The works of contemporary artists Xu Bing, Ed Pien and Gu Xiong are involved in bringing to light some of the factors inherent in social, cultural and linguistic translation. In doing so, each artist is also engaged in the nuanced activity of moving between historical and contemporary aesthetic strategies in order to interrogate the way meaning is…

Responds to Fredric Jameson's 1987 article "Reading without Interpretation: Postmodernism and the Videotext." Argues that video art encourages self-analysis and allows for a critical examination of culture and that video art is polemical in that it creates strategies whereby the viewers are disoriented and required to think about their…

Interviews video artist David Garcia, who offers his definition of video art, separating it from other related media such as television. Argues that video art is more about light and time than it is about narrative. Discusses the role of appropriation and the collage element in video. Offers a loose definition of what constitutes a successful…

Examines ways in which visible language works with or against an accompanying image to produce desired effects on a reader or spectator and investigates the role that fiction and myth play in life, using a book cover and comic strip illustrations as examples. (DF)

Introduces the subject/object juxtapositions inherent in the writing of history. Compares these "perspectives" with subject/object positions in the visual arts to present not only a background to current historiographic models, but to also suggest ways to extend beyond traditional historical method. (SR)

Offers background information on the art form of visual poetry. Suggest that visual poetry occupies an "intermedia" space between linear poetry and the visual arts. (RS)

Presents a discussion of visual poetry in Mexico and six examples of visual poetry. (RS)

Presents an informal discussion with composer John Cage which includes his response to George Maciunas' work, his recollections of Marcel Duchamp, the complex relationship between inelegant material and revealing works of art, neo-Dada and neo-Fluxus, Wittgenstein and the artist's ultimate responsibility to initiate a change in the viewer or…

Defines the scope of research concerning "inscriptions in painting" from a semiotic point of view. Shows that in cases from medieval pictograms to modern new concreteness inscriptions are used to subvert the pictorial content of art works. (RS)

Argues that Fernand Leger avoids the mimetic use of literary elements in order to subvert the conventions of the illustrated book and subordinates meaning to a graphic interplay where word and image can, on occasion, become interchangeable. States that Leger subverts the borderline between readable and nonreadable, lyric and painterly. (RS)

Notes that Jules Kirschenbaum, a modern American artist whose work integrates inscriptions and figurative painting, studied under the masters of abstract expressionism yet exhibited with protagonists of "magic realism." States that his later work took a wholly different turn--it became art about meaning and the "meaning of…

Examines the interdependence of language and image in a poster series by Shosaku Arakawa and relates the displacement of writing from the book page to his canvases or posters to theories of performative language to show that his work is itself performance. (DF)

Reviews the interrelationships between concrete poetry, industrial design and the plastic arts over the past fifteen years to illustrate the sort of team work necessary if poets are to have an active voice in our contemporary society. (Author/HOD)

Shows fundamental interconnections between video art and the history of avant-garde abstractionism during the 20th century; for example, as reflected in the work of experimental filmmakers like Stan Brakhage. Maintains that a specific body of film and video works has explored the issue of abstraction as a means to define their respective media.…

Discusses literary video as a genre in which text and image are brought together, not kept separate as in broadcast television. Argues that the fact that video can distort images much more radically than film means that the merger of text and image promotes a more extensive exploration of visible language than possible in any other media. (SR)