Vaizdas ir žodis šiuolaikinėje dailėje

ENLithuanian art critics have often enough pointed out the specific relationship between contemporary art and verbal language, yet it has not evolved into a subject for any detailed research. This article deals with texts that accompany, rely on, rule over or comment on images. Written either by artists themselves or by curators, the texts can take on various forms (that of description, press release, project application, or purposive critique). Taking into account the historical context of relations between image and word in art, as well as the syntagmatic and semantic image-text typical of contemporary art (when writing constitutes a part of an artwork, and the interaction between text and image is its main subject), the article highlights factors that led to the proliferation of textual supplements, discusses their subsequent emancipation, the critique towards them, and their peculiarities, and analyses several more interesting examples of an intertextual relationship with a work of art. Commentaries by an artist that become an integral part of her/his works indicate the lack of trust in spectators, critics, or commentators, and the urgent will to control the meaning - as if any unscheduled meaning was a certain menace for the artist. Fragmented, appropriated, torn out of their original medium, the images of contemporary art essentially require commentaries, in a similar way index signs do. Moreover, words empower images to exercise such cognitive, critical, social and political functions that are at times attributed to them with not enough reason. [From the publication]