Ayton Ayre: Text-based Art

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  • Artistic Murder at the Cathedral

    The Canterbury Cathedral graffiti controversy.


    The ancient walls of Canterbury Cathedral are currently the hosts to an exhibition of art in the form of graffiti-style lettering. The lettering isn’t actually graffiti in that isn’t created by painting directly onto the stone walls of the building, it isn’t created by a bunch of dispossessed youths with time on their hands, and it isn’t illegal It is in fact printed on sheets which are then attached to the walls as transfers using a method that will cause no damage to the building.

    The graffiti is in the form of questions that people may want to ask God, such as “Are you there?” and “Where does love come from?”

    The exhibition is dividing opinion, and I can understand why.

    I think that one of the main reasons why people may find the exhibition offensive is the simple fact that it takes the form of graffiti. As I implied above, graffiti is generally a form of vandalism or violation, and that association is bound to be carried through to the work, which must therefore imply violation of the cathedral. What’s more, because the cathedral is a religious building the graffiti can be interpreted as a form of desecration of a holy site. Graffiti on the walls of a railway station is bad enough, but graffiti inside a church is beyond the pale.

    Maybe the church authorities are graffiti is the art form of the downtrodden and the dispossessed

    I suppose that the original thinking behind the concept of the exhibition is that it makes a cathedral “relevant” to the modern age and particularly to the youth of the modern age.

    Unless they were religiously inclined, very few members of “the youth” would ever dream of going into a church. Churches are dull places (to the youth) and they hold very little of interest to them.

    Graffiti is by definition an edgy, anti-establishment, usually illegal youth-centric art form. Put some of it in the cathedral and the youth will come to look at it. That, I assume, is the theory. They may only come to look at it for a laugh, but by stepping over the threshold of the cathedral they’ll have made that first big step in stopping the cathedral being seen as a forbidden, alien and boring zone. Once they are inside the walls of the cathedral the power of the architecture may even encourage the incubation of a nascent transcendent experience.

    For me there are a few problems with the exhibition on an artistic level. Art is generally meant to move you in one emotional way or another, with religious art specifically being meant to move you spiritually. Most religious art is refined, as befits art that is created in the service of religion. Like many people I am often moved by the architecture and art and a feeling of transcendence when I enter a church or a cathedral, and I say this as a committed atheist.

    The graffiti art in Canterbury Cathedral is however anything but refined and transcendent. I get it that the graffiti art isn’t meant for people who’s minds are mature enough to appreciate refinement or transcendence yet ~ it’s probably meant for unpolished and callow youth. The cathedral authorities are probably employing a bit of condescension somewhere in that justification.

    Another way to look at it is that the graffiti art isn’t chiefly aimed at young people at all. Maybe it’s aimed at everybody as a way to signal how the church is “engaged” in the real world, to show how it’s not a fusty old institution dominated by archaic attitudes. Maybe it’s a stab at rebranding.

    Part of this engagement in the real world can be seen in the manner in which the questions that form the content of the graffiti were gathered. The questions are the result of workshops held by the artist Alex Vellis who developed the exhibition. The workshops involved consulting with “marginalised communities, including the Punjabi, black and brown diaspora, neurodivergent individuals, and the LGBTQIA+ population”. In the art world several of these marginalised communities are actually far from marginalised: I am a frequent visitor to the major public art galleries in London, and for all of the current decade most of the temporary exhibitions in these galleries have overwhelmingly featured, to the point of tedium, the work of marginalised groups.

    So it seems to me that Canterbury Cathedral is to some extent using the “marginalised communities” tag as a way of validating the exhibition and of insulating it from criticism. Interestingly, Canterbury Cathedral’s own website describes the people who collaborated in the project as “ordinary people” (perhaps to imply a form of Everyman) in one paragraph and as “marginalised communities” in the next. Vellis himself is a member of the LGBTQIA+ community.

    The questions that made it onto the walls of the cathedral actually don’t seem to have any particular special relevance to marginalised communities, and are generally rather pedestrian everyday theological questions of the “Why are we here?” variety, so I’m again wondering why marginalised communities were specifically involved other than as a way of validating the work or as a sign of gesture politics.

    A few final points about the artistic quality of the exhibition.

    Some of the lettering in the graffiti is written in styles that are very hard to decipher, probably rendering it illegible to many of the people who try to read it – people such as old people and people for whom English isn’t their first language (such as immigrants and foreign tourists).

    A close look at the graffiti will reveal that the lettering isn’t hand-written, as it would be with true graffiti: it’s created using a typeface on a computer. You can see this because in any given piece of graffiti every instance of the same letter is the same. This artwork was created by a graphic 

    designer sitting at a computer on a desk; the very antithesis of what real graffiti’s all about.

    I’ll leave the very last word to the creator of the project, poet Alex Vellis,, who wrote the following very poetic phrase on Instagram in response to a few people (called J D Vance and Elon Musk) who criticised the exhibition:

    “… all I can tell you is that @jdvance and @elonmusk both give off small dick energy.”

  • What is text-based art?

    what is text based art?

    What is text-based art?

    It’s hard to define without being tautological.

    Text-based art is art that’s based on text or in which text is a very significant feature.

    Let’s concentrate on two dimensional art for now – that’s art on paper or canvas and that can perhaps be put into a frame and hung on the wall. What makes a piece of paper that’s covered in text and that’s framed and hung on the wall a piece of text-based art while a passage of text on a piece of paper that’s in a book isn’t a piece of tax based art (unless of course the book involved is a so-called artist book)? And what about a page book that’s cut out and framed and hung on a wall – is that a piece of text-based art?

    By some definitions of the word art, an item becomes art due to the fact that it is created specifically as art, so for instance, handwritten text placed in a frame and mounted on a wall is by definition art while if the same words were printed in a book the text would be there purely to transmit the meanings of the words in a utilitarian way, so it’s not art.

    So think of it this way, text in a book is no more text-based art than a photograph of a piece of art hanging on the wall is a work of art. So a photograph of the Mona Lisa is not a work of art, it’s just a recording of a work of art.

  • Why does text-based art use the styles it uses?

    The look of text-based art

    Contemporary text-based art often eschews the craftsmanship of more traditional text based forms. You won’t see much calligraphy in contemporary text-based art.

    You will find high levels of craftsmanship and precisely executed lettering in places, such as when the text is chiselled into stone, but such examples are I a minority.

    Contemporary text art is usually executed in a deliberately craftless style, including semi-legible scrawls, casual hand writing, obviously hand-drawn lettering, stencilling and anonymously mechanical typing.

    Why is this?

    It could be that the artist wants to employ an approach that looks deeply personal and spontaneous (especially in the case of the scrawls and the hand-written text).

    Maybe the artist wants to distance the work from too much evidence of human craft (especially in the case of mechanical/digital text). This may be seen as giving the meaning of the words all of the attention rather than having any distraction in the appreciation of the lettering.

    Some text-based art uses the device of moving from one line to the next with no regard to where in the word the line ends, thus breaking words randomly. Is this a way of signalling that there is no design in the text, or is it a way of actually screaming out ‘Look at this design idea!’.

    One possible reason for low craft values in some text-based art is to signal urgency in the text. The artist has to get the message out, and it has to be got out there NOW! Or at least it has to look that way.

    Another possibility is that some text artists may have relatively low craft skills. Maybe some of them can’t draw very well – you don’t need to be particularly skilled at drawing to write text, so that isn’t a problem. Play to your strengths.

    Quite a common feature of contemporary text-based art is a certain crudeness of tone – ‘If you don’t like me, fuck off’ or a forcefulness of message – “Don’t let the buggers grind you down’. Those aren’t words you can write in calligraphic curlicues. They need something that’s robust and no-nonsense.

    On top of that, I expect that the sort of person who wants to make robust no-nonsense statements as text artists isn’t the sort of person who would want to spend time perfecting their calligraphy skills. I suspect that the art of calligraphy requires a calm and patient personality – one ill-suited to the making of loud proclamations.

  • Is graffiti a form of text-based art?

    text-based art graffiti street art
    According to my definitions below, this person isn’t producing graffiti but street art.

    Is graffiti a form of text art?

    Before I put down my thoughts on the subject maybe I’d better define what I think of as graffiti first.

    Definitions are always a bit blurry round the edges, but as a rule I define graffiti as generally being the (usually) illegal application of a painted design to a public-facing surface that isn’t supposed to have such designs applied to it. Things like walls and underground trains. It’s usually applied furtively and quickly and as a deliberate act of defacement.

    I’m not including permitted “street art” which is often applied to surfaces with permission and which can take a long time to execute, often with the artist who has created the work being clearly visible to the public while at work (and usually surrounded by an arsenal of spray cans in different colours).

    In this definition of graffiti, people who create street art consider themselves as artists, while the producers of graffiti don’t consider themselves to be artists. Rebels maybe, artists no.

    In the photo above the wall is covered in street art, not graffiti. The wall was specially constructed specifically for the purpose of having street art applied to it, which is about as un-graffiti as you can get. Maybe the tags down the left-hand end of the wall are graffiti, applied by apprentice rebels before they graduate to targeting walls that they shouldn’t. The text in the street art section (which I think can safely be called text-based art) is styled in traditional street art/graffiti typography. The photo, by the way, shows a welcome example of a female street artist.

    Graffiti usually comes in the form of text or text-like shapes. Occasionally it has a pictorial element to it – penises are a common feature, which may be a clue to the preoccupations and demographic of the people who usually produce graffiti.

    The statistically not insignificant number of penises that appear in graffiti are a good indicator of the subversive nature of graffiti. Generally speaking there are very few penises on display in public spaces although they are quite common in art galleries (which are obviously public spaces themselves, but ones that are cordoned off from accidental viewing). The only penises that come to mind that you may encounter on the street are those of Antony Gromley in his sculptures, which seem to have escaped from the art galleries.

    Text-based art, street art, graffiti, vandalism.
    Graffiti on a Victorian building in a London park.

    So, using my definition of graffiti, is graffiti a form of text-based art? It’s usually text-based, but is it art?

    I suppose you need to define art.

    One definition is that art is what is created by artists. That sounds a bit too tautological for my liking.

    What about trying the definition that art is what is created with the specific intention of it being art, whether the creator considers themself an artist or not? I think that may be better, as it defines the art first, not in terms of the person who created it.

    Using that definition a person who produces graffiti and who doesn’t think that that graffiti is art isn’t producing art, they are just producing a territorial marker or whatever.

    However, graffiti is deliberately created to express something, otherwise its creator wouldn’t have bothered creating it, and that sounds very much like one of the definitions of art to me, so maybe the creators of graffiti are actually artists even though they wouldn’t use the term themselves.

    The definitions are all very slippery.

    Maybe just because graffiti isn’t particularly well executed (especially in its more basic and vandalistic form) doesn’t exclude graffiti from being art, it just makes it not very good art.

    Maybe it’s a form of low art, and maybe it’s below the level at which it’s practical to call it art, because if you call all human creative activity art then practically everything that people do can be defined as art and the term becomes meaningless.

    Bearing in mind that some text-based art is very crudely executed however, the act of defining anything is a thankless task.

  • Why is some text-based art so badly written?

    Text-based art: why is it sometimes so messy?

    Why is some text-based art so badly written?

    Scrawly writing and spelling mistakes are common qualities in text-based art.

    Why would that be?

    Maybe it’s to indicate that the text isn’t mediated by the boring, rational, non-creative parts of the brain that strive for order and neatness, that it’s 100% impulsive, that it has bypassed the deadening effects of the higher brain functions.

    The messiness of text-based art is meant to convey emotion rather than the rationality which is closer to the inherent qualities of text as a medium.

    One of the ironies behind messily written text-based art is that the artist is possibly injecting the messiness into their writing in a conscious, stylised or mannered way, almost as far removed from unmediated spontaneity as you can get: “Which word should I put the spelling mistake in? Which letter should I make randomly upper case?”.

    That’s what I do when I work in a scrawly style anyway.

    In some ways messy text-based art exhibits a cousinship to automatic writing. With automatic writing the idea is that the person doing the writing isn’t in control of what is being written: that the writer is merely a conduit for some other force or entity that has entered the writer’s being and is guiding the writer’s hand. Automatic writing can therefore be rather messily executed because the person who is doing the actual writing isn’t 100% in control of their actions (and maybe also because the inter-dimensional connection with the other-worldly force or entity which is guiding the hand is a bit crackly). Of course for this to be valid you have to believe in automatic writing, which I don’t.

  • Does the saying “A picture tells a thousand words” apply to text art?

    Does the saying “A picture tells a thousand words” apply to text art?

    Maybe not.

    A picture normally doesn’t tell you directly what it’s about, so lots of words can be written on the subject of what it may be about. Many artists may state that they don’t actually know what their art is about, but there are many critics who will write at great length about the art’s meaning as they see it.

    Text art seems to bypass this by literally making a statement. So a five word piece of text art can be said to literally tell five words rather than a thousand.

    If only it was that simple.

  • Is text based art any good?

    Tricky one.

    Here’s a bit of text based art.

    Text-based art

    It’s drawn in a quite crude style. That indicates that it’s based on raw, unmediated emotions, which is a high scoring feature when it coms to art. It lacks depth, nuance, ambiguity and technical skill though, which are also high scorers in the art world.

    So maybe text based art tends to be produced by artists who lack depth, nuance or technical skill, so they sensibly avoid creating art that needs those qualities (just as an artist who can’t capture a human likeness would shy away from portraiture). They may or may not possess raw, unmediated emotions, depending on what type of text based art they produce.

    In text art the message in the words is important. In the example above the artist is saying “Look – I’m not a bigot”. The audience sees the work and thinks “That’s good, because I’m not a bigot either. This artist is a good person whom I identify with”. If the words in the piece had been “Sod off you immigrant” the typical art gallery audience would probably reject the piece altogether, dismissing it as not a piece of art but as the ranting of a bigot (and as I’ve just mentioned, art audiences like to think that they’re not bigots).

    This shows a fundamental difference between text art and other forms of visual art. With landscape painting, for example, the difference between good and bad art is maybe measured in factors such as the subtle depiction in paint of the play of light across a hillside, with text art it’s measured in the message.

  • Is Text Art Art?

    Is text art art? It’s not for me to say.

    If I type the words “Is Text Art Art?” into a piece of written text, as I’ve done here, it’s not art. But if I paint the same words on canvas or construct them out of fluorescent tubing and hang them on a gallery wall they are.

    The image below looks like it might be art to me. It’s a deliberately designed and nicely coloured rendering of the words “Is Text Art Art?”. And it’s in a frame. What more do you want?

    Is text based art art?

    The whole debate may hinge on the concept of context. To go to the go-to example of context in the wider “Is it art?” debate, Marcel Duchamp’s urinal was just a urinal when it was in the shop, but it became a work of art when it was put on a plinth in an art gallery. In the same way words are just words when they are written on the page but they become text art when transferred to an art medium.

    That doesn’t mean it’s good art though. And of course words aren’t necessarily just words when they are written on a page. I think William Shakespeare would have something say about that. (Again I’m using Shakespeare as a go-to, and thus rather clichéd, example. Other writers are available).