Art and text are cousins a long way back. Back, as you can see, to Egyptian hieroglyphics, when text actually was the representation of the object or action described.
Another instance, pointed out by the French novelist Michel Butor in a talk here in Elmira, is one that goes back to Renaissance painting, to the rise of the art star and the importance of his signature in the corner of the painting. In a performative tour de force, Butor went from painting to painting at a local museum, riffing on the signatures of the artists and how essential to each picture each signatures was; if nothing else, essential to its worth.
In the oldest depths of the Louvre Museum, American conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth has installed a single string of neon text that shines in the subterranean gloom like some murky procession of shamed halos filing through purgatory.
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