Kim Dhillon

With the rise of the digital age, the materiality of the linguistic signifier offers artists today something different than it did in the 1960s. Since the late 1990s, there has been a proliferation of works by contemporary artists in the UK and US that I refer to as text art, made by artists such as Fiona Banner, Janice Kerbel, Shannon Ebner, Pavel Büchler, or Paul Elliman. Part of my original contribution to knowledge is to explore the ways contemporary artists use text, to interrogate how this is different from work seen before, and to question the demands it places on the audience who reads it, as well as the challenges it places on the act of reading an artwork made of words. The literature emphasises a turn away from looking or the visual to a turn towards reading which occurred in conceptualism (Kotz, 2007; Blacksell, 2013). I explore the binary of this turn in the conceptual art period of 1966-1973 and suggest that artists are engaging with text today not only to challenge how an audience encounters written language as art, but the very act of reading text in a digital world. My thesis makes a feminist art historical analysis to explore how such contemporary works are being positioned curatorially in survey exhibitions of text in/as art in the past ten years, and argues the importance of feminist artists such as Mary Kelly, Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, and Adrian Piper to the development of the use of text in contemporary art.