What is textual art?

Answer 1

Textual art is a term describing artwork containing 1. a strong visual element but also 2. a strong linguistic element, *but the linguistic element that is there to be looked at and doesn't necessarily need to be read, said, or understood*. Textual artists have existed in every culture that has a written form of language: the metaphysical poet George Herbert is a textual artist because he made pattern poet, Islamic calligraphers are textual artists, and are Celtic illuminated manuscripts can be considered textual Arte 50's and 60's concrete work from Brazil is textual art, the calligrams of Apollinaire are textual art, Mallarmé was a textual artist, Ian Hamilton Finlay made textual art, and a great deal of contemporary art (ranging from Richard Prince's joke paintings; Ed Ruscha's word paintings; Jenny Holzer's LED signs) can be considered textual art in its purest form. It is arguable whether art that merely alludes to language (Henri Michaux's drawings; John Latham's sculptures; the scribbles of Cy Twombly), or uses language in an incidental manner (such as Picasso's cubist collages that use newsprint as one of their materials) are good examples of authors transforming the idea of the art-object; however are not distinctive of Textual Art for the sole reason that these objects were meant to be called Cubist and under their own conceptual statements.

As art-objects the Cubists are not different to any other art-objects in history, as such, and in the scope of defining Textual Art. The difference comes in History once the Concept is discovered, but then we are talking about The history of the Terminology and not of The Art Making itself. Discovering a Concept of something preexisting to the Word/symbol name which refers to the concept is a creative process in itself. Textual Art, as a standing concept is only that: A definition of an Idea. What is then, Textual Art? Well, let us not confuse Textual Art with Textual-Art-Objects, and its making.

Quoting a number of artists that have not defined their own Manifestoes with the concepts we want to describe here, is not a reinterpretation of their authorship for what it is, literally, a transposition of time and space over their own time and space in History. We have the tendency to do this, because we need physical objects to prove the non visual component we perceive today as part of our Collective Reality (and without being visionaries), and this, when talking about Art; and because they were the first who we recognize as using our own time and space Collective Conceptual Reality in History. These authors were visionaries, yet authors of other creations different than "Textual Art" as such. These authors do not have a method, school, or research attempting to create a manifested Textual Art or an object.

Textual Art is that creative process: Engraving, namely a non visible component which is the conceptually crafted Linguistics to a visible crafted component, such and alike are all symbols in Alphabets.