Erika Grigoravičienė (PDF)
https://doi.org/10.53631/DIS/2014.6.13
Lithuanian art critics have often pointed out the specific relationship between contemporary art and verbal language. However, it has not evolved into a subject for any detailed research. This article deals with texts that accompany, rely on, rule over or comment on images. The texts written by the artists or curators can take on various forms: description, press release, project application and purposive critique. Taking into account the historical context of relations between image and word in art, as well as the syntagmatic and semantic image-text typical of contemporary art (when writing constitutes a part of an artwork and the interaction between text and image is its main subject), the article highlights factors that led to the proliferation of textual supplements, discusses their subsequent emancipation, the critique towards them and their peculiarities and analyses several more interesting examples of an intertextual relationship with a work of art. Commentaries by an artist that become an integral part of her or his works indicate a lack of trust in spectators, critics, or commentators and the urgent will to control the meaning as if any unscheduled meaning was a certain menace for the artist. Fragmented, appropriated and torn out of their original medium, the images of contemporary art essentially require commentaries in a similar way index signs do. Moreover, words empower images to exercise cognitive, critical, social and political functions attributed to them without enough reason.
Keywords: art critics, verbal language, Eglė Kuckaitė, Laisvydė Šalčiūtė