The Writing on the Wall

From amplifying the female voice to framing letters of appeal, Indian artists have used text inventively. Shubhalakshmi Shukla launches into a discussion.

- Shubhalakshmi Shukla

John Berger wrote in Ways of Seeing, “Seeing comes before words”. Seeing is the first human faculty to develop, followed by touch. Soon, verbal language enters the fray and words take shape to express the self and the world. It is the act of belonging to a linguistic system that allows intellectual growth and the ability to respond to the external world. In the existing discourses and literary critical theories, everything that can be read is understood as ‘text’. Contemporary art practices in India delve into these processes of seeing and reading and articulating as integral parts of their visual language. Very often, the sense of ‘touch’ is privileged; artworks generate a visceral effect and human senses operate as ‘readers’ of the text. Performance art allows the reading of the body itself as text.

In this essay, I will explore works by contemporary artists who often employ the written word in their works, and look at the affects, ideas and experiences they produce. The Cubists, early in the 20th century, started including textual elements in their multi-perspectival works. Georges Braque’s The Clarinet explored text as graphic material, for example. Surrealists also used words in their paintings, with Rene Magritte’s The Treachery of Images (This is Not a Pipe) as one of its most iconic examples. Later, in the 1970s, text as art found its expression in the Conceptual Movement that emphasized ideas over visual forms. Several contemporary western artists also use text in their works.