1.

1 Images of Resemblance:
Magritte's semiotic explorations

What one must paint is the image of resemblanceif thought is to become visible in
the world.

Rene Magritte

The re-introduction of words into paintings and collages was a widely practiced
transgression throughout the twentieth century avant-garde, as for example in
Conceptualism, Dada, Cubism, or Futurism. In the case of Rene Magritte,
words/images was the subject of numerous "experiments" in the later 1920s, some
of which are among his best known works. In the early 1920s, Magritte had been
trying out different styles when he discovered Giorgio De Chirico's work. These
canvases, painted during World War I, excited a number of young painters who
came to call themselves surrealists. Clearly Magritte was taken with De Chirico's
incongruous juxtapositioning of "significant objects" with portentous titles ("The
Philosopher's Conquest," "The Disquieting Muse," "The Double Dream of Spring,"
etc.) but saw them calling forth a basically literary process of meaning-making. 3
This on the one hand led to a shocked sense that poetry was ascendant over
painting; on the other, it stimulated a feverishly productive period of including
words in pictures in various ways and comparing words and images as means of
representation.

His was a clear, narrow and quite abstract focus: he was not interested in
typography or visual design, for example, nor in the visual and material qualities of
writing (or calligrams, for that matter). 4 His interest was in probing how words and
images differ in their modes of signifying. During the most intense part of this
pursuit, from 1927-1929, he painted dozens of canvases, sometimes several with
the same name, varying one signifying parameter or another, and he continued to
visit the theme in later years. Two of these paintings provide the bookendsthe first
and last imagesfor John Berger's famous Ways of Seeing : the first is one version
of the "key to dreams" series and the last ("On the Threshold of Liberty") is from
what I will call the wallpaper series. Berger says just a bit about the first and

nothing at all about the last; it will become apparent, however, why they quite
properly preside over an introduction to how paintings mean. They could preside
equally well over an introduction to semiotics.

It should be borne in mind throughout the discussion, however, that Magritte was
not making a primer in semiotics: he was making art of the special, modern, "meta"
kind which deautomatizes the conventionalized and makes us aware of the
processes by which we see and read the world. His probing of seeing and grasping,
to be sure, is general and philosophical, almost Kantian, in its insistence and rigor,
and it is easy to see why Michel Foucault was intrigued enough to write a short book
in 1973 on the multiple readings and cancellations of "This is not a Pipe," 5 and why
Magritte would see in Foucault's Mots et Choses both a familiar title and a sweeping
scope of inquiry similar in spirit to his own "research."

Magritte has become much more readablehis mode of thinking and working more
mainstreamas Conceptualism and Poststructuralism have moved visual art so
much closer to language and philosophy than it was under High Modernism. Thus
Peter Sterckx articulates Magritte's experiments in representing representation
along lines similar to those developed here by describing them as working out the
rhetorical scheme of syllepsis (one construction changing into another). 6 Such a
move would seem to a Modernist extravagantly metaphorical and muddled, though
it does not seem so today. Interest in representation is now much more widespread
than it was in Magritte's time, but we will take him as a pioneer and begin by
tracing his experiments with words inside the frame of the picture and then with
words placed outside (above or below) the frame as titles.

Signification/representation/resemblance:
We speak of a sign as iconic when it resembles (i.e., looks like) what it refers to.
Hieroglyphic writing does this, at least at times. To represent (or signify) a house,
inscribe a (perhaps simplified and stylized) house H. It is generally said that such
writing is limited to the things that can be depicted and hence cannot readily
express abstract things or processes, logical condition, negation, or even novel
things that do not yet exist. Similarly, gestures can be used to convey certain
meanings by virtue of resemblance, as for example when we extend an arm,
holding the hand and fingers upright, meaning to signify "stop, hold off" as if we
were preparing to stiff-arm the person. 7 In the case of gesture as with the house
image, one can argue that such pantomimic gesturing lacks the full signifying power

of natural language, that it fails to support abstract thought. For words and gestures
to function as units of a human language, they must break the link of iconicity and
float free to signify "arbitrarily" as Saussure has it. There remains in natural
language only a small residue of iconicity, and that is based in soundthe
bowwow's and kikeriki's of various tongues and nations.

Visual representation depends on resemblance, using the latter in the narrow sense
of likeness of form or appearance (e.g. "The roofs resembled a row of tents"). It is a
good idea not to use resemblance when describing similitude of function (e.g
"Bactine is similar to iodine in function" but not "Bactine resembles iodine in
function"). Resemblance is one kind of similitude, namely, similitude of appearance.
8 The resembling sign may be stylized and abstracted away from visual surfaces
and detail in various ways, but it has to "look like" the object it represents. Each
visual culture has various ways of indicating that an image is a generic and
represents the class of objects rather than a particular one (outlining, canonical
presentation form, ways of flattening and desaturating color and texture). Indeed,
the more it is visually reduced, the more strongly the image represents an abstract
concept.

There are two exceptions to the principle that images represent by resemblance:
visual metaphor and iconography. Perhaps the most common and widespread
theory of metaphor is that of rendering abstract concepts and relations in terms
familiar from common material experience. Over the last twenty years we have
seen the creation and adoption into common sense of the desktop image for the
computing possibilities presented by a personal computer. The use of a little house
icon to mark a link to the "home" ( or" top") page of a site represents that page not
by resemblance but by virtue of a set of metaphors (perhaps mixed: what is a house
doing on a desktop?). Such a page could be called a "hub" page and represented
with a wagon wheel, if such a metaphor had ever caught on.

In the iconographic tradition, an image can represent not by resemblance but by a

chain of texts and verbally mediated associations. So when in a scene depicting an
event from the Gospel narratives there appears a lamb holding a cross with its right
foreleg, it is not by by resemblance that Christ is represented, and similarly with the
fish icon that signifies Christ via the Greek word ichthus. Lest anyone think this
tradition is just one of religions, consider the figure that the jacket designer put on
one of my books:

Cover of Contending Rhetorics

Figure 1.2
An Image of an Apple
The subtitle works as a straightforward case of resemblance, in this case to writing
on a classroom blackboard. The shape in the red box is instantly recognizable as an
apple (albeit very schematized), but what does an apple represent (i.e., signify)
here? Apple -school calls up "apple for the teacher"the (largely proverbial)
practice of presenting one's teacher with an apple as a token of appreciation (and
hence apple polisher, for one who make extra efforts to suck up to the teacher). But
what is the apple in the case at hand? Perhaps, one supposes, reflexively, the book
itself? This is a little shaky on the face of it, but the jacket designer must have read
the dedication of the book, which is "For My Teachers Who Initiated Me into
Academic Discourse." Normally, an apple does not represent a book; though it does
so in this instance, it does not do it by resemblance.

But this first example is complicated by iconographic displacement of

representation and we should really begin with a simpler case. Magritte offers one
such in his "Words and Images" article 9 and in the early group of words-in-frames:

Figure 1.3
The Palace of Curtains (1929)
Here a frame containing the word ciel ("sky")is placed next to a frame filled with a
blue sky texturean image of "sky". Both are representations, one working by
resemblance and the other by arbitrary association.

Figure 1.4
Empty Mask

Larger, multiframe compositions are possible suggesting parts of a world or items in

a list. Magritte gives us two pieces entitled "Empty Mask," one with words:

Figure 1.5
Empty Mask
and one with images:

There is some uncertainty about Magritte's titles, but it is worth comment that both
assemblies are called "empty," perhaps for different reasons. That is, it is easy to
see the absence of images in the the first version as the emptiness of the frames,
but in the second, the mask is still empty because all masks are empty, at least
those that do not represent anything, that are merely a decorated screen. Here
Magritte may be playing off of the "frame" convention: these segments can't
represent because they are not presented in proper rectangular frames. Didier
Ottinger quotes Bart Vershaffel: "The dividedness, the fragmented quality and the
separateness of their components deprive them of anything that resembles reality,
destroys all narrative content" (Ottinger, 70). Ottinger speaks of these elements as
"phonemes" of Magritte's new figurative language: the windows in a brick facade,
harness bells, nude torso, forest, and clouds reappear in many different
combinations in the paintings of this period and occasionally over the next decade
or so, as if offering examples of what can appear with what (24).

Figure 1.6
Fixed Idea (1927)
There is a similar, more rectilinear one that does have a human figure in it in place
of the patterned cutout:

The figure of a hunter does alter the mix, but the representation of him is as stylized
as it would be for a playing card and, like all the assemblies, the figure is placed a
foot or so in front of a blank wall illuminated from over the viewer's left shoulder
and with low horizon line. These bits of surfaces, even the hunter, begin to look like
tokens in some game we don't know the rules for, or samples of "background"

images for Web pages. They could all be made to tile very nicely. (Magritte was
making his living designing wallpaper at the time.) These images are all very flat
even though framed, and framing suggests a window being looked into. This is one
of the ways Magritte "paints representation." The purpose of the array is not to
present alternatives for us to choose our favorite from (like a book of wallpaper
samples) but to make them equivalent; so they are pages from the sample book of
representation through resemblance. To be sure, not all the wallpapers resemble
some general and familiar thing: the harness bells on corrugated galvanized sheet
metal are hardly a common figure of daily life. It is one more instance of Margritte's
asymmetry: so often his sets include one member that looks like the other members
of the set but is not.

Figure 1.7
The Threshold of Freedom (1929)
There are a few others in this series, including the final image of Berger's book, "The
Threshold of Liberty (1929)," which does break the single plane with a kind of
triptych effect and includes the image of a 15cm howitzer aimed vaguely at the
upper left panel, the naked female torso (femme nue).

I don't see this, pace A. M. Hammacher (76), as aimed at the woman's torso so
much as at the panel assembly as such"Liberty" in other words, would be to blast
signs to oblivion and encounter unmediated things in themselves. (Recall the title to
Figure 1.3: "The Palace of Curtains.") That would be at least approximately right to
serve as the end of Berger's book, where the picture follows several paragraphs on
the appropriation and debasement of art by advertising ("publicity"). And it does get
us a bit farther in the right direction than Sylvester's conclusion that "the cannon is
there to impress" (232), or for that matter Hammacher's remarks on the "eroticism"
of the torso, forest, and wood grain. Indeed, the whole tendency of this set of
experiments is to bracket or suspend representation for these "textures"they
represent nothing, they have become opaque, and hence do not bring in such
associations as we may have with wood planks, fire, forests, etc. This painting, and
the others, maintain the equivalence and interchangeability of the textures as
textures, not their sensual differences and particularities as things.

This is an important principle for artists who paint representation in this "meta"
fashion: we do not think of being outside on a fair day, or feel that we are, when we
see a framed piece of blue with puffy white shapes on it propped up against a wall.
The beginning of associations and feeling tones associated with things is that we
imagine ourselves to be in the presence of the thing, but with these paintings, we
are always reminded that we are in the presence of . . . a painting. The eye is not
fooled; Magritte's way was not that of Dali.

Figure 1.8
Violation (Attendat)(1937)
In 1937, after having moved beyond the flat space into perspectival representation,
Magritte revisited these textures one last time:

This is a textbook perspective example with converging parallels and shadows from
a light source high over viewer's left shoulder. The three swatches of wallpaper now
occupy different planes, two located within a "room" and the third visible through an
arched passage through an exterior wall. As the title says, however, there is a
violation in the composition taken together: the sky cannot appear as a surface of a
block inside the rooma reflection of the sky in a mirror-surfaced block, yes, or a
projection onto the block, but not simply the sky appearing through an opening
(which is the value it has throughout this series). A swatch of blue and puffy white
can only represent "sky" in certain contexts; there is, then, a syntax of graphic
signs, and this picture is a violation on the intended reading. Further, there is no
daylight illuminating the scene from the "sky" nor from the arched portal to the
"outside." Magritte became quite fascinated with this grammar of sky and did a
whole series of sky swatches projected onto displaced and discontinuous planes,
anticipating the powers of modern image processing programs. (See, e.g. "The
Universe Unmasked" 1932, "The Marches of Summer" 1937, " "The Poetic World II
1939, "Wasted Effort" 1962; only in the latter of these does light come from the sky.)
Here, since resemblance fails at the level of the composition, ( i.e., the picture is
ungrammatical), we may become aware of the rule that is being thwarted, and so
the picture paints representation once again.

Figure 1.9

Living Mirror (1927)

Concept blobs
Returning now to the main theme of images and words, we note that Magritte did
not always keep them in separate frames but tried various ways of combining them
in one. Words in a text frame are merely text, but in a visual frame (say one,
minimally, with a horizon or directional lighting) they become elements in a visual
array. He tried putting them in connected chambers of some biomorphic system of
burrows (Figure 1.9). (See "Tree of Knowledge" (1929) for another connected blob
set. )

This canvas with labelled areas begins to look like a sketch for a composition, and
he even drew a visually punning picture of a person breaking out in laughter (a
shattered image of a laughing face) but painting in the bird calls might be a real
challenge and would explain why this "plan" was never executed.

Figure 1.10
The Uses of Speech (1)(1927)

Figure 1.11
Eco- concept map
Alternatively, words might be enclosed in more substantial blobs with edges and
shadows:

Of course, all words receive this treatment, even nuage which certainly should be
left cloudy, and horizon, which isn't even an object at all. As a variation, in "The Use
of Speech" of 1928, the concept-blobs have soft edges but do cast shadows and
bear word-labels connected to them with lines. Blobs with shadows (or connections)
do not look so much like place holders, indicating where the image will go, as they
do concepts, the very sense of the words themselves (He uses blobs to represent
word senses in "Words and Images.") Because word senses are abstract, they

appear formless in a visual frameformless, but substantial. This is indeed one

attempt to make thought visible (as thought). The connected, labelled blobs of the
period are the precursors of semantic and conceptual network diagrams (and of
"concept maps") where the concepts are often drawn in as labelled ellipses or
circles. Concept maps articulate the relations among the blobs as networks
(directed graphs) rather than as configurations in space. Conceptual space is of
course a common metaphor, but the concepts in conceptual space don't rest on the
ground and cast shadows.

Thought blobs have been revived in art by the Conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth. In
the catalog of the Montreal Museum of Art exhibit of 1996 , one finds reproduced
four very large thought-blob compositions by Kosuth with the title L'essence de la
rhtorique est dans l'allgorie. The blobs are black with white , cursive lettering, and
in each composition six of seven of them are scattered on a slate green field. They
contain the words non-lieu, reprsentation, chose en soi, forme au discours,
similtude ("noplace, representation, thing in itself, shape of language, similitude").
The concept blobs in the other pages are equally attuned to the thematics of
Magritte's blob series and constitute a very penetrating revival of his project. This is
the same Kosuth who exhibited a chair, a picture of a chair, and a placard with a
dictionary definition of a chair with the title One and Three Chairs (1965: the year of
a major retrospective exhibit of Magritte's work in New York; the installation is now
in the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris). The problematic, and the use of art to
expose (rather than resolve) it, provide as clear a case of continuity as one will find
in art.

Figure 1.12
Use of Speech (1928b)
Here is another, somewhat later canvas with the title "The Use of Speech" (1928)
which has a very different look, but continues the word-in-blob theme by connecting
up with the cartoonist's balloon:

Here the convention appears to make everything perfectly normal, except that the
exchange, however Saussurean it looks, is neither in sequence nor sequential: le

piano | la violette. David Sylvester suggests this depicts Magritte and Breton playing
a surrealistic word association game, which is one "use of speech" but again entirely
nonrepresentational.

Alternatively we might begin to place images in place of the blobs:

Figure 1.13
The Apparition (1928)
"Apparition" has the oblique force Magritte sought in his titles: which is the
apparitionthe landscape filled with blobs (to the man) or the man himself in a
country of word-blobs? This painting is also reproduced in the English translation of
Foucault's Pipe as "Figure 18: Personage marchant vers l'horizon".

Magritte varied the mix in several canvases of the period, including "Living Traces"
(1927), where the blobs are unlabelled but there is the image of a tree on the right
side with the words "femme nue" on its trunk, "Swift Hope" (1927) with labelled
blobs, horizon, and no shadows.
Rene Magritte: Lost World (1928)
Figure 1.14
Lost World I (1928)
David Sylvester (192) lines up two versions of "Lost World," another in the series of
labelled concept blobs. The first version has a horizon and a bit of landscape in the
background, which is replaced in the other with the word paysage ("landscape").

Rene Magritte: Lost World II (1928)

Figure 1.15
Lost World II (1928)
Here the image of the landscape gives way to the word, spread out as a landscape
should be, and we pick up the ubiquitous cheval. This is like watching the process of

abstraction, or a translation from depiction to description. Clearly, for the picture,

something is lost. These lost worlds, however, also remind us of the advantage of
words, namely, it is a little hard to imagine what picture we could insert to represent
personnage perdant la mmoire ("person who is losing his/her memory.") Magritte
both suggests the intersubstitutability of words and images as alternative signifiers
and destabilizes the equivalence. This is perhaps most overt with the tree image of
"Living Traces" with the label "femme nue" on the trunk, but it is at work in the bird
calls of "Living Mirror," in "Lost Worlds" and again in the Key to Dreams series.

Rene Magritte: Key to Dreams (1927)

Figure 1.16
Key to Dreams (1927)
Titles/captions/labels
In the Key to Dreams series, Magritte returns to one traditional and stable way that
words and images can share a frame, namely with the word as name or legend of
what is also depicted in the fashion of vocabulary flash cards or early reading
workbook sheets.Pierre Sterckx says they are images from the Petit Larousse, (52).
Not just an equivalence of word and thing, but an exact match is implied.

It is, as Sylvester says, a school reading primer gone wrong(168)but, as so often,

not completely wrong, the lower right-hand cell is correct.

Rene Magritte: Key to Dreams (1930)

Figure 1.17
Key to Dreams (1930)
A six-cell version of 1930 is even less helpful for French I:

None of these nouns (the acacia, moon, snow, ceiling, storm, desert) match up. The
problem infects English vocabulary sheets as well:

Rene Magritte: Key to Dreams (1935)

Figure 1.18
Key to Dreams (1935)
This version, like the first of its French counterparts, has a correct lower right-hand
corner cell, and includes the hard-to-depict "wind." (This adorns the cover of the
Penguin edition of John Berger's Ways of Seeing.) A title for Magritte seems to refer
to the concept of a work, allowing there to be several canvases realizing the
concept bearing the same name. And to be sure, "Key to Dreams" (La clef des
songes) is it just this deflection, this swerve away from standard assignments and
displacement within the system that founds the semiotics of dreams? However that
may be, these vocabulary sheets are also violations that provide a way of seeing
how early schooling teaches us canonical recognition forms both of language and
visual representation. Note that the English version is also a slight, overly literal
mistranslation: the schoolbooks do not use the definite article in such contexts. But
the side-, eye-level views of the objects, their lack of extraneous detail such as
labels or decoration, and their presentation floating in a dark, featureless space
without shadows (at least for the French versions) conform to the rules for 'image of
a class of objects' that are part of our common visual culture. It is clear that for all
his attention to surfaces, Magritte is not interested in photorealism: the intense
particularity of actual concrete objects is not to his purpose.

This is certainly not to say that photography could not be used to explore
representation in Magritte's fashion. Jerry Uelsmann has perfected the technique of
printing pictures composed of more than one negative to create weirdly blending
one-in-the-other objects like clocks and houses emerging from tree trunks, eyes,
sky, and hands in odd places and out of scale, hard-edged objects suspended in a
vague sort of space (and not located in any particular place). In all of these
respects, Uelsmann extends Magritte's techniques into seamless, highly polished
black and white photography. 10

Robert Horne: Some Things Just Belong Together

Figure 1.19
from Horne, 1998, p. 112
In what appears to be a remarkable coincidence rather than influence, Robert Horne
creates a somewhat similar composition using clip art and words in order to show
that in "Visual Language" the words must be integrated with the images and not
merely juxtaposed. Horne's example is more like an intelligence test gone awry than

a word book. Because it does not present words and images as aligned pairs, it is
open to the viewer to try different groupings of images and/or words that might be
said to belong together (according to some story or principle the viewer could come
up with). He points out that one might try groupings on the basis of silhouettes or
typography or other visual traits, and thus the puzzle or conundrum posed by this
graphic does not lead to the issue of representation (and the similitude of the thing
to what it represents) but to the issue of similitude of forms.

This comparison highlights another of Magritte's pictorial qualities: the clip art is
two dimensional, monochrome, and lacking in visual detail (silhouettes are the
extreme of this kind of flattening and abstraction). These qualities make them
abstractive and typifying and also mark them as throw-away graphics, not art.
Magritte in contrast paints as if he expects you to linger. He greatly valued making
objects mysterious or numinous, and hence his rather fully rendered objects are not
throw-aways.

Rene Magritte: Trahison des Images (1929)

Figure 1.20
Trahison des Images (1929)
We come now to the most famous of Magritte's text-image groups, the core of which
all bear the title The Treachery of Imagery ("La Trahison des Images"). Their key
image is that of a bent tobacco pipe (side view, as always) in combination with a
sentence "This is not a pipe" ("Ceci n'est pas une pipe") done in the (usual) school
cursive script ("a script from the convent" Foucault calls it).

I fail to see what is to be gained by translating Le Trahison des Images as "The

Betrayal of Images" as is often done. "Treachery" makes it clear the images do the
betraying and is the title of the American-exhibited version. Here the words are a
declarative sentence which apparently corrects anyone who thinks this is a pipe.
And this? Presumably the imagea sort of General Semantics point that the image
is not the thing? Too simple and elementary, Foucault says. And besides, is this
common way of speaking so misleading? Isn't it common enough to insert "picture
of" where necessary, so that we do not tediously and pedantically have to say "This
is a picture of my son, this is a picture of our dog," and so on. Actually, Foucault is
most fond of a late version in which this painting is represented as resting on an
easel with a large pipe (no, no, image of a pipe) floating in the air above and in front

of it (title: "The Two Mysteries" (1966)). So why do we assume that there is more
truth in the words than in the image? That the words can comment on the image,
but not vice-versa? Or, Foucault suggests, the sentence's this could refer to the
sentence itself: "this (sentence) is not a pipe; look, here's a pipe." This would be
images taking primacy over words. One semiotic rule exposed here is that legends
or captions refer to the visual contents to which they are attached, not to
themselves. A second point is that legends and captions stand outside the
interpretive area of the work; they are authoritative and exempt from the full play of
interpretation.

So would it help to nail (or screw) the sentence down as a legend or caption? In
subsequent reworkings, Magritte painted it as on a brass plaque screwed onto a
wood mounting board for the pipe, and also sketched it as a screw-down plaque
with the slightly updated message "This is still not a pipe" in 1953. That would seem
to mute the self-referential reading ("this brass plaque is not a pipe" or "this whole
assembly"), but it proliferates a new one "this is the famous pipe of which it was
said 'this is not a pipe.'" Clearly this setup is rife with post structuralist
indeterminaciestreacheries?

Rene Magritte: This is a Piece of Cheese (1937)

Figure 1.21
This is a Piece of Cheese (1937)
Magritte branched out to other objects, painting not long before his death a quite
photo-realistic greenish apple with the caption "This is not an apple" (1964). But
cheese, now there is a different matter:

This counterpart to the pipe dates from 1937. One might say the lesson is that
context rules, but the title's affirmation is paradoxical, in that nothing looks less like
a piece of cheese than this little framed miniature substituting for something you
could eat. This affirmation, by the way, is not part of the picture (i.e., within the
frame) as it is in the pipe series and apple; rather, it seems more securely rooted in
the titling conventions which rule out its being taken as a part of what is
represented. So its privilege is manifested by its being obviously false.

Titles: As long as images represent things (objects, places, people, events) , it made
sense to identify what was represented by its verbal coordinates, as it were. This
naming enables viewers to recognize the thing, or correlate it to other
representations of the thing, and to admire the likeness or the rendering of some
part of the world. This standard practice does not so much enact the primacy of
language over image as it does confirm the function of the image as representing.
When in the twentieth century an artist decisively abandons representation in favor
of "abstraction" or a focus on formal values and medium, the title represents the
image itself, usually in terms of its main compositional features ("Red Square and
White Square", "White Balancing, 2" "Improvisation: Green Center"). When
representation is itself under scrutiny, the titles tend to become oblique and
sometimes teasingly definite references to things that are not part of common
knowledge or experience, allusions to things in a code we don't share (Duchamp:
"The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even", Ernst: "The Robing of the Bride"
just to take "brides").

Clearly Magritte's titles fall in this third, loosest of categories. A. M. Hammacher

provides a valuable sketch of Magritte's titling practices, which crucially involved
soliciting suggestions from his circle of mainly literary friends for the title of a newly
completed work. He gave them guidelines and discussed suggestions with them in
letters; among his papers was one "concerning titles" that reflects his thinking. He
sharply rejected titles of the first kind, which he called "indicative," seeking rather
the "poetic" title which was not identifying or determinative, but surprising and
enchanting (Hammacher, 22). Most of the titles we have seen would be examples of
poetic titles. A few of his titles are dead-pan literal descriptions of what a painting
represents ("The Man with a Newspaper", "The Empty Picture Frame"), though even
these are contestable, given the alert ingenuity his more characteristic titles call
forth. The Man, for example, only appears in one of the four panels of that painting
and the picture frame is not exactly empty: visible through it is a section of brick
wall, though the frame is shown hung over a plastered wall, so that its emptiness is
so intense, as it were, that it penetrates the plaster immediately behind it to expose
the brick.

Though strangely methodical and persistent, Magritte's probings and comparisons

of visual and verbal representation do not of course count as philosophical inquiries
into the theory of signification. Though through his working of incongruities, he

poses problems, he makes no attempt to solve them. His pursuit of topics like the
dependence of representation on framing and the equivalence/nonequivalence of
words and images has an almost empirical feel to it, as again and again we are
presented with paintings that cause our expectations of correlation and consistency
to tremble, almost as if the effect on us is to be measured, each one varying just
one parameter. The paintings we have looked at have no subject other than these
probings, this sly trickery, that produced the images of representation upon which
his enduring popularity rests. He is the first visual semiologist.

titles&captions
placards&legends
labels
The Treachery of Images (1952)

Figure 1.22
Ren Magritte: The Treachery of Images (1952)
1.2 Stable Relations of Words and Images

Jefferson Hunter's Image and Word: The Interaction of Twentieth-Century

Photographs and Texts (1987) begins with a chapter on photographs with captions,
and more recently Clive Scott may fairly be said to have written the book on titles
and captions of photographs. This book, The Spoken Image: Photography and
Language, begins with a characterization of photographic images as weak in their
manifestation of the photographer's intentions and easily fixed and interpreted by
surrounding text in the form of titles and captions. Scott traces practices and issues
in various kinds of photography (documentary, journalistic, fashion) and the use of
photographs in narratives, moving from the initial stable relations of title and
caption to more and more experimental relations where the attempt is made to
release the potential of photographs for "another kind of telling" (title of one such
attempt by John Berger and Jean Mohr). With the latter works, it is impossible to
specify exactly what the relation of text to image is, or which bears the main weight
of meaning, so his book moves from what we are calling stable relations to unstable
relations of text and image. Here we begin with noting some stable relations.

Titles&captions

We expect exhibited and reproduced works of art to be accompanied by a word or

words that are to be taken as the name of the "work". These titles generally occur
immediately above the work, below it, or to side. Captions generally are found
beneath figures and photographs and may be longer and of a more descriptive
nature. Further, as Magritte reminds us, the title is sometimes set apart on a little
brass plate. In the work to the left, however, the text on the plate is not the title of
the work; it therefore is something more like a legend beneath a trophy, or, rather,
it imitates a legend. Rosler very precisely refers to it with the linguistic term,
metadiscourse.

Since the title is essentially the proper name of the work, it should be unique (within
the artist's oeuvre, anyway) and it should be stable. Presumably the artist chose it
to locate the work in some way, though artists marching under Modernist banners
preferred titles describing the work (rather than what it represented) or the zero
grade of titles "Untitled" (as with Cindy Sherman's works, although she does
number them sequentially). Shane Cooper's variable captioner creates incongruity
(and humor) by pairing images and captions from rather heterogeneous lists, which
pairings change as one continues to click on the image. (random captioner)

Titles and captions can change over time even if provided by the author. Scott
traces very substantial changes in his captioning of photos by the famous
photojournalist Don McCullin from their early appearance in the late 1970s to their
collection in 1987. MCCullin's earlier titles are very long and supply background and
a narrative of the moment of taking, while the later titles draw back, are less
interpretive, and leave more scope to the viewer for "personal discovery, the
engagement of the imagination, the challenge to unravel what we do not
understand" (88). So
Bradford boy whose leg has been mutilated in a scrap-yard accident and whose only
mode of transportation is a baby's pram, 1978
becomes
Father and sons, housing estate, Bradford, 1978
and similarly
Down-and-out shouting confused political obscenities, Spitalfield market, London,
1973
becomes

Destitute men, London.

There are other changes as well that refocus from one figure to another in a photo
and categorize in ways that alter our evaluation of what is depicted.

Scott shows us that there are costs involved in the fixing or anchoring of images,
even journalistic ones, with titles, starting with narrowing and channeling our
response. To be sure, he argues, the loosening of anchorage in the historical
moment of taking the picture arises from the passage of time and a kind of
quintessentialization of the moment as an image of recurrent human experience
that can speak for itself (as they move, Scott says, from journalism to
documentary). The refocusing and reevaluating changes, however, are not
accounted for in this explanation. Scott finds these changes in the artist's own titles
troubling, and he concludes that at times McCullin seems to know what his message
is, and sometimes not.

Placards&legends
Informative and appreciative placards with text specifying (or "anchoring") the
image are still on the image-primary end of things. These provide (verbally) context
for the work, including information about the subject represented, the date and
circumstances of creation, and noteworthy features of the work. These are usually
displayed next to the work they explicate and are a major part of what we expect to
find in a curated exhibit. We may find them as well in a catalog of the exhibit or
book devoted to the works of the artist and they are a key part of framing the work
of art as art.

One of the things we generally are not told and presumably is not relevant to our
appreciation of art as art is who has owned it and what they paid for it--its history as
a commodity. Hans Haacke has created much discomfort and some uproar by
exhibiting placards with that information next to various paintings along with other
information about the owner's business holdings or those of the museum's
directors. This information is a part of the story of how a particular work came to be
exhibited before the public in that place and time, but it a part that our institutional
conventions of High Art render invisible and unspeakable. Haacke's efforts have

been rejected and censored and closed down, but he has also been invited
repeatedly to develop public installations and to curate exhibits, so that some also
influential people do applaud his incongruities and the opening up of Art they
stimulate.

Jacqueline Hayden: Statuary I

placard
Figure 1.23
Jacqueline Hayden: Statuary I
To see how much energy and interest can be generated from splitting of placard and
image, consider the "Statuary" series by Jacqueline Hayden on www.zonezero.com;
the first one of 10 is here in the margin. These pictures are presented one by one in
a highlighted oval (museum lighting) against a rich dark maroon field; each comes
with a little placard button that when pressed opens a window, as here, with the
placard. (The picture also can be enlarged.) The placard text in each case seems
utterly unaware of the modification Hayden has made to the antique torso ("Statue
of Hermes: Marble Roman, Imperial Period, 1st or 2nd century A.D....") It thus enacts
the obliviousness of the Western fine arts tradition to the look of bodies past the
age of fifty. The images are rather small platinum prints done with great care and
fine finish, and it would be quite wrong to take the exhibition as a joke mocking the
aging body or the preposterous vanity of those past their physical prime. These
tensions are evoked but not resolved (since images don't say anything); rather the
gaze they call forth is a compassionate one seeking and finding a certain kind of
beauty.

Labels
Organs of Speech
Figure 1.24
The Organs of Speech

Labelling would seem to be among the least problematic of relations: the label
word, though inside the frame, is the name or (other index) of the part to which the

term points by means of a pointer or the part where the label is located. At the left
is a simple line drawing of a "saggital section" view of the mouth and throat
directing attention to the parts that are centrally involved with speech. Line
drawings appropriately scant realistic surface detail in favor of structural
delineation. (Recent advances in anatomical imaging have provided a number of
photographically-based alternatives to the hand-drawn "sagittal section" of the
mouth. Here is one using a digitized sliced cadaver from the Visible Human Project.)

Larry Rivers: Parts of the Body: French Vocabulary Lesson III (1964)
Figure 1.25
Larry Rivers: Parts of the Body: French Vocabulary Lesson III (1964)
Another vocabulary lesson, this one very incongruent. The incongruity is not
between label and image (Magritte had already done that past repeating), but
between the standard format of a vocabulary diagram and its execution in this one
of a series of French Vocabulary Lessons by Larry Rivers. In the standard format, the
object or objects shown are all firmly outlined objects drawn in canonical recognition
view. Here the figure is sketched on canvas and partially painted in, though some of
the good-form symmetrical features are missing, the posture is not that of the
standing nude female to be found in any number of anatomical drawings. She is not
neutered, to say the least, and sits legs agape about full-sized or a little larger
looking directly at us (with her one eye). And the labels: why black sprayed or
painted stencil? (One is reminded of Foucault's remark about the "convent hand"
script in Magritte's vocabulary travesties.) One simple and inadequate answer is
that Jasper Johns was using similar lettering to put color names (RED, BLUE,
YELLOW, etc.) on his paintings in ways that suggest to Philip Fisher the
submergence or obliteration of signification in general(3); to Suzi Gablik, they link to
Magritte's exploration of misaligned labels (137). (See for example Johns' famous
False Start at Mark Hardin's artchive.) Here, however, the effect is to give the
conventions of labelling, the carefully framed and directed textbook gaze, a good
rough shake.

Kim Beckmann: Built World 2

Figure 1.26
Kim Beckmann: Built World 2

A final example of a labelled image gone astray: this may have started out looking
like "Figure 2." with points 1-5 to be noted but it drifted into a more abstract space
of words and concepts where voices, sounds, experiences, languages are all
streaming into or out of a vortex along with some thoughts about space and some
hard to make out pieces of things. Passing back through left to right again, the
twisted configuration can be seen as a diagram of how barbs are twisted into
barbed wire, which is one way to mark off a social field. This is in fact an unstable
image, since what is label, what image begins to blur when the space ceases to be
flat and the words appear angled toward the vanishing point vortex. This is one of
Kim Beckmann's prize winning digital images at Art and Science Collaborations
Digital98, where we find attached an evocative few lines of poetry and text that
employs most of the words in this image.

1.3 Appropriations

Appropriation has developed a somewhat specialized meaning in discussions of

modern art: it means to place an object or image in a context with which it is not
conventionally associated intending thereby to unsettle our normal expectations
and lines of interpretation. One source of such practices was Marcel Duchamp's
parade of "ready mades" (urinals, metal bottle racks, bicycle wheels mounted on
stools) exhibited as art so as to place High Art in question. No text is involved in
these cases, just the common objects and the gallery context, and the practice was
oppositional in the sense that High Art could not see such objects as significant or
beautiful shapes. A second source is political cartooning, in which the texts of
politicians are parodically illustrated with the sense of "what this really means is ..."
or "what will happen is this..."

The Butter is Gone

Figure 1.27
John Heartfield, detail of "The Butter is Gone" (1935)
At the left is a small corner of the very famous political photomontage of John
Heartfield "The Butter is Gone" (1935) that gives a precise citation for the text
(speaker, place, date). Here the text is folly ("Bronze has always made a nation
strong; butter and fat at best make a people plump.") and the image is truth-telling.
To be upended in this manner, the text must have some historical or social
identifiability and reflect a recognizable viewpoint that is part of its original context.

That is, the reframed object carries its original context with it to the extent that it
too is subject to critique. So, here, Gring's words evoke a context of Nazi
militaristic zeal that blinds them to the real needs of the people. Most of the time for
Heartfield and the political cartoonists, the image shows the way things really are or
will be and deflates or exposes the false representations, which are verbal.

The "will be" is an important distinction, however, since Heartfield's special

technique of what we might call photo-caricature makes no use of the convention of
the truth-telling image that exposes lies and impostures of political slogans and
promotional fliers. Jefferson Hunter traces this convention in American social
documentary photo-essays of the 1930s by Dorothea Lange, Laurence Stallings,
Frederick Barber, Margaret Bourke-White, and Archibald MacLeish. This polemical
use of photography subsided during and after the second World War, but was taken
up again by the new radicals of the 1970s such as David Plowden and Victor Burgin.
Burgin varies the convention in a number of interesting ways.

Victor Burgin: Life Demands a Little Give and Take

Figure1.28
Victor Burgin: "Life Demands a Little Give and Take" (1974)
Victor Burgin resumed the work of appropriation in the 1970s in exhibits in England,
Germany and the US. The image on the left follows the Heartfield pattern of placing
a chunk of text in a context that makes its unrealistic assumptions evident. The text
is place inside the frame of the picture so that some of the picture is visible behind
the text and so is a "text over." Its language is that of High Fashion:

Evening is the softest time of day. As the sun descends the butterfly bright colours
which flourish at high noon give way to the moth shades. The tones are pale,
delicate. These are the classic Mayfair colours. White, naturally, takes pride of
place, but evening white lightly touched with silver or sometimes gold . . . The look
is essentially luxurious, very much for the pampered lady dressed for a romantic
evening with every element pale and perfect.

I am not sure how readily the image would make sense with no context, but in a
collection of pictures that deal with the contradiction between manipulative,
obfuscating culture (ideology) and real material conditions (Burgin's Between), it is

not hard to see this picture as an exposure of the racist overtones of pale=beautiful.
That is, we have ordinary people waiting for a bus on a nondescript street corner in
modern Britain, among whom the camera's gaze falls on a woman who is distinctly
not pale and who does not qualify as one of the targeted audience of the fashion
magazine spiel. Another well-known image from this series combines a text
celebrating a recent Yves St. Laurent collection as "a ramble through Eastern
Europe" with a picture of an Indian woman technician working on some sort of
electronic switching array.

Victor Burgin: What Does Possession Mean to You?

Figure 1.29
Victor Burgin, "Possession"
In this his perhaps most famous piece from these series, Burgin reverses the
formula to make the image one drawn from commercial advertising and the
correcting context a verbal one, but integrating the text as if it properly
accompanied the image in an advert. "Possession"was done at the time of an
exhibit of contemporary artists in Newcastle. The Arts Council asked for some
publicity posters, and Burgin responded with "Possession" 200 copies of which were
pasted up on the streets of Newcastle. Burgin intended for the diametrical
opposition of text and image to catch the gaze and trigger thought, but because the
text is so visually integrated into the advert, it is possible that few actually read
enough of it to grasp the wrenchingly dissonant content. Follow-up research
indicated that not many passersby remembered what the posters said, much less
what they implied. Burgin made a number of others after this pattern, giving them
the look of commercial advertisements for such enticing commodities as Class
Consciousness and Property.

Photographs, as noted, do not lend themselves to typification very well, and on the
whole, Burgin uses his camera to capture bits of the material world as touchstones
to rub against various fine languages such as fashion, tract developer talk, and
English country home real estate puffery. That is, the formula is what Hunter calls
"Smug Texts and Truth-telling Pictures" (Hunter, 17). Burgin's images evoke
documentary: they are black and white, most appear unposed and taken with either
daylight or available light, making them sometimes grainy and high-contrast. The
exception is "Possession," which is obviously posed in studio with professional
models and lighting. Rather more complicatedly, Burgin also evokes other
languages more agreeable to his general politics but also recognizably abstract,

theoretical, dogmatic and self-righteous, namely the languages of Left sociology,

feminism, fetishism (commodity and otherwise), and psychoanalysis. These he also
puts to the test. And too, some of the texts are snatches of narrative, even
dialogue, but what all of these texts have in common is that the photographs that
accompany them do not illustrate the texts in any conventionally direct way. And
the texts are chunks of discourses floating out there in the heteroglossic soup. The
juxtapositions are rarely so directly oppositional as the upending of glamorous
consumerism by the inequity of property ownership in Britain.

Figure 1.30
Victor Burgin: Cordoba
In one way, the image to the left comes close both to typifying visually and
illustrating the text (enlarge the image to read the text), namely, in the line of six
business men that are walking diagonally across the picture (parking lot? cross
walk?). They are, after, "in transit," quite plausibly from work to home. The
dominant foreground image, however, is of predatory phallic assertiveness, of an
existence defined neither by job nor by home but by a big shiny car, cigarette, and
casual dress. If Chrysler didn't use the picture, they missed a good bet. But for
greatest effect, the picture needs the text, which, with its unrelentingly grim
portrayal of modern paternal role-modeling, makes the dude in the Cordoba
extremely attractive. Perhaps Burgin expects us to see through this appeal, but all
the visual values in the picture say "the dude is The Man." The text bears a title
"OMNIPOTENCE" and reads:

Economically speaking, the father's authority in the home is an anachronism which

recalls preindustrial times when he directed family-based production. In most cases
today the father is himself merely a commodity in the labor market. His 'authority'
now serves to reproduce in his children his own subservience to corporate and state
power, providing them with the image of an ultimately benevolent controlling
wisdom though which they will later tend to view all others who wield power over
them. The objective authority of the father has collapsed into that gap which the
factory opened between work and family-life. Simultaneously master-of-the-house
and a servant in his place of employment, the identity of the patriarch as wageslave is in perpetual transit between work and home.

This image pushes toward the unstable group, since it would be fairly easy to turn
on the text and reinterpret it in the light of the picture"Oh yeah? Well at least I
don't have to listen to you, Professor!"

Victor Burgin: c. 1976

Figure 1.31
Victor Burgin: Marlboro
On the facing page in Between is another image of a man with a cigarettethe
Marlboro Manbut in surroundings that are dark and shabby, perhaps a subway,
the very opposite of the daylight and shiny metal of the previous image. The text is
a little narrative, a mini-story

A dark-haired woman in her late-forties hands over a photograph showing the

haircut she wants duplicating 'exactly'. The picture shows a very young woman with
blond hair cut extremely short. The hairdresser props it by the mirror in which he
can see the face of his client watching her own reflections. When he has finished he
removes the cotton cape from the woman's shoulders. 'That's it', he says. But the
woman continues sitting, continues staring at her reflection in the mirror.

The actual image on the subway wall is also idealized image one the the great
commercial icons of all timebut there is no viewer to look at it (other than us). It is
economical to see a parallelism between text and image, provided we step into the
position parallel to the woman customer. We are not told what the woman was
thinking or feeling, and we too are left to our own thoughts, which may turn more in
the direction of self-examination than socio-political critique.

There are quite a number of other pairings in these series from 1976-78 that set off
text against image in ways that are comic or oblique in the sense that there must
be some third term or context not accessible to the viewer that links image and
text. When the relation becomes undecidable, we have left appropriation and
entered the region of the unstable, which is dealt with in the next section.

David Plowden: Statue of Liberty from Caven Point Road, Jersey City, New Jersey
Figure 1.32
David Plowden: "Statue of Liberty from Caven Point Road, Jersey City, New Jersey"
(1967)
The image by David Plowden at the left appears in his Hand of Man (1971)
collection and again in his retrospective Imprints (1997). On the facing page
appears Emma Lazarus' famous "Give me your tired, your poor" sonnet. Jefferson
Hunter reads this combination in relation to another in the book and concludes that
they all can be ranged under the rubric of 'Glorious things we say/Crummy things
we do' (not Hunter's words). And he notes that slaps upside the head like that grow
less effective as they grow more frequent: "It is all too easy to turn language into a
slogan and to replace argument with clashing juxtapositions" (18). Though it is hard
to believe Jefferson's comments had much to do with it, Plowden dropped all ironic
captioning in his retrospective collection Imprints (1997) which includes this and a
good number of other, formerly captioned ones. More likely, as with McCullin, over
time the photograph and how it may resonate are more important and more special
than the slogans and self-righteous superiority of exposing the lies and the
hypocrisy.

The example is complicated by the image itself exhibiting what film theorists call
"montage within a frame (or shot)" of the "collision of ideas" type, where the two
things to be read as contrasting occur not in a sequence of frames but within the
single frame. So there is "contradiction" within the image and between the image
and the poem. Most likely we have a truth-telling image played off against
corrupted words, but what truth does the image tell? That there are dumps in Jersey
City from which you can see the Statue of Liberty?

It is good for the image that it appears without Emma Lazarus's sonnet, because the
sonnet, speaking as the Statue, suggests that the Statue and the American promise
she represents has been somehow abandoned, forgotten, dishonored, betrayed or
travestied, with the photograph as evidence. As an argument, that is very weak:
dumps are not betrayls of the American promise. Reading it that way is not only
reductive, but specious as well.

For within-the-frame montage to convey a contradiction ("collision of opposites,"

dialectic) the viewer needs to be primed by context, unmistakeable symbols, or
overt polemic (Heartfield's Nazi bayonet through the dove of peace--although that
also changed over time). If the contradiction is not obvious and familiar, the

combination results in a looser, more evocative trigger for reflection. 11 In a

textbook example of collision-montage within the frame, Herbert Zettl says of an
image of the heads of an old woman and infant that it emphasizes the
impermanence of man, but, absent any supporting context, it could as well
emphasize the renewal and transmission of enthusiasm for life (320).

Esther Parada: Native Fruits (1992)

Figure 1.33
Esther Parada: Native Fruits (1992)
"2-3-4-D: Digital Revisions in Time and Space" is a set of image installations by
Esther Parada that deal with the texts of colonialism and photographs of
monuments and of contemporary life in Havana, Cuba. The typical installation has
several panels with the earlier ones displaying components of the final large image.
In the image "Native Fruits" (1991-2), two texts appropriated from the 1892
Columbus and Columbia: A Pictorial History of the Man and the Nation are placed
around and over a composite image of Havana street life. Also superimposed over
the street scene is a period etching depicting the land fall of the conquistadors and
their welcome by natives bearing fruits. In the lower panel, however, the overlays of
colonialism are removed and the people break through the screen of colonialist
thinking. In others of the series, the youth of modern Cuba appear wearing the red
scarves of young Communist Pioneers, to underline and affirm the break with the
colonial past. (See the discussion in the Photomontage chapter for another from this
series.) Here, as with the majority of these appropriations, the image is the
privileged window onto the living present reality, the text is the window onto the (to
our minds) preposterous thinking of the colonial past.

The ironic counterpointing of text and image is stable and quite decidable in the
next example. Each issue of Wired includes a 4 page (2 double) spread before the
Contents page which cites a line or two from a featured article later in the magazine
and functions as a teaser (or highly graphic "abstract") for the article. The sentence
to be quoted and graphicked is usually long enough to support the two stage setup
(double page one followed by double page two), as for example additive or
contrastive pairings, or cause and effect.

Usually Wired's graphic serves the bit of quoted text; the next example is unusual in
its relation to the quoted words. Gary Wolf's featured article in June 1999 Wired
profiles Sir John Templeton and his investments in religion, specifically in showing
that good religion is good business. The two double-page spread is built on lines
from one of Templeton's operatives (Charles Harper) and is neither explicitly
endorsed nor derided in the text of the piece. In context, it both celebrates the
triumph of world capitalism and outlines the next area for it to annex, namely the
realm of moral values.

Market 1
Figure 1.34
Market 1
On the first two pages, the two spray cleanser containers on the right margin seem
to express the result of the end of the struggle for markets. Photographed in hard
focus and bright light against dead black with nothing but the text to support them,
they illustrate what Kress and van Leeuwen call "hyperreal" modality, which in this
case links to sensual pleasure focusing on the consumer object typical of food and
drink adverts (p. 169). (see also John Berger, Ways of Seeing , pp. 140-141) When
we match these pages with their text declaring the settling of the fundamental
battle over the free market, it is hard to avoid the effect of severe understatement
(or under representation) amounting to ironic deflation ("the late consumer
capitalist market economy as epitomized by the choice of cleansers now dominates
the scene"with Bruce Springsteen's "57 channels and nothin' on" in the
background).

Market 2
Figure 1.34
Market 2
In the second pair of pages, the two packs of cigarettes (on sale in Japan, I hear) fill
the position of the cleansers and would appear to represent the not yet realized
victory of the market in the sphere of morals. (And here they bear their own texts
("Peace" and "Hope") which push even beyond "Fantastic" and "Fabulous" as
Orwellian perversions of the words.) The diminishing line of text, trailing off into a
kind of visual mutter, says " but I don't think people have a sense that capitalism is
the morally right way to do things." The image thus mock the words from

Templeton's agent by reducing the grand phrases to their practical consequences in

daily life: "capitalist marketing of morality would offer us immoral commodity
choices packaged with positive words"how backward can people be to withhold
assent! In this display from Wired, the image, though a studio job and no
documentary, shows the concrete material result of the victory of the marketplace
and is even more deflating than Heartfield's dinner of iron, since it shows the
present reality, not a possible future.

Figure 1.35
Geoff Broadway: Mirage (1997)
All of these appropriating works play off words against images in some sort of
opposition or dialectic, the words being printed on or near the image. There are
obvious limits to how far this can be carried, but appropriation is possible in more
complex configurations such as the six images created by Geoff Broadway for his
MPhil degree at the University of Derby (1997). These are exhibited on the Web as
"The Glass"; one of them, "Mirage," appears reduced at the left. After a bit of study,
we can see four relatively distinct images in the photomontage, three of them
overlaying the background image (a 16th century Arabic compass) in the semitransparent fashion of photomontage. Broadway identifies these images: one is an
Etienne Jules Marey photo of an Arabian horse galloping, one of an Israeli soldier
and a PLO suspect, and onethe flamesof an oil well fire from Operation Desert
Storm. We can then track him pretty well when he says of the image "Mirage
explores our perception of a land of exotic adventure with 'barbaric' and 'uncivilized'
counter-currents, whilst covering a history of scientific and technological
development which spawned the tools of western development." That is a rather
heavy thematic load for an image, even one with four layers, to carry, but given
Broadway's leads, it is fairly successful at touching four main threads of Western
Europe's take on the Arabic world and suggesting a temporal depth spanning
several centuries to those efforts at constructing the Arab.

"Mirage" first appeared with a white background in 1995; augmented with sound
two years later as one of a set of six pieces that appear online as "The Glass" along
with an introductory note by Giles Peaker. 12 These pieces include sound.
Broadyway's general headnote says "Using reworked 'found' images and sounds,
key aspects of the complex relationship between the west and the so-called third
world - political, social and economic- is explored." The general theme is colonial

exploitation and the method is showing the contradictions. Invoking Brecht's famous
line about how photographs do not reveal social relations, Peaker points out that
Broadway includes the contradictory parts as separate panels which overlay each
other as aspects of the complex social situations; they are not necessarily resolved
into a harmonized composite image, any more than the nexus of conflicting
interests and perceptions which are the real object of representation can be
resolved. As Peaker says about Broadway's use of photomontage in this set,
"montage works to make us aware of those images as traces of reality - a reality
which can't be 'pictured' but can be thought." Broadway also includes a link to his
complete thesis, which traces the conceptual complex "realist montage" through
the theoretical writings of Brecht, Lukcs, and Benjamin and the practice of
Heartfield, Lger, and Eisenstein.

Visually, the construction in five of the six pieces is that of three or four blocks
arranged vertically with some overlap and linkage, but with no common frame or
space. The overlaps, by using variable transparency, avoid the interruption of form
typical of collage. The effect leans toward the diagrammatic rather than the scenic.

The six pieces of "The Glass" are not just visual, however, but audio-visual: each
image has four or five sound clips associated with parts of it (roughly the separate
layers) in a Director display that fades them in or out as the mouse moves over the
image and allows several to be heard at once. This is a rather exact audio
equivalent of photomontage ("soundcollage"). In the case of "Mirage," the clips are
a bit of monologue on misperceptions of the Arab, a TV news report of the tickertape parade given to welcome US soldiers back from the Gulf War (complete with an
interview with a soldier), a background droning as of aircraft engines, sounds of a
well fire billowing flames, a newsreel commemoration of Israeli independence, and a
few measures from the Lawrence of Arabia theme song. These clips greatly enhance
the presence and specificity of the attitudes and events depicted, furnishing a
partial answer to Sontag's point that "functioning takes place in time" and hence
"Only that which narrates can make us understand." 13 The version with sound
takes a long time to load and on my machines the sound has to be teased out
somewhat, as if one were turning the dial of an analog radio tuner and receiving
broadcasts from the mid- and later 20th century.

The power of these emblems does not arise from new or original "thoughts" about
colonialism. It comes from the sheer intensity with which the "thought" is realized
with a little work from the viewer. This work is especially impressive in that
compared to Heartfield, say, there are no villians to hate (and depict)no Hitler,
Goebbels, Goeringand no swastikas, salutes, and goose-stepping. And let no one

say that this is pure image: it is imagetext, though some text is heard rather than
seen, some is in captions and background, and some is in the appended thesis
itself.

Peaker's and Broadway's discussion of "digital realist montage" makes the useful
point that images cannot literally show contradictionsnot, at least, the profound
and systematic ones that characterize late Capitalism and colonialism. The real on
this view is abstract (which is not to deny that it is created and maintained by
material bodies and forces), and so, given what is generally said about the
anchoring of images, most especially photographs, to physical objects with
contours, textures, and surfaces, they come close to representing abstractions.
Broadway takes advantage of the loosened reference to the world that comes with
digital images and montage. The parts of these images do not cohere in a single
representational space: they cohere as aspects of a historical-political phenomenon;
they are tokens for attitudes and events, signifying by synecdoche.

Ann Marie Rousseau: Macy's: the Benediction (1980)

Figure 1.36
Ann Marie Rousseau: Macy's: the Benediction (1980)
Images do not speak their contradictions. Even if on formal grounds, or on content,
they seem to invite a reading in terms of oppositions, those oppositions can be
articulated in any number of ways. Determination by text, Deleuze points out, is
paradoxically endless, unless for some reason we choose to accept a particular
reading as authoritative and final. This image appears in Susan Buck-Morss's The
Dialectics of Seeing (1989) with the title "Shopping Bag Lady 1980" and enough text
to fill up the rest of the page. She reads the image as montage within the frame.
The commentary cites a description (dating from 1934) from Benjamin's Arcades
Project of a bohemian woman sleeping under a bridge with her head bent forward,
briefly describes bag ladies in the US and the irony of the bags suggesting a just
completed shopping spree, and concludes with a reminder that being homeless and
living in the street is a great oppression subjecting one to "state surveillance, public
censure, and political powerlessness" (Dialectics, 347).

The image also appears on Ann Marie Rousseau's Web page with the title "The
Benediction" and a paragraph describing how the photo came to be taken and what
it means to her. It concludes:

The more privileged women (mannequins) on the inside advertise cruise wear in the
dead of winter, and are portrayed half naked, bald and equally alienated. They
bestow a blessing on their sister a world apart, yet only inches away on the other
side of the glass. Both are in full view on public display and are at the same time, to
the larger world, invisible.
This is so different from the treatment in Buck-Morss' book that it almost seems
written to recapture the image from her, as if to say, "you focussed on only a part of
the image," and to affirm and reconcile the alienated, rather than to rouse
indignation at the oppression creating the homeless in our cities. (Buck-Morss also
reproduces a similar photo by Brassai in the 1930s which shows "the contradiction"
more directly and in the fashion of the times (271), where a tramp is sleeping on the
street under a large poster of a dinner salad being made.) A cultural critic might
dismiss Rousseau's account as a trivializing or exploitation of oppressiona
prettifying "let's imagine"but Rousseau refers on this and other pages to her
decade of work in the shelters for homeless women, and it is likely she is well past
the ironies of superficial contrasts. It is as if her image was hijacked, not by BuckMorss, but by the tradition of Lange-Evans-Bourke-White style photographs of the
homeless huddled in the doorways of banks and so onthe same tradition Martha
Rosler was resisting in "The Bowery in Two Inadequate Representational Systems"-to which we turn next.
1.4 Unstable relations

The relation of text and image become unstable (or "open") when neither text nor
image is primary in the piece, nor is one more grounded in the world than the other.
As we view them, we shuttle between one signification system and the other, which
is to say between the two visual modes of reading and viewing. Here we will begin
with some of Martha Rosler's work, where the words mostly stay outside the frame
of the image, and look then at what we will call textmontage, where words and
phrases bleed into each other and into images. We will then look at some variations
and developments of words in imagetexts from another Wired, and an online edition
of a Borges story by Eduardo Navas to the long and continuing anatomy of urban
street life, Jody Zellen's GhostCity.

Figure 1.37
Martha Rosler: The Bowery in Two Inadequate Representational Systems

Rosler
A year or two before Victor Burgin began exhibiting the series just discussed,
Martha Rosler first showed The Bowery in Two Inadequate Representational
Systems. This work has had an extraordinary history of exhibition, publication,
inclusion in collections and citations on the Web (usually only a sample of the
exhibit in the last two cases.) It consists of 24 rectangles of masonite, each with one
photograph of a street site in New York's Bowery and one list of terms meaning
"inebriated." So for the image at the left there are twelve terms ("soaked, sodden,
steeped, soused, etc."), many of them terms the alcoholics sitting or lying in the
streets would use to describe their condition. The sites themselves are mainly the
fronts of stores where the alcoholics would sit and they all have empty bottles lying
about, but of the alcoholics themselves there is no trace. The terms by their very
abundance show that there is no single, most accurate term to represent the state
these people seek; they convey rather a sense of the lifeworld of their users with
elements,Rosler notes, "of playfulness and humor, of poetry and stand-up comedy."
14

The photographs hark back to Walker Evans' work in street documentary, but
Rosler's streets are empty, early morning scenes with only traces of the inhabitants.
Speaking of Eugene Atget, also a great depicter of empty morning streets, Walter
Benjamin says,

Not for nothing were pictures of Atget compared with those of the scene of a crime.
But is not every spot of our cities the scene of a crime? every passerby a
perpetrator? Does not the photographer--descendant of augurers and haruspices-uncover guilt in his pictures? 15

Harlan Wallach's "Chicago Murder Sites"(see Chapter 5.3) is a fine example of what
Benjamin is talking about, but Rosler's is not, mainly because the viewer constructs
an inhabited scene by means of the words that is not one of repulsion,
condemnation, pity, guilt, or victimage. The inadequacy of the photographic
medium, we might say, is that in depicting (necessarily) the shabby clothing,
splotchy flesh, toothless mouths, matted hair, and supine postures, the camera
would capture only the roughest outlines of individual experience.

I call this exhibit unstable (or "open") because neither text nor image is primary,
and because the viewer struggles to compose an interpretation that brings the
pieces together without knowing what that exactly would be, only that it is not any
of the conventional stances the viewer of documentary might take. To put it another
way, Rosler speaks of pointing the camera back toward the world, so that the selfreferentiality of much contemporary conceptual art gives way to actually looking at
the world--while at the same time thinking about the two representational systems
and their relative adequacies to represent the experience of the Bowery alcoholic.

Martha Rosler: In the Place of the Public: Airport Series

Figure 1.39
Martha Rosler: In the Place of the Public: Airport Series
Beginning in the early 1990s, Rosler began to exhibit a new series which has gone
through some changes it has traveled and as she continues to add new pictures
(and remove others). This series, "In the Place of the Public: Airport Series," uses
color and is photographed with a little pocket camera she carries with her as she
travels. These she displays in various arrays with words, phrases, sometimes a
paragraph placed near or around them. You can get a sense of this from the slightly
amplified online version of a recent exhibit. You can also click here for a picture of
an installation.

The gallery display frees the words and phrases from any pairings to images, which
are presented in standard gallery fashion. They mean to invoke the ambiance of the
airport, of course, and so the words become an ambiance of commentary. In this
they are distinct from the baseline simple singular indefinite noun phrases in small,
gray letters, most of which signify, rather nostalgically, places which were
destinations and locales where specific human interactions took/take place. These
also function as a baseline to the pairs of images in the online exhibit and they are
plentiful. The words above in the gallery (above and on top of the online images)
are name bits and pieces of Postmodern information age culture that apply in
various ways, some quite tangential, to the images, or, one might say, vice-versa.

One theme of the work is thus obviously the experience of airport space as not a
place (in the old sense) but a passage to a place and filled with images of other
rather generic spaces as possible objects of desire (Germany, England). A second
theme is flow of data and information, which in our time is far more important than
where it starts or ends up, or what it is. This notion is touched in the numerous
images of television displays, newspapers, placards, in the floating phrases, and
even in the base line series, which includes or concludes "flow, transition, data, bit,
byte," which terms contrast to older units of information in the base line ("A tablet,
a paper, a parchment, // A palimpsest, a pamphlet, a book"). 16

There are three strings of words that rise to the level of sentences and might
thereby be qualified to give definitive commentary, but one is figurative and
descriptive ("Each module repents of meaning") and the other two are selfcanceling. The singsong "I don't say map, I don't say territory" could be applied a
number of ways as a reference to the whole exhibit. Taking the "I" in a simple, naive
way as the voice of the maker, it refuses to say that the display is in any sense a
map of postmodernity- -the layout of the world of virtual space- -nor will it say that
airport space is a particular territory, since it is always only a passage to "elsewhere
and otherwise." Equally so, these words or spaces cannot be said to be fragments,
since "There are only no fragments where there is no whole" and it would seem the
entire notion of whole/fragment is nostalgic.

Figure 1.40
Stef Zelynskyj
Textmontage
Textmontage refers to the superimposing of text onto image layers with the soft
blending edges we take as characteristic of photomontage.(See Chapter 2) The text
can be read in bits and snatches, but it fades into the background, so that there are
no well-defined boundaries to mark off the "readable" from the "seeable."
Textmontage is more than simply using text, especially hand-written text, as a
visual texture usually harking back to a predigital world (very often also with
postmarks and stamps). Such bits of text can be deciphered only with effort and
their contents are not thematic to the work. With textmontage, you can and are
meant to grope for the words and decipher them as part of a message, but the
artists often also provide a simple version to assist your grasping of the text. In the

example at the left by the digital artist Stef Zelynskyj, the text is a poem "Song
(That Women Are But Mens Shaddowes)" by Ben Jonson.

FOllow a shaddow, it still flies you;

Seeme to flye it, it will pursue:
So court a mistris, shee denyes you;
Let her alone, shee will court you.
Say, are not women truely, then,
Stil'd but the shaddowes of us men?
At morne, and even, shades are longest;
At noone, they are or short, or none:
So men at weakest, they are strongest,
But grant us perfect, they're not knowne.
Say, are not women truely, then
Stil'd but the shaddowes of us men?
Here the disruption of reading seems to arise from physical damage to a printed
page scrutinized through a magnifier at five different degrees of magnification. The
damage allows the sky to appear through the page in places, but not always exactly
the same places. This piece taps in to a certain fascination we have with reading
erased or canceled words, or restoring a page that has been ripped to pieces.

Sandy Young: Which Way

Figure 1.41
Sandy Young: Which Way
The digital artist and designer Sandy Young exhibits this along with six other
"typographic pieces that express ideas in the form of 'visual poetry'." The piece as
an IRIS print is large enough that text in the background may be legible (with
concentrated effort), but as exhibited on line, she gives the text to its left:

i don't want to do it that way / i want to do it my way. / frank did it his way / so why
can't i do it my way? / by the way / which way are you going? / can i come along?

This does not appear to be a continuous or unified text, but a series of strips of
language containing the word way, and the various visual styles of presentation
reflect the various phrases and uses of way.

Sandy Young: Emerging Vision

Figure 1.42
Sandy Young: Emerging Vision
The piece "Emerging Vision," which mercifully is available in a larger version, is from
another series (Notebooks) and blends text with image on the theme of "coming to
see." We also "come to read" as we recognize repetitions of the sentence "this is
what I see" (not "his is what...") and then can link that to a face emerging through
an eroded screen with rows of digital 01's on it. These images are of such
complexity both for reading and viewing that they do emerge slowly like a print in
developer, except that these are textmontage prints, not photos. This is perhaps as
close as anything can come to Mitchell's imagetext.

Kim Beckmann: Metaphrast

Figure 1.43
Kim Beckmann: Metaphrast
Kim Beckmann also won a prize in the ASCI Digital98 contest with "Metaphrast as
Author" (along with two others, one of which we looked at in the stable section
(1.2).) This is textmontage with a vengeance, with layers of text occluding other
layers of text, and with diverse voices or sources likely for the bits of text. As before,
we cannot tell which is primary here, text or image.

Diane Fenster: Canto 2 of Huidobro

Figure 1.44
Diane Fenster: Canto 2 of Huidobro

Diane Fenster is another digital artist discussed elsewhere (in Photomontage) whose
montage extends to layering text. In her "Hide and Seek", which is a hypertext
consisting of 12 images, each of which includes (translated) snips of a poem by the
Chilean surrealist poet Vincente Huidobro. One might suppose from this description
that the images were essentially illustrations to the lines from the poem, the latter
being the primary focus. However, the twelve snips in order do not correspond to
any single text that Huidobro wrote, and there is a third, definitely surrealist
element involved, which is a number of hypertext links from words on most of the
pages to sites that are not obviously related to any theme of the page (they may be
related, just not obviously related).

Ian Campbell: Usenet series: Male Cliche

Figure 1.45
Ian Campbell: Usenet series: Male Clich
Ian Campbell is perhaps more interested in junk, debris, garbage (for him, being
Canadian) than in words and texts, but he is also attracted to words when they are
thrown away. So old Usenet postings get laid over rusting steel plate or old, torn
underwear and buzz words and words of art are sprinkled about. Campbell actually
began with pairs of words like male cliche, ran them by a Usenet search engine, and
harvested the posts the engine turned up. He then presumably gave them their
material form on various kinds of discarded paper and with various fonts,
emphasizing their already used up quality. In more recent works, he has been using
the HTML browser apparatus of "alt tag" tool-tip windows and messages in the
status bar that cause words to appear as you mouse over his images, so that the
words are not physically next to the things that trigger them in the image, but are
"released" by touching the things. In his recent "Dross" these devices produce two
short strings of words when either of two trigger panels is touched; the words
include a goodly number of nonsense words and strings and cannot be semantically
connected to the images, for the images are not readily recognizable as familiar
objects. They exude a strong physical presence because they are brightly lighted
and photographed very close up in hard focus; we just don't know what they are
fragments of, and so cannot summon up much of the cultural code about them. We
will discuss his more interactive work in the Collage chapter (3.4).

Data 1
Figure 1.46
Data 1

Wired The "Data" set of pages from Wired is built on lines from an article about a
Seattle company that recovers old email, even deleted email. The lines seem
rewritten over themselves, and the graphic represents old data that has been
rewritten over many backups. This pair of graphics give strong support to the claim
that images excel at representing chaos. The line in "Data 1," "Backups containing
millions of email messages are the digital equivalent of formaldehyde," offers a
simile which is the basis of the green liquid look with its bit of magnified mosquito
or crane fly in it.

Data 2
Figure 1.47
Data 2
Turning the page, the color changes to fiery red and hotter yellow, to a lake of fire or
furnace with old disks, a key, some more crane fly wing, numbers and labels. The
text says explicates the simile: "a medium where nothing decays." The fire could be
taken as what puts companies in the hot seat, but it can also attract traditional
connotations of Hell, the place where the fire of torment burns unconsuming and
nothing is forgotten or forgiven. For me, seeing a sort of doll's face or mask in the
fire invites this human association with the digital eternally unforgotten and is much
more powerful than fragments of email memos would be. This I should add carries
the significance of the graphic far into a spiritual dimension that has little to do with
the content of the article, which mostly turns on CYA for corporations. If the reader
turns to the indicated page and begins to read the article, she likely will be
disappointed by the absence of metaphysical grandeur. Which is to say that the
artist takes the lines out of their verbal context and indeed out of the context of the
article and recontextualizes them, composing a visual meditation upon them. The
new, very strong contexts do not upend or puncture or invert the words; they simply
take them as a point of departure into a parallel realm which corresponds to the
date in a digital backup in a perhaps indeterminable number of ways.

The top screen from Eduardo Navas: Qstory

Figure 1.48
home.earthlink.net/~navasse/ Qstory/once.html
Eduardo Navas, the author of "The Quixote" In all of these instances of text-inimage, the relation is unstable insofar as one alternates between reading text and

viewing image, with neither illustrating nor explaining the other. They do not
necessarily compete with each other for interpretive mastery, except insofar as they
compete for "real estate" on the screen or page. Most of the instances of text in
these examples are relatively brieffragments, in some casesand it would seem
that they compete with themselves as visual figure and as connected text. An
interesting way to resolve this competition can be seen at the web site linked from
the screen capture at the left. The site is Eduardo Navas' "edition" of Borges' short
tale "Pierre Menard: The Author of The Quixote." It is made up of nine screens plus a
tenth floating window. For each screen, the window displays part of the text of the
story in both Spanish and English, sentence by sentence. Each screen contains two
sentences from the section of the story in the window, in both Spanish and English,
montaged over the background in large, colored fonts. The background contains an
image of an illustrated Spanish edition of Don Quixote (different for each page) and
a smallish graphic that links off site to targets whose connection to the theme of the
page is extremely obscure. (Here the image is a little movie of surf and the link is to
a Surfing Cam site which itself links to various surfing cameras around the world.) In
this way, various sentences are both made part of the visual design of a page (a
sort of poster, as it were) and yet can still be read as part of the connected text, so
a part of their own illustration. Even in their large, poster-panel form, the sentences
also insist on their being text by reminding us they are words of one language along
with their equivalent words in another. This is just the sort of tension between word
as visual figure and word as meaning that Johanna Drucker finds to be core of early
modern typographic art:

This typographic work embodied and manifested a complex attitude toward the
materiality of visual and verbal aspects of signification--one in which there was a
continual interplay of reading and seeing, linguistic referential functions and visual
phenomenological apparence[sic], as well as traces of social context and historical
production evidenced in materiality. (Visible, p. 89).
It was this very multi-modal quality that caused this experimental typographic art to
fall out of favor with Greenbergian High Modernists and that is found once again in
net.art.

Jody Zellen: GhostCity and Rooftops: urban (s)pacing

Figure 1.49
Jody Zellen: GhostCity and Rooftops: urban (s)pacing
Jody Zellen has focused her sizeable body of on- and off-line work on the experience
of the urban street and urban life, which is for her first of all that of fragmentation:

incomplete takes of things and texts which are interrupted before we can fully
recognise and integrate them into a world. Her style for conveying this
fragmentariness is not the classic one of collage with its torn and cut images and
texts interrupting each other, once quite popular as a way of representing the rush
and jumble and distraction of urban life, but rather that of a grid made up of
100x100 pixel sections of larger images. These sections are often rotated or
distorted and some are animated gifs that flip through a series of image pieces (at
100 msec a piece) or that change on mouse over. In the grid at the left, the bottom
image is a flipping animation and the four upper images replace on mouse over. So
even this very standard, stable design with centered complete-sentence text is less
fixed than it appears.

Jody Zellen, Book, from GhostCity

Figure 1.50
Jody Zellen, Book, from GhostCity
As we go into the site, however, text also is fragmented, overlaid, and flipped
through in stacks, passing also through states where it is fused with the images in a
single tableau. The animated image at the left epitomizes most of these techniques.
Presented in this way, one might seriously doubt what sort of coherence or
satisfying shape could emerge from GhostCity or Zellen's other, similar works (e.g.
rooftops). After viewing her work for some time, however, one begins to recognize
fragments of text and image and to realize that a great deal of it is recycled, as if
bubbling around in the preconscious and surfacing as half-remembered echoes. At
times the spatial array of words seems like visual poetry ("vizpo"), but as you
assemble the words into sentences, you frequently get rather long, stringy, and
thumping examples of academic prose, as in these two examples:

The narrative of this walking is belied by what we know and yet cannot experience.
As we turn the corner, one object disappears around the next corner. The sides of
the street conspire against us. The walkers of the city travel at different speeds.

The alienated city: a space where people map their positions within the urban
totality in which they find themselves only to disappear.

These texts, which appear as continuous strings or sequences in rooftops, furnish a

few words here and there in many places in GhostCity, so that the effect is that of
alluding to one's former commentaries and mutterings.

An obvious extension of Zellen's urban vision is into the sound fragments that are
so often part of representations of the City, and indeed, she has just recently posted
her first piece about urban soundDisembodied Voicesabout cell phone
conversations in public with non-present people. Done in Flash, this piece has
several images of public spaces aswarm with people, who, when clicked on, speak
into their cell phones. The site begins after the fashion of GhostCity, trying to
subject the viewer to an experience of many voices speaking many languages in a
black space with only icons floating in, but then it rather surprisingly begins to
return us to the body. On the later pages, we can control hearing the conversation
by clicking on a figure in the scene and the space remains that of the large public
spaces that we view as if from fixed cameras.

Figure 1.51
Screencap from Miranda and Neumark's "Machine Organs"
Dynamic textmontage:
Thus far, we have been thinking of text as an element in a static visual composition;
one of the most attractive affordances of Macromedia Flash, however, has proved to
be its easy animation of lines and blocks of text; a second attraction has been the
easy synching of sound with scripted animation, and the ability to play concurrent
tracks on any platform and browser. Flash has become the on-line multimedia
medium par excellence: in the first four issues of Ctheory Multimedia, for example,
the great majority employ Macromedia Flash or Shockwave. The fourth issue of
Ctheory Multimedia, for example contains Zellen's "Disembodied Voices," which
uses Flash; Issue 2 contains Maria Miranda and Norie Neumark's "Machine Organs"
(Figure 1.51), where words and phrases write over the images of computer-organs
accompanied by distinctly "bioform" sounds and a montage of voices, whispers, and
noiseslest, as it were, that we in our rush to virtual life in virtual space forget "the
meat." The work is thus a visual-textual-aural metaphor identifying the computer's
vital processes in terms of "our own." The great popularity of this software can be
seen also in the "Congruence" branch of The Cauldron and Net and in the winners
and honorable mentions of recent net.art competitions.

Figure 1.52
Section of one screen of Jess Loseby's "Textual Tango"
Jess Loseby's "Textual Tango" (snapshot in Figure 1.52) repaints the screen over and
over with two texts of personal ads and lines from others. One speaker is
represented in red, one in green, but as the flow of text continues, other texts enter,
disintegrated, and drift or fade away, only to be replaced with others asserting the
desire to "find someone." This cascade mounts to two climaxes of speed and
abundance synced to a voice (Sting?) singing "Roxanne," a song originally written
by Sting and performed by him and The Police, but featured recently in the film
Moulin Rouge with Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman. The singer is a man who
loves a prostitute and is promising her she need not go out into the street anymore
a stern, if not perhaps entirely excessive comment on "the discourse of personal
ads." This counterpointing use of a song is quite similar to Young-Hae Chang
Industries' use of "C-Line Woman" discussed in Chapter Five, 3.

It is interesting that both of these examples work by assembling associations and

connotations of images, texts, and sound, where no one mode is dominant. Clearly
neither statement-plus-illustration or image-plus-commentary apply; rather, we find
the incessant switching between modes and media that seems highly characteristic
of contemporary net.art.

literaturetranssm_200.jpg (103K)
Figure 1.53
Lit box, British Library
Post Script

The John Ritblat Gallery in the new British Library houses and displays many of the
Library's oldest books and most precious manuscripts (under glass, to be sure). The
gallery is decorated with a number of free-standing glass boxes illuminated from
various directions and with bits of text and diagrams drawn on the glass in white.
The image to the left is of the Literature box; through it can be seen other boxes as
well. On the Lit box are words and even stanzas of a poem (Wilfred Owens' Dulce
et Decorum Est). The look is of text montaged into pure space. The materiality of
the texts are foregrounded by the variety of scripts (printing, cursive hand, courierlooking monospace), as is appropriate in a gallery celebrating works of scribal

writing and early print, but the mixture of pure space and material hands displayed
on illuminated glass surfaces (two-sided boxes) seems to carry the look of
textmontage on the screen to a final abstractionthe homage of contemporary
infoart to its forebears in monasteries and print

1.5 Word-Image Chains

Thus far this chapter has dealt with relations of text and image on a single screen or
page; with on-line Web display, a third dimension of sequence comes into play and
allows words and images to be anchors of links to other words and images,
sometimes in chains of word-image-image-word- etc. When such chains are the
structural backbone of a site, an easy equivalence as anchor and target arises.
Hypertext linking becomes an image of signification (i.e. clicking on this gives/takes
you to that) in a way that levels the difference in mode of signification which we and
Magritte have attempted to keep distinct. One has the feeling of manipulating a
language that does deserve the term "imagetext."

Joseph Squier: Urban Diary Page 1 (1995)

Figure 1.52
Joseph Squier: Urban Diary Page 1 (1995)
In this section, we will look at two quite early pieces by Web artists (Joseph Squier
and Carol Flax) and two more recent ones (Carmin Karasic and Liz Miller) who
extend the interactivity of early work with JavaScript.

The fragment at the left is the upper left-hand corner of page one of Joseph Squier's
Web classic Urban Diary. (Its classic status is assured by its inclusion in the Walker
Art Gallery collection.) The core of this work is a sequence of eight such (full) pages
which link each to the next. The pages are snapshots of somewhat rumpled and
soiled three-hole-punched cross section paper on which some words have been
typed and hand written, and to which various images are attached. Most of the
pages are dated in a November (no year), but Page 7 is dated in April. Although the
pages are linked serially, there is no narrative ordering one can discern, for they
seem to be self-contained diary pages. Whether they have been selected from a
more complete set cannot be determined. They are, he tells us, a found object of
which we know nothing. He gives us certain themes to get started making sense of

the fragments ("control, faith, desire, and obsession") and the navigational tip that
the pictures and images, as well as the circled items on one page of numbers, are
link anchors. The "technical note" spells out for us many things that now would be
taken for granted, suggesting a date of making of very early graphic Web (1995).
The words, snapshots, lists, calendar pages, jottings--all are signifiers, but their
meanings are known only to the absent consciousness that collected them. (One
should not take this display of Modernist impersonality as Squier's distinctive
approach: his most famous Web work is Life With Father, a very personal,
expressionist settling of accounts.)

link map of Urban Diary

Figure 1.53
Link Map of Urban Diary
Urban Diary has always seemed very rich and complex to me, going always in
multiple directions, but in analyzing its link structure, I see that it has the structure
of a wagon wheel with a central entry point with paths (spokes) to the individual
pages and links around the rim from one page to the next. This is a basic hypertext
structure, very easy to navigate. The richness and complexity come from the
invitation to interpret all these "clues."

Carol Flax: Home is Not What You Imagine It to Be

Figure 1.54
Carol Flax: Home is Not What You Imagine It to Be
The thumbnail to the left is the "home page" image for another classic piece of net
art by Carol Flax dealing with adoption. The image is itself an unstable mixture of
text fragments (which appear in fuller form later) and an image of a young girl,
presumably adopted. It is also the anchor linking to another image (perhaps of the
girl) overwritten by text and surrounded with fragments of the word nurture. This in
turn links to a page just of the words "I am illegitimate" repeated four times. One of
the illegitimates links to an animation of the words "out of wedlock" which collapse
inwardly and fall into a heap, but also link to a page of words (etc.). Flax likes to
make animations of words fading, collapsing, or disintegrating. She also does this
with images, but dissolving is particularly striking with text, which is presumed
permanent and unchanging. The site is made up of such chains (and there are
cross-links and returns). The initial "Home" image is also the center of another page
with the caption "what makes you think you've come home?" This recapitulates the

experience of adoptees who learns at some point that home is not what they think it
is.

Carmin Karasic: With Liberty and Justice for All (1998)

Figure 1.55
Carmin Karasic: With Liberty and Justice for All (1998)
The fading aside, the images and pages of these early works are stable and can be
revisited when you will. Nor do they load other pages or change without your
clicking. With the availability of usable Javascript, however, writers enjoyed greatly
enhanced ability to make self-modifying pages, and a prize-winning trend has been
to exploit these powers. We will look at two pieces from the 1999 Digital context
sponsored by Arts and Science Collaborations, Inc. (ASCI). The thumbnail to the left
is one from many "family album" pictures used in Carmin Karasic's With Liberty and
Justice for All, a recollection of growing up Black in the Navy in mid-twentiethcentury.

Carmin Karasic: Opening text-panel for WLAJFA

Figure 1.56
Carmin Karasic: Opening text-panel for WLAJFA
From the moment the page opens by slowly running up the window frame like a flag
and then sprouts three satellite windows, two with pictures on the right and one
with text on the left, we realize we are entering a scripted world which may be
active in various ways even without our clicking. The text window (on the left)
provides a certain narrative and table-of- contents effect, since clicking on the one
or two anchor words in each panel either advance the text-story or change one or
both of the picture windows. (Online, this is a true text panel: the somewhat uneven
hand-written look of the text is produced by MS Handwriting font, which is found on
many Ms-Windows machines. ) This panel grabs the window focus every five
seconds so that it insistently pops up even if buried by other opened ones. It on the
whole controls the two "albums." The upper album frame is labelled The American
Dream and offers a series of images from the media, often ironic in relation to the
text and the other window and even to the preceding or following Dream image. But
the American Dream window also has images of stirring moments for Blacks of the
period and also images of the horrors of fire-bombed churches and lynchings. These

last images tend to revert fairly quickly to the preceding, usually commercial
images of "house beautiful." One can force changes by clicking in the Dream
window, even in the lower window ("My Life") which is largely filled with snapshots.
Many of the images in these windows have text in them as well, so that the
distinction of text v. image is neutralized. The main focus of attention is what the
links do, not whether they are text, or image, or image-with-text.

Formally, it is a scripted world; in content, it is a world polarized by race (and

secondarily, gender). So we have another site committed to "showing the
contradictions" which it does by juxtaposition, sometimes side-by-side and
sometimes by sequence (as in the slipping back of the Dream images from violence
to dream house decor). The double toy flags, the one switching white to black and
inverting the blue field to its complementary green, require little interpretation as
emblems of the two Americas of race (especially in the light of the words of her
mother which begin the piece), and they appear when the text speaks of saying the
pledge of allegiance in school and in fact displays the text of the pledge. Here
image opposes text, but image can also oppose image, as when the word disobey
loads new images into Dream and also My Life: Dream shows a scene from the
Selma acts of civil disobedience while My Life shows her father's receiving a military
decoration, the fruit of the most literal and explicit obedience. Thus both words and
images are capable of expressing ideological illusions but also of critiquing these
illusions: neither one is reliably or consistently the truth-teller.

Although there are contradictions aplenty to be found in With Liberty and Justice for
All, they are not all laid out at once and thrust in your face, as it were. The cards
have been laid out, but most are face down. As we browse and click, we find them
and even though we know they have been laid out exactly for us, we still feel we
are choosing how we experience them, even though they do seem to have
something of a life of their own. That some of the links are words and others are
images does not seem to matter very much, as long as we keep turning the cards
and making sense of what comes up.

Another memoir, quite similar to Karasic's in general outline but strikingly different
in technique, is Colette Gaiter's piece "SPACE/RACE" published in the e-journal Bad
Subjects in 1997. 17 Gaiter also uses family snapshots and some of her own
collages to evoke growing up Black in the 1960s (in the service) but a reflective,
essayistic (and linear) text predominates.

Liz Miller: Moles: a Web Narrative

Figure 1.57
moles.node.net (1999)
To browse the next site, the viewer has to be even more inventive in finding and
synthesizing cues. Moles is multi-media self-examination," Liz Miller says, calling it
an autobiographical narrative, which is promising a lot for a site that opens with a
black screen and seven thumbnail images which align themselves on the left to
make up a table of contents. Each of these if touched fills the main window with a
large version of itself partitioned into three sections. The central, slender section of
each is the clickable part and activates reloading with a bit of narrative text
appearing, usually over image and sometimes as a mouse-over with one of the
moles. One of the seven strands has some "refresh" auto-loading, but the general
mode rewards engagements with the mouse in various ways: the effect is
sometimes of sliding panels that the viewer must pull back to read the text behind
them, sometimes of painting the screen with the mouse to trigger mouse-overs, and
often of touching the moles with the cursor to trigger text or jump to the next
screen. The bits of story are there, linked to the moles, waiting to be released.

In case one wonders what an artist does after completing such an intensely selffocused work, Miller's most recent project worked with residents in the Parkville
Senior Center in Hartford, Conn. to construct a site showing how their community
had changed over the last century. 18

Liz Miller: Moles: the letter

Figure 1.58
Moles: the letter
The seven narrative segments are not in simple chronological order, but do advance
a theme of growing up, leaving home, discovering attraction to women, wanting to
and finally telling her parents in a letter of her lesbian identification. This screen
capture illustrates how this all works as technique and content:

The gray text-over in monospace type can be readily made out as the text of the
letter she has been struggling to write. The cursor is touching a mole on her thigh
and triggering the appearance of the text on the calf of the leg. This is imagetext

and even pushes the notions of text and image beyond the static page or screen
into a stream of interchange.

Shelly Jackson: The Body

Figure 1.59
Shelly Jackson: The Body
Moles brings to mind the other quasi-autobiographical site built around the image of
the author's body, namely "thebody" which we looked at in the section on maps.
Shelly Jackson's site opens with a drawing of her naked body which a imagemap
and map of the site, which become a hypertext web of annotations on various parts
and features of her body. Most of the other pages have drawings, but the top map is
the only image that has link anchors. All of the other anchors in the web are text.
Though the body map has boxes drawn around parts of it, it is the unifying center of
the site: the text pages are reminiscences about developing body image and sexual
attitudes, along with some leg-pulling and blarney.

With Moles, the image of the body is broken into pieces and does not provide the
unifying center. Her body does not provide a map for the site, and the site does not
appear under a general rubric "a propos my body." Miller observes:

The site has a clinical aesthetic look, typical of autopsy records, x-rays, or other
medical procedures that fragment the body as a part of the diagnostic process.
One point she is underlining is that moles such as she has bear watching for signs of
dangerous changes, a theme of the piece that even provides its concluding
segment, built around a scar on her knee that is the lingering effect of a medical
excision of one such mole. But a second sense of self-examination is apposite as
well: the piece is housed at two different servers, one of which is contrition.net.
contrition.net offers other pieces by Miller as well as a substantial discussion of
Catholic doctrine concerning contrition. What unifies Moles is not an image but the
narrative of attempting to prevent her sexuality from separating her from her
parents. The attempt fails, as her mother cannot respond to her letter disclosing the
facts.

Andi Freeman and Doll Yoko: Death of the Zombie Princess

Figure 1.60
Doll Yoko and Andi Freeman, Princess Zombie
The final piece is a fairly small web of about 20 pages, 6 of which are text; several
of the remaining images include words and phrases. The images are all imagemaps
with one to three hot areas, many of which are eyes, faces, and lips of figures (in
one case an ear). There is a sense of physical transgression and violence in the
piece, as there is in most of Doll Yoko's pieces, here focused on activating or
releasing what the eye sees or lips say (or do, in one case spew or drool) by
touching it with your "finger tip." Once you get past poking someone's eye to get
another screenful of text or image, you join the game and begin to size up the next
screen to guess which spots she has made hot. And, it turns out, a number of the
words included in the images are hot (though of course they are not underlined as
the link anchors are in the pure text pages). This is discussed further in 5.2.

In his little book on Magritte (1973), Michel Foucault lays it down as axiomatic that
images and text, as rival semiotic systems, cannot coexist in a single work; one will
try to subdue the other. In this chapter we have certainly seen cases where their
difference has been mobilized to make a point, or the tension between them seems
to provide a good bit of the pleasure and interest, but this section makes it clear
that this difference can also be neutralized or ignored. When word and image
become digital and can be marked up as anchors or targets of links, they become
functionally quite alike: they become the hot spots or connecting points that
connect pages into a network. In turning that way, they turn away from making
representations of the world, and hence the different ways they do that is of little
concern. Digital words and images have after all a common mode of material
existence, and that mode is not one of paint or ink or emulsion, canvas or paper or
plastic; it is one on the spinning platters of hard drives and the memory registers of
ram; it is those alternations in magnetic polarity and in electrical charge that we
represent as strings of 0 and 1.