The visible word

by Johanna Drucker

Early in this century, Futurist and Dada artists developed brilliantly innovative uses of typography - including visual poems and collages of words and letters - that blurred the boundaries between visual art and literature. In The Visible Word, Johanna Drucker shows how later art criticism and literary theory has distorted our understanding of such works. She argues that Futurist, Dadaist, and Cubist artists emphasized materiality as the heart of their experimental approach to both visual and poetic forms of representation; by midcentury, however, the tenets of New Criticism and High Modernism had polarized the visual and the literary. Drucker skillfully traces the development of this critical position, suggesting a methodology closer to the actual practices of the early avant-garde artists based on a rereading of their critical and theoretical writings. After reviewing theories of signification, the production of meaning, and materiality, she analyzes the work of four poets active in