THE MISCEGENATION OF WORDS AND PICTURES

Words are different from pictures, which might explain why they have different names.  

Even though words and pictures can never fully combine, their mere frottage (in both senses of the word) can bring a new richness or multi-dimensionality to art. 

Verbal creation and visual creation each contribute different strengths and perspectives to their partnership.  As Swinburne said,

Light is heard as music, music seen as light.   

Through the centuries, illustration is the art form where words and pictures have interacted most closely.  Traditionally, this meant words next to the picture, but still separate:

Comics integrated the words directly into the picture, sometimes with mixed results:

Word balloon competes with drawing (Neal Adams)

MAD Magazine parody

But over the years, artists have found interesting and engaging ways to combine visual thinking with verbal thinking.  No one was better at it than the great Saul Steinberg: 

Commercial artists who used words as graphic symbols became an inspiration for pop art.

Bob Peak employs words as design elements

I do like the way Claes Oldenberg used words as graphic objects, obliterating the meaning of the words:

I've previously outraged readers by publicly admiring Cy Twombly's Orpheus, which-- unlike Oldenberg-- incorporates the meaning of the word, painting it in a way that evokes its rich content:

Orpheus by Cy Twombly

Yessir, people have wrestled with cross breeding words and pictures in all sorts of ways:

But in my view, the marriage of words and pictures remains largely unconsummated in post modern conceptual art.  

Famed artist Jenny Holzer places text side by side with images-- perhaps on a colored background or carved into a bench-- without ever combining or even juxtaposing their different characteristics.  These words would fail as literature so Holzer seeks to find legitimacy by taking up residence in the less discriminating side of town: the visual arts.

Holzer apparently believes that projecting boring platitudes on the side of a building transforms them into Art.

Similarly, many other contemporary artists who are incapable of doing the heavy lifting of combining words and pictures rely exclusively upon words (yet still hope to claim credit as visual artists):

Museum of Modern Art displays pages from the Montevideo phone book with the names of political victims.  

Apologists and pedants have attempted to justify this use of words as a substitute for pictures, claiming in learned treatises that words were simply a cool new form of visual art.  

It may be that in the marriage of words and pictures, some people believe images are the weaker spouse and can be supplanted.  Not me.  Pictures preceded the written word and will be there at the end to receive it.