Image and Text in Conceptual Art

Abstract

This book examines the use of image/text juxtapositions in conceptual art as a critical strategy to challenge the ideological and institutional demands placed on art. While conceptual art is generally identified by its use of language, its analysis should make clear how exactly language was used. In particular, this book asks: how has the presence of language in a visual art context changed the ways art is talked about, theorized and produced? Image and Text in Conceptual Art demonstrates how artworks communicate in context and evaluates their critical potential. It considers international case studies and draws interdisciplinary resources from art history and theory, philosophy, discourse analysis, social semiotics, and literary criticism. It presents three analytic frameworks that engage art’s critical and social dimensions: the work’s performative gesture, its logico-semantic relations, and the rhetorical operations in the discursive creation of meaning, and offers a comprehensive method of analysis that can be applied beyond conceptual art.