In Euro-American thought, there exists a perceived gap between text and image.[1] To look at this page is to see writing, a text, and a designated means of conveying thoughts through an agreed-upon language. It is not to see an image, or a series of images, arranged to convey these same thoughts. But in both a technical and a historical sense, this gap breaks down and becomes meaningless on closer investigation. Text, in the sense of an alphabet or character system, constitutes only a strictly codified series of images, typically devoid of pictorial content, with the intent that they be combined to form meaning.[2] Text is, essentially, the image reduced to an objective form, closed to interpretations and founded on consistency. Its primary purpose is not aesthetic, but communicative, and this purpose it achieves, in theory, through its own unchanging nature.
Subversions of this necessity are as common as they are varied: across histories and geographies, artists have sought to beautify text, to instill in it aesthetic value, new meanings, and expressions of identity that go far beyond text’s essential language-based purpose. To call it reclamation of text is to imply that the desire to reimagine text was ever gone; it is more apt to refer to these artistic transformations of text as pursuits of balance between textual utility and artistic value. This balance is not the combination of the written word and the image, but the written word as the image, wherein the two are equally poised, inseparable.
In the category of text as image, the calligraphic traditions of East Asia stand as wonderful examples. In Yashima Gakutei’s Fans and Writing Paraphernalia, Japanese calligraphy is incorporated and conflated with the “image” of the print in multiple ways. It is important to note that the assertion of text as image would not have been a surprising or groundbreaking one to the original audience of the print (produced c. 1817). Calligraphy in China and Japan had long been considered a high art, and not just a communicative tool. Calligraphy is taken as both a system of abstract beauty, and a presentation of the artist’s identity[3].
Gakutei’s print is a statement of the unity of text and image. The calligraphy in the background may seem like a separate element, as if the image dominating the print is only illustrating the text, or the text is only a commentary on the image. But the fact that the script is calligraphy (and indeed, highly stylized calligraphy) reasserts the text’s aesthetic importance. The text on the fan, encompassed by the image and stylized, also forwards this message. The first drawn, then printed, pictorial image depicts primarily instruments of calligraphy: paper, an inkstone, a suzuri-bako (writing box), cleverly presenting the link between the pictorial and the calligraphic, the text and the image. It would also have been understood that the tools of writing text and of painting or drawing would have been the same brushes and inks. The entire composition of the print confounds attempts to foreground the text over the image or vice versa. The image and text are on the same visual plane, and the text ultimately is as much the image as the peony on the fan.
Written by James Kelleher, 2014
[1] Asa Briggs, “Word and Image: Changing Patterns of Communications”in “Old Faiths and New Doubts: The European Predicament.” Daedalus, Vol. 108, No. 2, (Spring, 1979), 133.
[2]It is true that some written systems, Chinese for example, are ultimately derived from pictorial representations. However, it is in the abstraction of these representations that any sort of widespread literacy or acceptance. Cf. the development and subsequent popularity of the Small Seal script during China’s Qin dynasty
[3] Zhongshi Ouyang, Chinese calligraphy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 3.
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