Twelfth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

In post-World War II art, text appears on more and more works of fine art. In this paper I propose a classification of these cases and I analyse some significant examples from contemporary fine art. I classify the image-text relationship in contemporary art into the following categories: the cohabiting text and image (e.g. Magritte, Barbara Kruger), the scribble situated between text and image (e.g. Cy Twombly, Basquiat) and the text as image (e.g. Ben Vautier, Joseph Kosuth, Robert Barrry, Anatol Knotek). From an aesthetic point of view, the central question is how the text changes when it becomes an image? What is the beauty of the painted word, what kind of aesthetic experience does it provide? My hypothesis is that this evokes a new kind of joy of the text, and I try to outline the particularity of this joy.