the illustrated manifesto
Apologies if some of this seems familiar, or the writing a little odd, I've adapted it from a post I placed on a forum in response to a 'picture poem'.
Conceptually combining images and text is extremely interesting. This relates to a lot of work I've been experimenting with over the last three months. Inspired by Dada, Performance Art, and a whole range of other things I've recently been using painting, collage, and photography to explore the ideas in my work. So far I've kept the text and images largely separate, and certainly haven't used text that would be recognisible as poetry. My reluctance is twofold. Firstly there's a tendency to topple over into tweeness or sententiousness. Secondly, since people began using the written word they've combined it with images. You only have to look at adverts, films, tv, games, comics, books etc etc to see all around you the combination of images and text. To differentiate your work from these (or to exploit a similarity) you need to work really hard.
This second area throws up the most problems. When most graphic combinations have been tried out in magazines, comics and posters, how do you come up with something fresh and distinct? Tracey Emin has shown one way in which this can be done, by combining single words or short phrases with three-dimensional objects. For me this is a good solution because it allows the elements to work together, and for your attention to flick back and forth freely between the two. Where you have a more solid block of text it demands more attention, and you get a conflict between the two elements.
The core problem is one of incompatability. Each element is distinct and interpreted in its own way, and this is always going to lead to conflict. You can solve this in a couple of ways. You can try and give both the text and the image equal weight, or you can make one of the elements dominant. I would suggest that the image or sculpture should be dominant. Or where the text is dominant that it is perhaps repeated, fragmented, or very plain. This is all opinion rather than prescription, and it may be that you have better solutions. I apologise for currently being unable to show you any examples, but if I can find some by other people then I'll post the links here.
Conceptually combining images and text is extremely interesting. This relates to a lot of work I've been experimenting with over the last three months. Inspired by Dada, Performance Art, and a whole range of other things I've recently been using painting, collage, and photography to explore the ideas in my work. So far I've kept the text and images largely separate, and certainly haven't used text that would be recognisible as poetry. My reluctance is twofold. Firstly there's a tendency to topple over into tweeness or sententiousness. Secondly, since people began using the written word they've combined it with images. You only have to look at adverts, films, tv, games, comics, books etc etc to see all around you the combination of images and text. To differentiate your work from these (or to exploit a similarity) you need to work really hard.
This second area throws up the most problems. When most graphic combinations have been tried out in magazines, comics and posters, how do you come up with something fresh and distinct? Tracey Emin has shown one way in which this can be done, by combining single words or short phrases with three-dimensional objects. For me this is a good solution because it allows the elements to work together, and for your attention to flick back and forth freely between the two. Where you have a more solid block of text it demands more attention, and you get a conflict between the two elements.
The core problem is one of incompatability. Each element is distinct and interpreted in its own way, and this is always going to lead to conflict. You can solve this in a couple of ways. You can try and give both the text and the image equal weight, or you can make one of the elements dominant. I would suggest that the image or sculpture should be dominant. Or where the text is dominant that it is perhaps repeated, fragmented, or very plain. This is all opinion rather than prescription, and it may be that you have better solutions. I apologise for currently being unable to show you any examples, but if I can find some by other people then I'll post the links here.
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