As titles, narration, or allegorical inscriptions, words appeared in paintings long before Modernism. It was not until the advent of Cubism [more] however that language systematically entered the visual field, as snippets of text from newspapers, posters, and product labels, first carefully painted, and later collaged directly onto the canvas. This move coincided with the Cubist understanding of painting itself as a kind of language—as a series of coded signs that could be manipulated, fragmented, and rearranged independently of any subject depicted. The “concrete” or “nonsense” poetry of Raoul Hausmann, Kurt Schwitters, and other Dada [more] artists often pulverized language into evocative shards of sound, letters, and graphic insignia.

In the 1960s Pop art [more] employed language as a highly stylized visual sign, drawing from a world of commercial logos and brand names in which words increasingly take on a life of their own. Conceptually oriented artists like Dan Graham, Joseph Kosuth, and Robert Smithson created works that only existed in the form of publications. Projects by Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler, and others arranged language as sets of procedures or operations that could be documented photographically, or to produce a work, as in Sol LeWitt‘s wall drawings, which can be executed by others following detailed written directions.

This “performative” aspect of language presented as instruction initially came from experimental music, especially the work of composer John Cage in the 1950s. Artists such as George Brecht, Yoko Ono, La Monte Young, and others associated with the Fluxus [more] group wrote short “scores” for simple actions that were performed or interpreted, like Young’s Composition 1960 #10, “Draw a straight line and follow it” (1960) or Brecht’s 1961 Word Event, which read simply “Exit.” Just as language is an inherently open-ended structure not bound to its individual enactment or instantiation, such linguistically based works often bypass the uniqueness of the material object to focus on process, perception, and the larger discursive context, using “the idea” as, in LeWitt’s phrase, “a machine to make art.”