Jon Campbell, Stacks On, 2010, installation view, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney; image courtesy the artist and Museum of Contemporary Art © the artist
There are a number of exhibitions at the moment focused on artists who use text as the foundation of their art making. It is hardly a new idea – text and art have been intertwined for centuries; think of medieval illuminated manuscripts with their elaborate illustrations, or Surrealist Rene Magitte’s words “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (“This pipe isn’t a pipe”) slashed across a painting.
