Language

About

Art about language treats words as material and as a problem: how they mean, how they fail, how they sit beside images. Calligraphy has long been an art in itself, but modern artists made the gap between word and picture a subject. Georges Braque stencilled letters onto Cubist canvases around 1911, and René Magritte's The Treachery of Images (1929) labels a painted pipe ‘Ceci n'est pas une pipe’.

In the 1960s poetry and Conceptual art met. Emmett Williams made concrete poems where layout carries meaning, and Marcel Broodthaers began as a visual artist by setting leftover copies of his own poetry book in plaster for Pense-Bête (1964). Mel Bochner chalked Language Is Not Transparent (1970) over dripping black paint on a wall. Glenn Ligon stencils borrowed sentences about race until they smear, and Xu Bing's Square Word Calligraphy writes English words in forms that resemble Chinese characters.