a reservation,
but instead roamed the world with the Navy. Later Durham was an art student, political
activist and as Director of International Treaty Council of the American Indian ’
Movement. Unable to return to a pre-colonization past, Native American artists such as
Durham attempts to renegotiate identity in a complex and changing culture. His political
agenda is motivated by his identity and though he has found success in some circles of
the art world he continues to confront assumptions about Indians and refuses to capitulate
to conventional Western art standards. Using a style he labels “neo-primitive neo-
conceptualism,” Durham tries to “deconstruct European hegemony and reconstruct it into

a new “Indian” culture through automotive relics.”93

A third artist whose work also indicates the importance of identity politics in text art
is the Chinese émigré artist Xu Bing. Xu can be said to occupy the area of identity
politics based on ethnicity or race. Furthermore, Xu’s work also connects the two, new
factors suggested for interpreting the use of text in art through his use of the technolog
of the computer, of language, and the subject of identity politics as related to the cultural
differences between East and West.

Xu Bing was born in 1955, educated in Beijing and became one of the important
ﬁgures in the Chinese “New Wave” art movement. In 1990 in the wake of the Tianamen
Square massacre he was forced to leave China.94 N ow living in New York he exhibits his
work internationally. At thirty-nine years old, Xu ﬁrst became known for his work

Tianshu (The Book of the Sky). This work “is based on the three

9

 

93 Lucy Lippard, “Jimmie Durham: Postrnodernist “Savage,” Art in America, February, 1993, 62-68, 55.

39

categories of Chinese writing: the sutra scroll, the book, and wall texts;

however, in this work all three use the four thousand, unreadable, but

aesthetically beautiful characters that the artist spent a year carving. This

work defeats the viewer's expectations that the text can be read. It also

touches on many contemporary issues: the futility of expression and the

inability to communicate in modern times, as well as the deep-seated

cultural and political disarray encountered in contemporary China.”95
Tianshu- (The Book of the Sky) brings the East into contact with the West at its most
divisive point, that of language; it questions cultural similarities and differences.
Ethnographic works by Xu Bing such as Tianshu reveal that language and culture are the
subject of his art.

Xu is best known for his elaborate installations, that poetically merge sharp cultural
criticism with traditional Chinese book craft. Through text-based installations Xu
continues to “encircle history and politics with an imaginative web of cynicism, tradition
and humor.”96 One work in particular by Xu Bing in which text plays an important role is
Cultural Animal: A Case Study of Transference (Figure 6) an installation performance of
1996. This installation, which was videoed and reshown later at numerous galleries with
two pigs on opposing walls, consisted of a live performance of two breeding pigs. As
Lydia Yee the associate curator of contemporary art at the Bronx Museum of the Arts
describes “Each pig will be carefully cleaned, groomed and have nonsensical words
printed on their bodies in both fake English and Chinese. The pigs will be foraging for

food and fornicating amongst newspapers, magazines and books.”97 For Xu this is “an

experiment to provoke various responses and interpretations: the arbitrariness of all

 

9“ Laurel Reuter, Into the Dark Sings the Nightingale: The work of Xu Bing, Grand Forks, North Dakota:

North Dakota Museum of Art, 1992, 1.

95 Jonathan Goodman, “Bing Xu: 4,000 Characters in Search of Meaning,” Artnews, September 1994, 99.

96 Barbara McKenna, Currents, Feb. 22, 1999, University of California, Santa Cruz,
http://www.ucsc.edu/oncampus/currents/98-99/02-22/chinese.htm.

cultural endeavor; a metaphor for the human condition: an illustration of cultural
imperialism; and the triumph of natural order over culture, or instinct over reason.”98

Another work by Xu that exempliﬁes the tenets of my thesis is entitled Introduction to
New English Calligraphy, 1999 (Figure 7).99 In this installation Xu invited
viewers/participants to learn the Square Word Calligraphy he teaches. Using traditional
Chinese brushstrokes Xu merges English letters with Chinese script. This work serves as
a bridge between East and West because it demystiﬁes the Chinese language to non-
Chinese speakers. At ﬁrst glance most of the words of Square Word Calligraphy appear
to be Chinese writing, but can be easily deciphered as English words. In a project that
stems from Square Word Calligraphy Xu has developed a computer version called Nin
Gui Xing (Your Surname Please), an Interactive Language Project, 1999 located on the
website of the Asia Society ’00 Here viewers become collaborators in Xu’s project,
inputing their names, which are then, transformed into “pseudo-Chinese characters” a
theory catches up with practice. One can also see the gap between words and meanings
opening up as the language that identiﬁes the Chinese people merges with English.

I have established through the analysis of these representative artists that identity

politics are a factor that inﬂuences the use of text in the art from 1988- 1999 and that this

should be critically synthesized with the interpretations given in chapter two.

 

97 Lydia Yee, review of Cultural Animal: A Case Study of Transference, by Xu Bing, accessed March, 29‘“,
1999, available from http:/lwww.imageseries.com/art-review.htm.
93 .
Ibrd.
99 Ethan Cohen. “Xu Bing,” Asian Art Newspaper, January, 1999, 6-7.

41

Chapter 4

A REALM WHERE ART AND INFORMATION MEET

In this chapter the inﬂuence of intemet technology on the inclusion of text in art from
1988 - 1999 will be clariﬁed so that this issue can be synthesized with interpretations b
Bowman, Prinz, Hapkemeyer and Weiermair. Crucial to an understanding of this factor is
a consideration of the mass media’s inﬂuence on artists and society. Following
assessment of the effects of media on society during the past thirty years through the
comments of several media theorists the inﬂuence of the media on artists will be shown.
Next, the relationship between art, technology and the media will be discussed. This will
then be followed by a description of the characteristics of web/net art. Concluding this
chapter will be a look at the relationship between web/net art and identity politics in the
art ofVictoria Vesna.

As discussed previously, the four theorists/scholars discussed here concur that the
artists’ use of text during the years1960-1990 reveals the inﬂuence of the media. One
characteristic of the View of postmodernism used here is disillusionment with
technological progress coupled with an irresistible fascination with it. However, in the
ﬁrst part of this chapter the effects that the media has had on society generally in the past

thirty years will be considered. This will then be connected by taking into account the

 

10° Asian Society, “Work in Progress,” available from
http://www.asiasociety.org/arts/insideout/worldnproghtml, accessed April 13, 1999.

42

continuing relationship between art and technology to the development of the intemet as
a site for on-line art.101
In the past three decades both media theorists and artists recognized that the media is

inﬂuencing others to believe in its alternate reality. In a-chapter called “Media Art” in Art
of the Postmodern Era (1998) Irving Sandler writes about the increasing inﬂuence of the
mass media on the lives of most Americans and some artists’ responses to this. One
pertinent segment reads, “The overwhelming number

of Americans born after 1945 had been weaned on the mass media,

particularly television. They sat for hours on end every day in front of

the tube, their consciousness permeated by its programming- and its

commercials. So prevalent had the mass media become that many artists

felt that they had come to constitute their essential experience, if not

reality itself.”102
The reality deﬁning and transforming aspects of the media that Sandler describes were,
however, predicted in the sixties by the media theorists Guy Debord and Marshall
McLuhan. Debord in The Society of the Spectacle (1967) had fatalistically predicted that
“capitalism had evolved and instituted such powerful mechanisms for manipulating
consciousness that the masses had been transformed into passive consumers, in thrall to
an all-embracing “spectacle” of advertising and the media.” ’03 McLuhan, on the other
hand, in Understanding Media (1964) was more Optimistic and saw the media as “an
extension of man.” McLuhan believed that television had the ability to enmesh the entire

human community into what he called “one vast electronic, global village?“

 

10’ The World Wide Web is, according to Robert Atkins, a component of the intemet. Robert Atkins,
Artspeak, 135.

‘02 Irving Sandler, “Media Art,” Art of the Postmodern Era, 320.

’03 Myriam D. Maayan, “From Aesthetic to Political Vangaurd: The Situau'onist International, 1957-68,”
Arts Magazine, Jan. 1989, 51.

1°“ Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media New Yorlc McGraw-Hill, 1964, 60.

43

Debord’s and McLuhan’s views are two of the most widely acclaimed. However,
since then others such as the French media theorist Jean Baudrillard have also
commented on the all-too-powerful effects of the media. Baudrillard believed that as
computers, television and other electronic media increasingly dominated society, the
mass media profoundly affected Western culture. In 1988 he wrote: “that people are
mediated by the language of the media where the established social order represents
itself,” and that “we should passively surrender to the ﬂow of media images in an ecstasy
of communication.”105 In a way, Baudrillard’s, Debord’s and McLuhan’s predictions
have now come true as we have become wired to spectacular events that can be
experienced globally on the World Wide Web.

In the nineties, theories about the effects of the media continue to be formulated.
Leonard Schlain the author of The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conﬂict Between
Word and Image (1998) postulated on the effects of television on culture. He claimed
that, “The fusing of photography and electromagnetism is proving to be of the same
magnitude as the discovery of agriculture, writing and print.”106 He also alleged that,
“Television promotes multicultural tribalism and subverts nationalism?!” This
undoubtedly refers to solidarity based on similar television viewing experiences, which
cannot be conﬁned to national borders. Television programs such as CNN news, Dallas

or Dynasty, which can be seen around the world, serve as examples.

 

“’5 Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, Trans. Bernard and Caroline Schutze, New York:
Semiotext(e), 1988.

1“ Schlain, Leonard, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conﬂict Between Word and Image, New York:
Viking Putnam, 1998, 407429.

‘°7 Ibid.

Since the sixties artists have made works that comment directly on the media. For the
Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist and others Pop
artists it was the popular culture of advertising that inspired their work, some criticized its
representations, some gloriﬁed them. In the seventies video artists criticized the
mainstream media which all but banned their work. “’8 During the 1980’s, artists such as
Barbara Kruger and Richard Prince examined the overload of images in the media by
apprOpriating imagery and/or the technology from the mass media. It was then that it
began to be recognized that “what we see on television is based on what audiences want
to watch, and what the people who control and sponsor television believe needs to be

created and broadcast in order to maximize proﬁt.”109

The relation between the media and art has to do with the redeﬁned relation between
art and technology. Many contemporary artists use new computer-based technologies for
art making. Artists value these technologies because they allow communication with
larger numbers of people more than traditional media like painting, sculpture and
drawin . The inﬂuence of the media continues to interest some theorists and artists, as
does the use of new technologies. The growth of technology-based art is part of the shift
in the past thirty years from the medium-specific modernist u’adition of the artist as
painter, sculptor or printmaker to a neo-avant—garde understanding that may involve other
areas of endeavor. This shift is based on interest rather than quality. Artists, such as

Gretchen Bender, who want to critically examine the media and are interested in using

 

108 Frank Popper, Art of the Electronic Age, 179.

‘09 Herbert I. Schiller, “Media, Technology, and the Market: The Interacting Dynamic,” in Culture on the
Brink: Ideologies of Technology, eds. Gretchen Bender and Timothy Druckery, Seattle: Bay Press, 1994,
44.

45

new media technologies, create works in which the computer controls some aspect of the
other media used. An example of one such work by Bender is Total Recall 1987, a

computer controlled, video work. “0

This installation consists of twenty-four monitors,
three ﬁlm screens and eight video channels whose simultaneous images overwhelm the

viewer with information in a way only possible through the emerging digital, technolog

of the computer, although the television plays a crucial part as well.

The digital technology of the intemet represents a manifest convergence of
television, telecommunications technologies and interactive computer technologies. Art
projects on the intemet, in 1999, are an extension of the digital media and have
similarities to earlier multimedia works by artists such as Laurie Anderson, Grahame
Weinbren and Jeffery Shaw. Anderson’s multimedia performances such as United States,
1984 merged high art and p0pular culture using spoken, projected and written texts.
Weinbren’s computer controlled videodisc project Erlkonig 1987 was one of the earliest,
interactive videodiscs that allowed the user/viewer to touch the screen to direct the ﬂow
of the video’s sound texts and images.111 Shaw, on the other hand, created an interactive
computer/video installation The Legible City, 1990 that allowed the user to take an
imaginary bicycle ride through an urban architecture of words and sentences.112 Many
artists such as Bender, Shaw, Weinbren, and Anderson comment on the presence and

effects of the media in their lives and the lives of others by creating media conscious

 

llO -
Ibrd. 179.
1” David Reisman, “Telescreen as Text: Interactive videodisc Now,” Artscribe International, May, 1988,
66-70.
”2 Frank Popper, Art of the Electronic Age, London: Thames and Hudson, 1993, 110-111.

46

work and by putting electronic media to work in their art. Their use of electronic,
computer-based, media technologies can be seen as a precursor for intemet/web art.

In its initial stages online artworks often took advantage of the information storage
and transmission capabilities of the intemet thereby giving early on-line art an
exceptionally neo-conceptual appearance.113 Only in the past few years have artists begun
to understand—as technology has advanced— what may be done when text, images and
sounds are combined on multiple, randomly generated screens. Intemet/web art situates
us “in a realm where art and information meet.”114 I am proposing that the technology of
the intemet should be included as a factor contributing text in contemporary art. It should
be noted though that already in the brief history of intemet/web art some art historians
have mentioned opposing opinions. For example, David Reisman, who has written about
interactive video art, claims that, “a number of artists may be getting interested in the
artistic possibilities of the intemet through a longer-standing use of text in art, rather than
the other way around.””5 Surely this debate will continue.

In the past decade the intemet has grown and expanded to include the World Wide
Web and in doing so has become a possible site for art. In this brief period it has been
used by artists in ways that have never been possible before, so that now they are creating
“art” the likes of which no one has ever experienced. But what are the characteristics of
intemet art? Dubbed “net” or “web” art, this art appears online, but may have an object
based component as well, continues many of the accomplishments of earlier artists,
expands accepted deﬁnitions of art and comments on contemporary issues. Several other

characteristics of web/net art are: a virtual erasure of geographical borders allowed

 

”3 Atkins, Artspeak, 137.
”4 Lovejoy Postmodern Currents, 213.

47

through worldwide transmission, utilization of texts, sound, images and video
(hypermedia) on more than one screen, and interactivity that depends on the input of a
participant for its progress. "6 In online art “the ﬁnished work of art gives way to one that
is never ﬁnished.” “7 Online art is ethereal art form existing only as digital datain a
memory bank. Such projects exist one day and may be gone the next. Art online produces
new aesthetic experiences and political interventions because through it artists can reach
an audience of multicultural viewers around the world. Internet/web artworks are "hybrid
art," and are "liminal works that intersect or balance precariously between disciplinary
modes" thus aptly ﬁtting Jessica Prinz’s deﬁnition for “textual art” updated by two new
factors ”8 Last of all, intemet art is experience oriented and requires a dematerialized
concept of art similar to that advocated by the conceptual artists and performance artists.
However, intemet/web art, like Performance art and Conceptual art, is still in its infancy.
It is a new media and descriptive parameters should not be set, nor are they trying to be
set here.

The addition of intemet art to the range of media available to artists gives them more
opportunities to have their views heard. Communication is an intentional part of intemet
art and is one of the primary reasons why web/net art includes text. Artists want to
communicate with the work they do. Web/net art projects combine texts, images, sound,
and video to convincingly present an artist’s message. Better communication (faster and
to more people simultaneously) is only one of the possibilities offered by the technolog

of the intemet to artists who choose to use text in web/net art projects rather than

 

“5 David Reisman, interview by author, e-mail correspondence, April 21, 1999.

“6 Atkins, Artspeak, 135-137.

“7 Regina Cromwell, Interactive Art and the Videogame: Separating the Siblings, Camerawork, Spring,
1993, 10-13.

48

traditional art forms. Granted all art is about communication, but the urgency to
communicate is conveyed through the medium used, electronic telecommunications

technologies.

One of the most important characteristics of web art and the interactivity of web art in
general is its reliance on text (hypertext) as an essential operative element. Hyperlinks do
not have to be text, but hypertext markup language (htrnl), the computer language that
composes all online websites is a language of numbers and letters, not images. In a realm
where art and information meet being in cyberspace is “closer to reading a book than to
watching T.V.. Much of what we look for in the culture of the book can actually be found
in the new culture of the screen.”119 The reason for this is that net/web an often includes
text that takes the form of what is called “hypertext.” Technological "progress" and
theories that alter the authority of the author led to the invention of hypertext. George
Landow, the author of Hypertext 2. 0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory
and Technology, (1992) states that “hypertext represents the convergence of technolog
and literary theory by entwining the roles of the reader and the writer and allowing the
reader to choose his or her way through a text.” 120 Primarily occupying the place of
instructions, titles and categories hypertext moves the net art experience along by
allowing the user to choose between links connected to other text.

Interactivity through the use of hypertext, is one of the key differences between on-

line art and traditional art. Many contemporary artists using new interactive technologies

 

”8 Prinz, Art Discourse/Discourse in Art, 8.

“9 “What We Are Doing On-line,” Harper Magazine, “Forum,” August, 1995, quoted in Margot Lovejoy
Postmodern Currents: Art and Artists in the Age of Electronic Media, 2"‘1 ed., New Jersey: Simon &
Schuster, 1997, 213.

49

claim that the content of art online is found in the work’s interactivity even stating that
“each work only really exists when the spectator becomes a participant and interacts with
it?”1 The notion that a viewer’s interactivity is part of the essence of an artwork is
related to the Minimal art movement’s concern with audience involvement. Interactivity
also situates net/web art in the genre of time-based arts such as video, performance and
music. The possibility of interactivity offered by the technology of the intemet is one of
the main reasons why artists use text in intemet/web art

One of the other differences between online art and traditional art is that in most
interactive art online, the artist is not in control or pretending to control the art experience
through a structured hierarchy.122 Each viewer/participant by clicking on various “hot”
spots or words is linked to another screen, animation, video, sound or music fragment
where he or she must then again complete the same process. “With the rise of the
personal computer, the status of the text in society changed and so did the role of writing
in the” electronic age.”123 Artists of interactive net/web art projects have become more
than just producers of art objects, now they create art that is experiential and
collaborative with the viewer or completed by the viewer.

An example of an online art project that uses interactivity, is experiential and
collaborative with the viewer is Dream Screens, 1996 by Susan Hiller. Dream Screens
begins by offering the user/viewer a hypertext menu of six different language choices

with which to hear the accompanying sound (or text). “The sound (or text) accompanying

Dream Screens is ambiguous, part recollections, part dream images, part catalogue of

 

12° George P. Landow Hypertext 2. 0: The Convergence ofContemporary Critical Theory and Technology,
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997, 27.

121 Regina Cromwell, “Interactive Art and the Videogame: Separating the Siblings,” 10-13.

‘22 Reena Jana, Flash Art, 35.

50

collective historical documents (the artist remembering scenes from ﬁlms that have the
word “dream” in their title, and recounting them in chronological order). 124 This project
also has a bulletin board for user’s comments, interviews with the artist, a list of books on
dreams, an index of the color’s names that the viewer sees after choking on their
language choice. The viewer of Dream Screens may stay at this project as long as s/he
wishes and may follow any path desired.

The fact that the user is offered non-linear and varied pathways at every point in a
hypertext document or screen is also the basis of one speciﬁc point about the technology
of the intemet as related to text in art. This concerns the way that “the line between one’s
identity as a reader or writer can shift” as s/he navigates his/her way through the non-
sequential writing.125 Intemet/web art projects often require the input of the user/viewer
for their completion. For example, Susan Hiller’s Dream Screens requires the
participant/viewer to select a language of their choice. Dream Screens does not select one
for the user and without the choice of the participant/user the art cannot continue.

It could also be argued that the text in online art is virtually invisible. In online art the
“text” is something that writer or reader must acknowledge due to the fact that text and
hypertext are present in most net/web art. Usually the use of text in net/web art is not
meant to be an issue although obviously its creator and users acknowledge the text and
hypertext, but what does it mean when the identity of the reader, writer and user are
changed? Artists, who use the electronic, telecommunications technologies of the digital

media want to communicate. They want to make interactive art that gives viewers new

 

‘23 Geert Lovnik, “From Speculative Media Theory to Net Criticism,” Mute: Digital Art Critique, New
Contemporaries Insert 1997, 1.

124 Susan Hiller, Dream Screens, web art project on the DIA Center for the Arts website, available from
http://www.diacenter.org/hiller/index.html, accessed August 25, 1999.

51

experiences and has the potential for the simultaneous, rapid transmission of information,
in the form of images, sound and text to all sites on the intemet/World Wide Web. The
want to make this information available to anonymous users regardless of the viewer’s
personal identity. To do this artists now may openly show their literary skills along with
traditional and avant-garde, artistic ones by allowing viewers/users as authors and readers

to become interactive producers.126

Now that the role of the media and the characteristics of web/net art are better
understood and the use of text and hypertext in intemet art has been considered, the
relation between online art and identity politics is next. The art of Victoria Vesna will be
discussed here to show the inﬂuence of identity politics and the technology of the intemet
on the use of text. First we will look at the relationship between web/net art and identity
politics. Then we will closely look at one of the latest projects by Vesna.

The emergence of the technology of the intemet as a site for art and its use of
language is more complicated than the issue of identity politics because the issues of
identity politics are not necessarily eliminated through the use of this new technology.
According to K. D. Davis “Identity politics has found its latest playing ﬁeld on the net, as
gender and sex are among its most active and vibrant subject nodes.”m “Identity is the

ﬁrst thing you create when you log on to a computer service. By deﬁning yourself in

 

'25 Reena Jana, “David Ross: Director, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,” Flash Art,
January/February, 1999, 34.

’26 Lovejoy Postmodern Currents, 235.

‘27 K. D. Davis, “Spatial Deceptions: Art and Gender on the Net,” World Art, 1995, 11.

52

some way, whether through a name, a personal proﬁle, an icon, or a mask, you also
deﬁne your audience, space and territory.”128
Art online does eliminate almost all distinctions of identity because when one

experiences an online artwork one has no certain way of knowing the identity of the artist
or artists who created the site unless this information is given. One of the only ways that
users of an on-line art project might not be as “equal” as other users is through the
technological limitations of their computer system. The scholar Olu Oguibe, succinctly
describes this situation, “In my thinking, the “other” on the Net is not the problem. The
problem is the new “other” that the Net has created, the “other” who cannot simply
connect.”129

The possibilities remain wide open, but to some web/net art can be seen as somewhat
controversial given the elitist connotations surrounding the access to high technology and
the “mo-colonization” of cyberspace. Cybernetic technologies do for the most part
eliminate geographical, gender and racial distinctions, but these beneﬁts in no way
advocate blind faith in technological “progress.”

Between the multitude of texts, images and sounds of the intemet, which becomes
more and more dominated by pornography and corporate retail sites everyday, there is
still space for art. Because of the advantages of faster and more communication we can
be almost certain that more artists will decide to venture into the brave new world of the
digital matrix known as the intemet and add to the use of text and hypertext. The inability

of users to identify the art sites from the normal general interest, academic and business

sites will also only add to the complexity of online art. Recently too, digital art-speciﬁc

 

’28 Lynne Hershman Leeson, “Romancing the Anti-body: Lust and Longing in (Cyber)space,” in Clicking
In: Hot Links to a Digital Culture, ed. Lynne Hershman Leeson, 325.

53

museums have surfaced, such as Germany’s ZKM (Center for Art and Media) and
Tokyo’s ICC.130 These museums attest to the growing interest in media and online art.

The claims that this thesis makes regarding identity politics and intemet technolog
as factors conuibuting to text art are shown in the work of the American artist Victoria
Vesna, (born 1959). Originally from Washington DC, Vesna was chosen to be included
in this group of four text an artists because she is female, she is a contemporary artist, a
curator, an educator, a student and her work is primarily computer based. Vesna’s work
may be categorized with other artists such as Laurie Anderson, Guillermo Gomez Pena,
and Esther Parada, who through their art continue to question cultural and geographical
boundaries. Because Vesna’s work has culture as one of its subjects and because it uses
stories and scenarios, it therefore utilizes both ethnographic and narrating identity
tendencies.

One of Victori Vesna’s most recent interactive, intemet art projects is Bodies
INCorporated, 1996 (Figure 8). To some people this online artwork may not appear to be
an artwork at all, however its creators/maintainers claim that it is. This is compliant with
the notion that “Pluralism in art entails that anything can be art. ”131 Bodies INCorporated
was created in 1996 in collaboration with Robert N ideffer, Kenneth Fields and others and
“is devised to facilitate exploration into the social psychology of group dynamics,

actualized in corporate structure.”132 This project is designed to allow users “to build out

 

‘29 Olu Oguibe, “Digital Other: The Virtual Third World,” Flash Art, May June 1999, 63.

13° Reena Jana, “David Ross: Director, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,” Flash Art, January
February 1999, 34-35.

‘3‘ Arthur c. Danto, “Interview,” The New Art Examiner, February, 1999, 27.

’32 “Biography of Victoria Vesna,” Eighth International Symposium on Electronic Art Program Guide,
Chicago, September 1997, 123.

54

bodies in three-dimensional space what were previously bodies generated as text-
only.”133

Before each user has the opportunity of building out a body he or she must ﬁrst agree
to recognize and abide by various copyright restrictions, legal disclaimers, and limits of
liability—including liability for disappointment in the outcome of the body that one
constructs. In contrast to most websites, where the average user only clicks on “ok” or
“yes” or “no,” on this site users must ﬁrst ﬁll out a form that was derived from the
Ofﬁcial Disney website 134 After the proper agreements have been taken care of the users
may then begin assembling their body out of twelve synthetic and natural materials by
buying shares with which to obtain body parts. Each user is free to choose skin color, sex
or size although building a body that is not a tall, slim, decidedly Euro-American ideal
requires more shares and expertise.135 This website’s speciﬁc preference for idealized
humans is unfortunately somewhat racist and arrogant.

Once a body is assembled it then can be translated from text into three—dimensional
images visible to other users. Each user of the Bodies INCorporated website gains a new
identity formed around the body he or she has created which is their personal property
and can be downloaded on their own computer. Part of the Bodies INCorporated
community that is also planned into this site is that upon deciding to end the life of their
body participants must bury it where other users can visit it. Bodies as part of a corporate

structure reveal the criticisms of corporate culture implicit in this site. A web/net art

project that allows users to create an alternate identity as visual and textual information

 

133 Gonzales Jennifer, “Appended Subjects and Hybrid Incorporations: Bodies INCorporated,” available
from http://www.ucsc.edu/ accessed 9 April,1999, l.

55

reveals how personal identity in the digital age becomes more and more fragmented into
a series of windows on a screen.

Vesna considers herself “a nomad artist and a world citizen” and continues to exhibit
her project at museums around the world where visitors, normally without access to a
computer, can see the project and become familiar with it.136 At such locations, the
bodies displayed on the computer at the museum will only be those belonging to residents
of that particular location, who are also invited to the exhibition’s opening.137

In Vesna’s web art the text is invisible/visible, but of crucial operational importance,
as discussed above. This is different than the text in Xu Bing’s Square Word Calligraphy
on-line project where text is central. Both projects are different and yet both utilize the
same technology of the intemet. Both projects also use text, but Xu uses text and his
work is about text while Vesna’s uses text, but is about something else. The meaning of

each as in all works considered is left open to interpretation.

 

13’ Tilrnan Baumgaertel, “Netzkunst: Philosophische Koerper,” Spiegel On—Line, Kultur Extra Archiv:
Kunst, available from http://www.spiegel.de/kultarc/kunst/aktuell/vesna.html, Internet; accessed April 9
1999.

135 Gonzales, Jennifer. “Appended Subjects,” 3.

56

SUNIMARY & CONCLUSIONS

The four artists investigated here, Simpson, Durham, Bing and Vesna, reveal the
diversity of artistic concerns accessible. They also utilize a visual language that is
transnational and cross-cultural. As in Jessica Prinz’s Art Discourse/Discourse in Art the
number of artists working with similar agendas is large and the artists selected here are
only “blatant examples of a cross-cultural phenomenon.” Together they show the need to
include identity politics and the technology of the intemet as factors conuibuting to text
art in the years 1988-1999.

The four artists above do not necessarily work only in the format discussed. Many at
times work in other media. All four artists situate themselves within the realm of the neo-
avant—garde by including text in visual art and addressing issues of identity politics
among other things. Their choice to include text in art situates them within a history of
other artists who also include text. This is a choice that should not be simply overlooked
for it is not simply a binary either/or decision. Including text differs from not including it.
Simpson, Durham, Xu and Vesna admittedly address other issues of importance,
however, text is text and unless one is addressing the slipperiness of meaning between
text and images, it is obvious that texts are used as more than just signiﬁers. In this type
of art the text present has importance to the artist as text. Therefore to omit discussion of
the importance of the legible content in the art of these artists would be similar to

omitting the importance of color, iconography, or interactivity etc. in works without

 

'36 Victoria Vesna, personal e-mail interview, April, 1999.
137Baumgaertel, Tilman, Netzkunst, 3.

57

visible or audible text. Critical thinking should be applied to this type of work, not to
detract from the other important issues it is concerned with that continue to need more
attention than they are given, but instead to learn from it, to see what exists in addition to
what is openly at stake. In the end all the factors given should be considered as having an
inﬂuence on the artists who create text art, although prioritization cannot be given
concretely.

From this point on, when encountering art that includes text one should remember to
combine the two new factors with previous interpretations so that a critical synthesis may
be achieved. One should recognize that identity politics and the technology of the intemet
contribute to the use of text in art. Regarding identity politics this may mean the use of
text in art to address one, several or all of the four areas of identity politics presented.
Once the theme of identity politics in a work of art is recognized and the use of text is
also noticed the speciﬁc relation of the legible material to any images or objects present
may then be differentiated according to whether or not it uses the “ethnographic” or
“narrating identity” tendency. If one is experiencing an online artwork one may identif
the differences between the traditional work of art and the work of art “on-line.” These
differences then lead to the possibilities offered by the technology of the intemet:
interactivity, better (faster and more) communication, and a shifting identity between
viewer and creator of art. These possibilities are what inﬂuence artists to use text and
hypertext in on-line art.

With globalization artist’s views of what the purposes of art are have changed and
continue to change. Artists now think of themselves as cultural workers responsible for

the positive transformation of society. “There is not any clear-cut deﬁnition of the artist’s

58

role.”138 Without the proposed consideration of the impact of technology and the cultural
Other interpretations of text art would be similar to the three (Prinz’s, Bowman’s, and
Hapkemeyer’s and Weierrnair’s) given in chapter two.

New theoretical perspectives have decreased the distinctions between text and images
and contributed to interpretive interdisciplinarity. The use of text and images can be used
to promote political agendas and the use of text and images is political. The positive
beneﬁts of intemet technology do not eliminate or correct the issues that are at the basis
of the politics of identity, but as may be progressively seen in the work of each artist
discussed the politics of identity are converging with online web art. Now both of these
factors simultaneously and independently inﬂuence the use of text in contemporary art.

The art and artists discussed here all operate with the three characteristics of
postrrrodemism: an end of metanarratives, a heterogeneity without hierarchy, and a
challenging of the modern notion of originality in the background of their work. All four
are acquainted with the ubiquity of the mass media and its manipulative place in culture
at the end of the twentieth century. The validity of the art of Simpson, Durham, Bing and
Vesna as with most art of the recent past must continue to be examined before a critical
distance can be achieved. Their use of text is only one aspect of such an examination.
However, this study of previous interpretations of the use of text in art from 1960-1990
and the close study of the use of text by these four artists now forms part of any future

interpretations of art that includes text. The message is in the box.

 

138 Lovejo . Postmodern Currents, 266.

59

APPENDIX

ton—no-6: I

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Figure]

Lorna Simpson, You're Fine. 1988.
Four color Polaroids, 15 engraved plastic plaques. ceramic letters

61

 

Figure 2
Lorna Simpson, Untitled (2 necklines), 1989,
Gelatin silver prints, 11 engraved plastic plaques

     

 
 

:1 and m.....;,_,;. _._
~ w..*--~-

 

Figure 3
Jimmie Durham, Red Turtle, 1991,
Turtle shell, paint, paper, wood

63

I FORGOT WHAT
I: was
Colds
To 5A7

   

gms»;

 

Figure 4
Jimmie Durham, I forgot what I was going to say, 1992,
Gun. wood. metal screw, canvas

 

 

Figure 5
Jimmie Durham. Untitled. 1992,
Wood. paint. glass eyes, paper

 

Figure 6
Xu Bing. Cultural Animal: .~\ Case Study of Transference. 1996-1999
Performance instullution. Video projection

    

It.

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Figure 7
Xu Bing, New English Calligraphy, 1999,
Ink. paper. brushes, chairs and tables

 

Bodies© lNCorporated

PLEASE Rl:.-\D ’I‘Hl-‘SI- TERHS OF l'SF. C-\RF.FL LLY BEFORE USING THIS
SITE 8) usrng lllh stlc mu srgmt'x mur asst-n: in these terms ot‘use Il'wu do not
agree U) the“: lt-:":~ ,t; .l\C planlsc do :in: use thr- \lh:

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Figure 8
Victoria Vesna, Bodies INCorporated, 1996-1999,
Ongoing online art project

68

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69

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