Introduction: Acting (on) the Text: the Case of New Media

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Proyecto Venus: An Interview with Roberto Jacoby

 No abstract availabl

The monument in conjunction with its archive: historical narrative and the dialectics of experience in a Michael Sandle archive exhibition

The problematics of history in the presentation of Michael Sandle's Malta War Memorial

Image and Text in Conceptual Art: Critical Operations in Context

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

Conceptual Art and Language: Introducing a Logico-Semantic Analysis

This article suggests a logico-semantic analysis of Keith Arnatt’s Trouser-Word Piece and Victor Burgin’s Room, based on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s examination of the logical relationship between propositions and the world and M.A.K. Halliday’s discussion of social semiotics. It reconsiders the use of language in conceptual art practices from a wider sociological and interdisciplinary perspective, and aims to show how their juxtaposition of different voices within a public context negotiates the space of art as a social space. Focusing on how artworks communicate in context, the following discussion presents the historical as well as the discursive environment in which Arnatt’s and Burgin’s works are situated and received; moreover, it examines how these works critically manipulate viewing and reading regimes, frameworks of evaluation and patterns of communication in order to create a situation of particular tension between perceptual and conceptual apprehension. In wider terms, this article demonstrates how critically engaged artworks manipulate the conditions of communication by utilizing loan rhetoric (a rhetoric external to the art context) and displace associate meaning in order to challenge the institutionalization of art’s production and function. In doing so, they critically stage and contest the power structures that support corresponding hierarchies across producer, audience and mediator, and bring art’s social modality into focus. Investigating the manipulation of language in conceptual art, this article proposes a method of analysis that becomes fundamental in studying contemporary multi-modal art production, and in understanding the dialectics of art’s communication and critical potential