Phaidon’s “Vitamin” series is often credited with helping define the contemporary canon and launching little-known artists into new levels of success. For each volume, beginning with “Vitamin P” for painting in 2002, more than fifty curators, critics and scholars around the world are asked to nominate living artists doing notable work in a single medium, and a like number are commissioned to write a short essay on each artist. The result is a remarkable snapshot of a particular branch of artistic practice at the current moment.
“Vitamin Txt: Words in Contemporary Art,” the latest in the series, is a departure. Editor Simon Hunegs describes it as “the first installment to view contemporary art through a theme,” rather than a medium. This isn’t the first book on the subject—Black Dog’s “Art and Text” (2009) precedes it—but it’s the first with the authority of this publisher and these nominators. It’s also the first with global reach. It’s timely too, as text-based works rise in parallel with more socially engaged artistic practices, because of text’s communicative power.
Casual art followers might be forgiven for thinking that text-based art is a relatively small—if nevertheless important—corner of art history, with contemporary artists Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, or Mel Bochner coming first to mind. But Evan Moffitt’s excellent introduction shows that the practice of combining word and image goes back many centuries. Moffitt begins with illuminated manuscripts and their role in early Christianity, then he reminds us of the importance of calligraphic art in Islamic and Chinese cultures. At some point, in the Western tradition at least, the disciplines of literature and visual art were largely separated until the early twentieth century, when words assumed a central role in Dadaist art and featured in Cubist collage as well. Text reached a new salience with pop art, figuring in some of the most iconic images of the era, such as Warhol’s “Campbell Soup Cans” (1962) and Robert Indiana’s “LOVE” image (1964).
The artists and works in “Vitamin Txt” pick up in the aftermath of Pop, with the advent of conceptual art in the late sixties and early seventies. Conceptual art was influenced by the linguistic turn in continental philosophy, which shifted the focus to words from things. Artists likewise began to turn their attention to the nature and function of language.
At almost the same time—and among some of the same artists, as Holzer and Kruger exemplify—artists also turned to language as a tool for engaging more directly with the world around them. As a fellow woman artist sharing some of their frustrations and ambitions, Judy Chicago noted: “I was focused on developing a clearer formal visual language and wasn’t there yet… hence the text to make my intentions clear to the audience.”
This compatibility between text-based art and art as social practice is abundantly reflected in the work of the artists featured in “Vitamin Txt.” Among them are many important Black artists, including Glenn Ligon, Pope.L, Lauren Halsey, Adam Pendleton and Bethany Collins. While the social aspect of their art generally gets more attention, there’s a welcome opportunity here to fully appreciate Black artists’ unique role in advancing the use of language in visual art. But I had at least a dozen similar moments of insight browsing the volume’s 500 beautifully reproduced images.
Though ambitious in scope—103 artists from forty-three countries are included—“Vitamin Txt” cannot and does not encompass every artist doing important work with text (as I reflected last week in Orange County viewing work by Tony Lewis, not featured here). But the full spectrum of text-based art is represented. At one end are artists grappling with the weakness of language—its reductiveness, ambiguity and commodification—at the other end, its strength—its power to inform, inspire and challenge. In the middle are artists—like all of us—relying on language as a lifeline, and a way to understand, record and communicate our journey along the way.
“Vitamin Txt: Words in Contemporary Art”
By Phaidon Editors, with an introduction by Evan Moffitt
Phaidon, 288 pages
