We’re in a Situation!
Considering the provocative text-based art of the Situationists, where the words get out of the way…
Bruce Nauman is now well-known for his works made with neon tubes bent into letterforms or ideograms, with his glowing spiral sentence of 1967 that states The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths becoming emblematic of the Conceptual Art movement along with Joseph Kosuth’s similar neon works in which a short sentence describes only what it is, for example A Four Colour Sentence first produced around 1965 and followed by numerous variations on the theme — reinforcing the artist’s assertion that “art is the definition of art.”
There is plenty of precedent for text as art. There were inklings of text-based visual art decades earlier and we need to consider the influence of earlier types of visual expressions conveyed by letters, such as the illumination of medieval manuscripts like The Book of Kells in which the monks of Iona incorporated elaborate decorative designs intended to demonstrate their devotion. Other medieval religious texts used pattern to reinforce meaning, such as layouts that could be read in multiple directions or represent other symbols. The technique is known as micrography in which the writing also forms an ideogram that relates to the subject of the passage — a cross or a menorah…
