On Urs Fischer’s Yes and LA Dust
Ephemerality and Permanence
The History of Text-Based Art
How Words Became Art
Text-based art occupies a singular position within modern and contemporary art: it dissolves the traditional boundary between reading and viewing, transforming language into both medium and subject. From the conceptual turn of the 1960s to contemporary multimedia practices, artists have used words not merely to describe artworks but to constitute them—deploying typography, statements, slogans, poetry, and bureaucratic language to explore the mechanics of meaning itself. As a result, in this article, we’ll have a stroll through history to discuss the relationship between text and art and how it evolved up to today.
Historical Precedents of Text-Based Art
Long before “text-based art” existed as a named category, Western image-making was already built on a tight alliance between word and image. Medieval illuminated manuscripts are the obvious starting point: here, writing is not simply a container for images, and images are not merely decorative add-ons to text. Script, ornament, iconography, marginalia, rubrication, and miniature painting operate as a unified system of meaning. In that sense, illumination establishes a foundational Western logic: the artwork is something you read and see at once, with the authority of the image often anchored by the authority of the written word. Western art history and image-making in visual art, and the historical superiority of painting that accompanied them, originated in illuminated manuscripts—a practice that began around 500 A.D. and culminated in new heights by 1400 A.D. as a rebirth of artistic freedom and image-making.
As painting developed, text remained present in the form of inscriptions that are part of the image, which was perceived as an open window onto the world as described by Giorgio Vasari’s (1511-1574) Finestra Aperta. In religious art, words functioned as identifiers and theological anchors, clarifying who is depicted and what event is represented. Beyond iconography, inscriptions also performed practical and social roles: they could name patrons, mark ownership, commemorate events, or assert authorship through signatures and dates. In early Netherlandish painting, that authorial function becomes especially pointed. A canonical example is Jan van Eyck’s (1390-1441) Arnolfini Portrait (1434), where the inscription “Johannes de eyck fuit hic” (“Jan van Eyck was here”) does more than sign the image: it stages the painter as a conscious agent and witness, foregrounding artistic presence rather than anonymous craftsmanship. In other words, text becomes a statement about authorship, status, and the conceptual framing of the image.
This intertwining of language and visual production deepens further with the rise of printmaking—woodcuts, engravings, and etchings—where text is structurally embedded into how images circulate. Prints frequently require titles, captions, allegorical keys, and publishing information, and they develop conventions of authorship and dissemination: “invented by,” “engraved by,” “published by,” and other credit lines turn the artwork into a document with a visible chain of production. Here, text is not decoration; it is part of the print’s metadata and meaning, shaping interpretation and reinforcing the public life and distribution of images.
Text-Based Art in Modernist Avant-Garde Movements
By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the word-image relationship became newly experimental and explicitly modern. Movements such as Arts and Crafts, Art Nouveau, and Jugendstil treat typography, ornament, image, and design as a unified field—an ideal of Gesamtkunstwerk (total artwork) that also blurs boundaries between “fine art” and “commercial art,” think of Alphonse Mucha’s (1860-1939) famous posters. From there, the avant-gardes of the early twentieth century push text further to the center through collage and montage. In Cubism, with Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Georges Braque (1882-1963), where printed fragments, labels, and newspaper typography enter the pictorial plane as real material, language becomes a literal piece of the image.
Also part of the 20th-century avant-garde and the path towards abstraction was Constructivism. Here, artists such as Alexander Rodchenko (1891-1956) and El Lissitzky (1890-1941) treat graphic language as part of a new social and industrial aesthetic: typography becomes functional, public, and programmatic, integrated with photography and design in the service of mass communication. With Dada, we encounter one of the earliest and closest instances of text used in a manner that anticipates conceptual art, although it remains embedded in a very different cultural framework. Dada poems, such as Hugo Ball’s (1886-1927) Karawane (1916), typographic experiments by Tristan Tzara (1896-1963), or collages by Hannah Höch, where text is a cut-and-paste tool of rupture, satire, and media critique.
In the first half of the 20th century, text also appears within Surrealism, most decisively in the work of René Magritte (1898–1967), who emerges as a crucial modern precedent for text-based art as we know it today. Rather than treating text as a material or graphic form, Magritte approached language as a conceptual program, using words to destabilize the viewer’s certainty about representation itself and to force a confrontation between naming and seeing, between the object and its linguistic label. His most famous example, The Treachery of Images (1929), bearing the inscription Ceci n’est pas une pipe (“This is not a pipe”), makes this logic explicit: the painted pipe is not a real pipe and cannot be smoked, revealing the gap between language, image, and reality. In this sense, Magritte can be understood as a direct predecessor to Conceptual Art, establishing the foundational insight that text is not merely a communicative tool but a structural element in the production of meaning itself.
A Text-Based Art Boom with Conceptual Art
The historical era of conceptual art, primarily spanning the 1960s and 1970s, is defined by a shift in artistic quality from the physical object to the immaterial concept. This transformation was driven in part by criticism of the increasing commercialization of art as a product for decoration and consumption, but it was also strongly influenced by the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), logical positivism, and the broader semiotic and structuralist turn associated with thinkers such as Roland Barthes (1915-1980). Art no longer needed to be decorative, beautiful, skillful, or part of a traditional artistic discipline such as painting or sculpture. The idea is the artwork itself. The physical object functioned merely as a vehicular medium through which that idea was transported. In this context, text naturally became a crucial ally. Artists began to produce works that functioned primarily as information systems, often presented through pictures of texts or text-based statements. As a result, text-based art booms.
Joseph Kosuth’s (b. 1945) One and Three Chairs (1965) forms a direct conceptual bridge to the investigations initiated by René Magritte. The installation presents three elements: a physical chair, a photograph of that chair, and a dictionary definition of the word “chair” in text, thereby separating the object, its visual representation, and its linguistic description into distinct yet interdependent components. Where Magritte demonstrated that an image is not the object it depicts, Kosuth exposes the semiotic system. And to do this, text is the conceptual artist’s natural ally. Vito Acconci (1940-2017), for example, frequently used text to provide context for his performances. Art & Language, a British artistic collaboration, produced text-only works such as Painting No. 1 (1966), an inkjet print on paper mounted on panel. More iconic examples can be found with John Baldessari’s (1931-2020) I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art (1971), in which the sentence is handwritten repeatedly as both a conceptual gesture and a critical and slightly ironic manifesto. Other iconic text-based practices include the work of Marcel Broodthaers, who repeatedly used his “MB” signature to satirically mock the role of the artist’s signature in determining the value of the artwork.
The list goes on: Bruce Nauman (b. 1941) Robert Barry (b. 1936), Piero Manzoni (1933-1963), Douglas Huebler (1924-1997), Dan Graham (1942-2022), Jan Dibbets (b. 1941), Hanne Darboven (1941-2009), Lawrence Weiner (1942-2021), et cetera. With these iconic conceptual artists implementing text primarily through wall statements, works on paper, found objects, or photographic and video documentation supported by language, it often appeared as if painting had been kicked out of the front door. Yet, a number of conceptual artists used text to allow painting to re-enter the conversation through the back door. A central example is On Kawara’s Today series (1966–2014), consisting of meticulously executed Liquitex paintings on canvas that display nothing more than the date on which they were produced, rendered according to the linguistic conventions of the country in which the artist was working at that moment. Over nearly five decades, this concept became the systematic documentation of existence itself.
A crucial artist in this context is Alighiero Boetti (1940–1994), in whose work text becomes central not only as meaning but also as visual structure. In his characteristic grid-based compositions—most notably the embroidered works composed of colored letters—language operates simultaneously as linguistic content and formal element, emphasizing pattern, rhythm, and chromatic organization while still conveying semantic information. A related yet distinct approach can be found in the work of Mel Bochner (1940-2025), with whom text is granted an explicitly expressive dimension. In works such as Language Is Not Transparent (1970) and his well-known Blah Blah Blah paintings, Bochner demonstrates how words can function both as carriers of meaning and as painterly material, where scale, repetition, color, and gesture reintroduce the formal concerns of painting into conceptual practice through language.
Text-Based Art as Visual Form
Whereas conceptual art established language primarily as idea in art, many artists soon began to explore language again from a visual and painterly perspective. Within Pop art, Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997) elevated comic-strip speech bubbles into monumental painting, merging high art and popular culture, while Andy Warhol (1928-1987) embraced commercial typography and brand imagery, incorporating the language of advertising into painting itself. Robert Indiana (1928-2018) transformed single words into iconic sculptural and painterly forms, and Ed Ruscha (b. 1937) explored the poetic resonance of isolated phrases rendered in controlled typographic compositions, demonstrating how words can operate simultaneously as linguistic message and pictorial subject. More recently within this trajectory of combining popular language with painting, Harland Miller (b. 1964) transforms the graphic design of mid-twentieth-century Penguin book covers into large-scale typographic paintings. Using bold layouts and short phrases that oscillate between humor, irony, and melancholy, he relocates the visual language of mass-market publishing into contemporary art, collapsing the boundary between popular culture and high art while treating typography as both cultural reference and pictorial composition.
As a result, calligraphic and typographic exploration—language as form—moved to the center of text-based art. Kay Rosen (b. 1943), for instance, examines grammar, spacing, and capitalization as visual systems, revealing how linguistic structure becomes composition, while Christopher Wool’s (b. 1955) stenciled black-and-white letter paintings balance readability with abstraction. Today, a similar approach continues in the work of Adam Pendleton (b. 1984). Using stenciled letters, fragmented words, and layered black-and-white compositions, Pendleton treats language less as a direct message and more as a visual structure, where typography becomes rhythm, density, and painterly form while remaining subtly tied to historical and political references.
The formal aspects of text also developed an expressive dimension in the final decades of the 20th century. Cy Twombly (1928-2011) integrated scribbled inscriptions—names, fragments of poetry, and gestural writing—into painterly surfaces where writing functions as drawing. In Neo-Expressionism, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s (1960-1988) crossed-out words, lists, and symbolic phrases carry intense visual energy, while Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945) incorporates written references to mythology, literature, and history into his monumental paintings. A particularly compelling example is Philippe Vandenberg (1952-2009), whose text paintings, such as Untitled (Kill Them All and Dance) (2005-2008), fuse language with emotional intensity—an expressiveness that, especially in works produced shortly before his death, gives the textual elements a profoundly charged psychological dimension. A comparable intensity appears in the work of Jonathan Meese (b. 1970), whose large-scale paintings incorporate aggressive handwritten slogans, repeated names, and ideological phrases into chaotic painterly surfaces. In his practice, text functions less as readable statement than as raw expressive material, extending gesture and performance while reinforcing painting as a theatrical arena of thought, identity, and power.
Post-Modern Text-Based Art
In postmodern art, text has become an essential tool for critique since the 1970s, for activism, and for rewriting historical narratives, particularly within feminist practices. The Guerrilla Girls (founded 1985) employed bold typographic posters and billboard campaigns to expose gender inequality within museums and galleries, transforming language into a direct instrument of institutional critique. Barbara Kruger (b. 1945) combined declarative slogans with appropriated imagery, using the visual authority of advertising language to interrogate power, consumerism, authorship, and representation. Judy Chicago (b. 1939), through installations such as The Dinner Party (1979), integrated textual elements that foreground women’s histories and collective memory, positioning language as a means of restoring overlooked voices within art history.
Post-conceptual artists further expanded the linguistic strategies of conceptual art, often integrating narrative, performance, and installation. Sophie Calle (b. 1953) constructs investigative works combining autobiographical text and photographic documentation, while Tracey Emin (b. 1963) employs handwritten neon statements that transform personal confession into visual form. Jenny Holzer (b. 1950) inserts language into architectural and public spaces through LED installations and projections, transforming political statements into immersive environments. Roni Horn (b. 1955), Glenn Ligon (b. 1960), and many more post-conceptual artists continue to approach text through philosophical reflection, identity-based inquiry, or participatory frameworks, demonstrating the adaptability of language within contemporary art.
A younger generation continues to expand text-based practices across global cultural contexts. Jeffrey Gibson (b. 1972) integrates typographic phrases into rhythmically patterned compositions addressing Indigenous identity and resilience; Shilpa Gupta (b. 1976) explores borders, surveillance, and linguistic control; and Hank Willis Thomas (b. 1976) employs slogans and media-derived language to critique consumer culture and political representation. Artists such as Friedrich Kunath (b. 1974), Heman Chong (b. 1977), Christine Sun Kim (b. 1980), Rinus Van de Velde (b. 1983), Hellen Ascoli (b. 1984), Kameelah Janan Rasheed (b. 1985), and Nora Turato (b. 1991) employ text across painting, installation, textiles, drawing, performance, sound, and digital media, emphasizing language as social discourse, embodied communication, and experiential environment. Across these practices, postmodern text-based art demonstrates that language is no longer merely a conceptual device or visual motif but a dynamic medium through which artists negotiate identity, power, memory, and the conditions of contemporary communication.
Cover image: Kay Rosen, Soundtrack, 2023, Kay Rosen “NOW AND THEN” at Weserburg Museum für moderne Kunst, Bremen, 2023. Courtesy: the Artist. Photo: Tobias Hübel
Last Updated on February 14, 2026
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About the author:
Julien Delagrange (b. 1994, BE) is an art historian, contemporary artist, and the director of CAI and CAI Gallery. Previously, Delagrange has worked for the Centre for Fine Arts (BOZAR) in Brussels, the Jan Vercruysse Foundation, and the Ghent University Library. His artistic practice and written art criticism are strongly intertwined, examining contemporary art in search of new perspectives in the art world.
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