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.