8 / Writing

• • Prato Haggadah, Folio 11rUnknown artist, Spain	For the GuggenheimJenny Holzer (American, b. 1950)	Poems with Floral DecorationKojima Soshin (Japanese, 1580–ca. 1656)	Lindisfarne Gospels, fol. 29 (Cotton MS, Nero D.IV)Attr. to Bishop Eadfrith of Lindisfarne (698–721), Northumbria (England)	Venus Table from the Dresden CodexMaya artist, Yucatán Peninsula probably, Mesoamerica	Leaf from a Qur’an ManuscriptUnknown artist, attr. to Spain
    OOFEd Ruscha (American, b. 1937)	Stela of MentuwoserEgyptian artist, Abydos possibly, Northern Upper Egypt	Quotations from Chairman MaoXu Bing (Chinese, b. 1955)	One and Three ChairsJoseph Kosuth (American, b. 1945)	Book Cover for Zang Tumb TumbFilippo Tommaso Marinetti (Italian, 1876–1944)	Graffiti TagFaro (Egyptian, active early 21st century)
    La Trahison des images (Ceci n’est pas une pipe)René Magritte (Belgian, 1898–1967)	Bamboo in the WindWu Zhen (Chinese, 1280–1354)	The Five ScrollsAaron Wolf Herlingen (Austrian, ca. 1700–ca. 1757)	Abstract Figures on PaperJohn J.B. Murry (Murray) (American, 1908–1988)	Biblia Latina (Latin Bible)Johann Gutenberg (German, ca. 1400–1468) (publisher)

expert perspective

Sylvia Wolf Director of the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington, Seattle

“

The idea of what constitutes meaning is crucial in this discussion of art and the written word. When I try and trace how did it come about that artists began using words as evocative of ideas by abstracting them from their narrative function or from their job as text and description, I go back to 1888. And I go to the advent of the half-tone printing process, when for the first time visual or images and words could be reproduced en masse to be broadly disseminated. And then the Kodak Number One camera was invented, and at that point everybody could make images, not just painters or professional photographers.

And in the twenties and the thirties, when you move through Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism, and Futurism, all of them are heavily dependent on language and words and images for any number of different reasons, and the collision of what happens when you put these things together in a fashion that is out of the norm, they no longer become information in the manner in which we were used to.”