On Mar 7, 2009, at 12:03 PM, Chris Miller wrote:
So now I'm wondering -- is there any law against her posting text
next to every painting ? Would it make a difference if that text
were more like poetry and less like an index of explanatory
footnotes ?
And it also occurred to me that, even though she practices European
techniques, she comes from a world where extensive text and images
are often displayed together, while we don't really expect that in
our Euro-centered artworld, outside of Medieval manuscripts,
illustrated books, and, of course, William Blake.
Done anyone know of an artist who wants the display of his or her
work to be accompanied by explanatory text ? (perhaps that happens
in those museums of contemporary art that are so foreign to me)
Text and pictures? Sound like Blake, so why exclude him? What about
Greek pottery painting, with the names of the figures, so the viewer
can recognize the figure and understand the depicted scene or action?
Or Hogarth's moralizing etchings. Or Barbara Kruger's photographs.
There are a lot of paintings and other 2-D visual works that employ
either affixed (collaged) printed passages or original text written by
the artist (or others), which are intended to be read by the viewer
and the literal meaning of the words incorporated into the
significance of the total work.
Moreover, there are many examples of artists who employed a personal
symbolism of color and wrote about it, and publicized the symbolic
equivalences, not much different in effect from putting text next to
the paintings.
But then, today Miller wrote:
BTW I -- if she did that, I would ignore her explanation, feeling
that it would interfere, rather than enhance, my experience with her
painting. (just as I've never paid any attention to what Smetana had
to say about a trip down the Vltava - even though I love to float
down rivers, and just enjoyed that music again last week)
Frankly, this seems a little naughty, as Cheerskep would say. Miller
describes an inquiry by another artist, then asks whether there is a
"law" that prohibits incorporating "explanatory text" with the
picture. Then he says, but WTF, he'd ignore the words anyway.
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Michael Brady
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