TEXT BASED ART — Text as art, and in art, has an art history of sufficient depth so as to be beyond the scope of this short article here. For now, this article makes only a narrow observation to be integrated into the continuing history of text art in further posts:
What if an artist uses text not as language, nor as an abstraction of language, nor even to explore the boundary line between the intelligible and unintelligible — the line between the cognitively substantive and semantic, on the one hand, and the visually and conceptually abstract, on the other hand? Is there another use for text in art? Stated differently, what if the use of text by an artist is not to serve the function of substantive meaning, or linguistic communication, but rather to serve an intention of a different inquiry — the rules of the most basic and fundamental geometric marks on surface — the line and the curve.
Text-based art as rules for geometric (grid) paintings with words. Figurative formalism based on the rules of how we must shape letters? — Letters that can be reduced to the same four types of stencil cut-outs?
Artist Adam Daley Wilson’s conceptual works manifest almost exclusively in text — text that, for him, by intention, always has substantive meaning, whether ultimately legible or whether ultimately, by overwriting, impossible to read.
But it also appears that his text works, as he matures from emerging artist to living artist, are also about something else — something apart from their layers of material (their overwriting), their layers of meaning (their narratives, their arguments, their propositions), and their layers of references (sometimes up to fifty, across disciplines and fields from art histories of times and cultures, to contemporary events, to the sciences, to political histories, to philosophies across continents and cultures, to natural laws, and more). In other words, they also appear to be experiments — inquiries — in creating visual works comprised solely of basic — elemental — lines and curves. Placed on the canvas not by the artist’s intention, not by the hand or the brushstroke, but solely by the rules, in a given human language, of how lines and curves must exist and relate.
An example. The lines in the capital letter “E” in the English language follow rules — rules grounded in simple Euclidean geometry: Lines parallel to each other and perpendicular to the root, or stem. Another example. The curves in the letter “S” in the English language are dictated as to their shape by the rules governing their diameters, circumferences, and symmetry. Which in turn are grounded in geometry as well. Virtually all letters in the English language are similar; they manifest rules, even laws, sounding in another language, math, specifically dating back to Euclid (thus Euclidean geometry) during the times of Ancient Greece. Adam Daley Wilson argues, through his personal writing system works, that the rules of these letters, in turn, can provide a system for curves and lines that, despite origins based in rules of construction, may result, through bending those rules, in visual works that become fully abstract.
This seemingly abstract work is also comprised entirely of text; it also forms a brief narrative; and each line follows the rules for lines and curves that letters in the English language generate.
Can the creation of conceptually and visually abstract artworks transcending rules and laws of construction and language as to their lines and curves? Can text-based art transcend the semantic purpose of text, and instead be a slingshot to lines and curves not seen, not overwritten, not overlapped before? Can the furious scrawling and scribbling of the letters that constitute the English language — any language — have both semantic meaning and abstract meaning at the same time, finding just enough adherence to the lines and curves dictated by the terms of text-based art? It seems increasingly clear that this may be one way to understand the evolving nature of some of Daley Wilson’s text-based artworks, as an inquiry as to letters — text — language — is not just for meaning but for providing an order, even a mathematical order, a natural order, to abstract curves and lines.