A FEW ‘SEMIOTIC’ PAINTINGS OF
1975, UNKNOWN AND DESTROYED
JOHN A.WALKER
INSTITUTE OF ARTOLOGY,16 RANGERS SQUARE,GREENWICH,LONDON, SE10 8HR2002
I am most grateful to Sophie Orman of SMi Ltd, New Concordia Wharf,
Mill St, London, for sponsoring this publication.
In Britain, during the early 1970s, several critics became convinced that
the art of painting was suffering from an identity crisis and that certain
influential tendencies had reached a dead end.These tendencies had
nothing to say about events in the world beyond the studio. For instance,
John Hoyland painted abstracts that were nothing but patches and slabs of
different colours, while Bob Law exhibited canvases that were all white
apart from a line forming a rectangle echoing the shape of support. (1)
Evidently, formalist and fundamental painting practices dependent upon
American reductive theories of art, such as the modernist painting thesis
propounded by Clement Greenberg and minimalism, were still current
among painters despite critiques undertaken by British conceptual artists
such as Art & Language,Victor Burgin and John Stezaker. Of course, there
were many figurative painters practicing during the 1970s, but the
formalists were especially influential because of their status as guardians of
the essence of the medium.
1
I had been trained as a painter in Newcastle-upon-Tyne during the late
1950s where, under the influence of van Gogh’s colour theories and
American abstract expressionism, I had generated large, abstract, colour-field
paintings based on an intense complementary contrast of red and green.
Having started as a figurative painter influenced by post-impressionism, I had
become a formalist without realising it or even knowing the word! When I
left art school, the prospect of spending the rest of my life adjusting two
colours dismayed me and I began to seek a way out of the impasse of
abstraction and reduction. By the 1970s, I was living in London and spending
more time as a critic and art historian than as a painter.As an art historian, I
was delivering lectures in which sequences of slide images were accompanied
by verbal commentaries, and I was making photomontages of images with
texts to make into slides for teaching purposes. Conceptual art and its use of
language as its primary medium fascinated me but I was still attached to
visual pleasure and to painting. (2)
2
A small, naturalistic still life painting executed in 1965 entitled
‘"Orange"’ (illus 1) presaged my interest in the conjunction of
painting and language. It depicted an orange (the round citrus fruit,
isolated against a plain tabletop) that I placed in quotation marks
because it seemed that nature (of which the orange was a token)
unmediated by culture and existing representations, was impossible to
3
(1) "Orange", (1965), painting, oil on hardboard, 34.3 x 25.3.Collection John Stezaker, London.
perceive (hence nature became ‘nature’). (3) Years later, writers on post-
modernism asserted that it was characterized by everything being put in
quotation marks! Perhaps I can claim to have discovered or invented post-
modernism.
It seemed that many abstract painters thought their art form was
unsuited to the transmission of logical statements because it was a medium
essentially concerned with sensory impressions rather than semantic
information. Of course, if painting was defined in a narrow puritanical way –
as it was in theories of modernist and fundamental painting – and a fetish
was made of the purity of the medium, then painters would undoubtedly
find it difficult to make logical statements.The content of their paintings
would be restricted to the phenomenal properties of colours and forms or
the physical properties of material and the traces of process.
At that time, I was researching the subject of diagrams in art and design
because a significant number of artists, conceptualists amongst them, and
4
art historians seemed to be using them. Diagrams intrigued because
they conclusively demonstrated that logical statements could be made in
terms of a visual figure – usually a line drawing – providing the elements
of the figure were coded in some way and providing language was used in
an auxiliary capacity to limit the polysemic character of the figure (as
titles do in the case of most paintings). In 1975, a verbal/visual (that is, an
audio tape/slide projection) presentation of my findings was given in The
Gallery, London, an alternative space run by the artists Nicholas Wegner
and Vaughan Grylls. (4) An illustrated article was also published in
Control, a magazine edited by the artist Stephen Willats. (5)
To explain how signs of all kinds communicate meaning is the purpose
of semiology or semiotics, the science of signs.This was another subject
fashionable in British art circles during the early 1970s. Many
semioticians used diagrams as analytical tools; one diagram in particular,
consisting of a rectangle subdivided into three further rectangles, was
5
used by French writers such as Ferdinand de Saussure and Roland Barthes
to illustrate a sign’s basic constituents: signifier and signified. (6)
A sign is simply the consequence of the relation between signifier and
signified: signifier + signified = sign.
Paradoxically, signs cannot be discussed without the use of another sign
system. Hence, semiotics was a meta-language (a language which talked
about another language, commonly called ‘the object-language’ meaning
‘the object of study language’); therefore, semiotic diagrams were meta-
linguistic instruments. Such diagrams were themselves signs, which could
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SIGN
SIGNIFIER SIGNIFIED
also be treated as an object of study and subjected to analysis (if need be
diagrammatically!). Since paintings are also signs, and are often subjected
to diagrammatic analysis by art historians such as Erle Loran (his
diagrams of Cézanne’s compositions), it seemed to me only appropriate
that the above mentioned semiotic schema should be used directly to
expose the meaning mechanisms of painting. It also seemed appropriate
to employ the impersonal pictorial techniques of commercial sign
painters.
A series of paintings focusing upon the colour orange was then
produced. (Any familiar colour would have served the purpose equally
well.) My basic assumption was that even when gazing at an expanse of
unadulterated colour, language came into play because one would
automatically identify and name the colour using the system of
categorization associated with one’s native language. (When choosing
colours for interior decoration, we consult charts supplied by paint
7
manufacturers, which show rectangles of colours with their names
alongside.) Viewers who were painters would be even more precise in
their naming than laypersons because they were familiar with the names
of pigments from the labels on the tubes or cans of paint they used.
The first painting consisted of a square canvas divided into three
horizontal bands (illus 2). In the top band was the word ‘orange’ painted
in white on a black ground; in the middle band was a flat expanse of
cadmium orange taken straight from the tube; in the bottom band was
the word ‘orange’ painted in orange pigment on a grey ground. (Some
degree of optical flicker resulted from this contrast.) Scanning down, the
viewer encountered the English name or concept for a familiar colour,
then the percept or exemplification of that colour, and then, at the
bottom, the unity of concept and percept. Finally, the painting was
entitled ‘Marriage of the Verbal and the Visual’.
8
9
(2) Marriage of the Verbal and the Visual, (1975), painting, oil on canvas, 122 x 122 cm.Artist’s collection, London.
It then struck me that it would be more effective to use the three
rectangles diagram employed by Saussure and Barthes to explain signs.
Hence, in the second painting entitled ‘Sign: Orange’ (1975), a rectangle
of orange occupied the signifier rectangle while the word ‘orange’
occupied the signified rectangle (illus 3). Above them, in the sign
10
(3) Sign: Orange, (1975), painting, oil on canvas, 183 x 91.5 cm. Destroyed.
rectangle, was placed the word ‘orange’ executed in orange pigment against
a grey ground.
Semioticians distinguish between denotation and connotation. Seeing a
painting consisting of nothing but orange, viewers may decide it is self-
referential, that the colour orange denotes itself, that is, exemplifies ‘orange’
or ‘orangeness’. However, one has only to think of the divided society in
Northern Ireland where Protestants identify with the colour orange and
Republicans identity with the colour green to realise that colours have
connotations or social meanings in particular cultures. In art, such meanings
are often made clear by means of the general stock of cultural knowledge
that viewers bring with them or by extra-visual information such as an
artist’s statement of intent, or the work’s title.Writers such as Barthes paid
particular attention to the different inflections of meaning that captions to
images could generate. (7) This was also a relation explored in certain works
by the British artist-photographer John Hilliard during the 1970s.
11
In a third painting entitled ‘Sign: Pride’ (1975), (illus 4), the rectangle of
orange signified the emotion ‘pride’, a fact that was made explicit by the
words ‘an emotion’ in the signified rectangle (to indicate the more
personal character of emotion, the lettering was based on handwriting
rather than a standard typeface); as before, the synthesis of image and
12
(4) Sign: Pride, (1975), painting, oil on canvas, 183 x 91.5 cm. Destroyed.
concept was achieved by the appearance of the word ‘pride’ (coloured
orange) in the sign rectangle. Semioticians regarded denotation as a first
level and connotation as a second level, and they used staggered or
stepped diagrams in which the basic semiotic diagram was treated as the
signifier of a second, larger diagram. I too produced some staggered
diagram paintings even though this meant building complicated wooden
stretchers and resulted in unwieldy, shaped canvases.
The intention of these paintings was to achieve a unity of affective and
semantic information, cognition and perception, word and image. However,
this was not the end of the story.What in fact happens when one produces
a painting of a semiotic diagram in such a way that the edges of the
diagram coincide with the edges of the canvas? (What happened when
Jasper Johns made a painting of the American flag that coincided with the
edges of his canvas? There was a confusion of identities. Critics asked: was
it a painting or was it a flag?) There was a change of material, of scale, and
13
of context; overall, there was a directive to the viewer to regard the form
as worthy of consideration as an object in its own right. In addition, by
taking a semiotic diagram – which was only a means to an end – as an end
in itself (making it literal), a paradoxical situation was created in that the
paintings constituted new signs over and above their analytical content. In
other words, the two levels of meaning and signification re-appeared: the
overt meaning of the two paintings ‘Sign: Orange’ and ‘Sign: Pride’ were
the concepts ‘orange’ and ‘pride’, while their latent signification was what
can only be called ‘semioticity’.
Furthermore, even at the level of signifiers paradoxes arose: in spite of
every effort to deal only with intentional entities, the paintings also
contained textures and brush marks that were not under full conscious
control or were to some extent arbitrary. For most of the lettering, a plain,
sans serif style was employed but I realized that meanings would alter if
other, more distinctive typefaces such as Baskerville or Old English were
14
used instead.Thus the paintings confirmed the truth that all human actions
have consequences that are unforeseen and unintended by their authors.
Although in appearance the paintings somewhat resembled abstract art,
there was no reason why representational images should not occupy the
compartments of additional diagram-paintings.
By this time, I had accumulated a collection of psychological and
philosophical reflections and quotations regarding colour perception that
were more suited to sound recording than transcription on canvas.To
eliminate noise distractions, the recording was relayed via headphones and
to exclude extraneous visual information, I devised an eye mask or visor cut
from semi-transparent orange plastic sheet, which, when worn near a lamp,
facilitated an intense colour sensation that engulfed the whole field of
vision. It was much more direct and economical than a painting and avoided
those arbitrary pictorial factors cited above.The work was called ‘Seeing
Orange’. Its aim was to bring together the private sensory experience of a
15
viewer and the public language in which such experiences have been
discussed, so that the listener/viewer could check the correspondence, or
lack of it, between the two.Years later, in 1993, the same conception was
evident in Derek Jarman’s Blue, a film that had been inspired by Yves
Klein’s all-blue paintings.As Peter Wollen has remarked, ‘The film
consists of the projection on screen, for its entire seventy-five minutes, of
pure blue light, with a soundtrack of the film-maker reading his text [a
meditation on the multiple meanings of blue] and a music score by his
collaborator, Simon Turner’. (8)
Another issue that concerned left wing visual artists during the 1970s
was the commodification process associated with the art market and
private gallery system. Many artists and critics wanted to find an
alternative and various strategies were tried. It occurred to me that
painting itself should address this issue and so, in 1975, I devised a canvas
featuring the words ‘Buy Me! as an investment, Genuine Oil Painting’
16
17
(5) Not for Sale, (1975), painting, oil and acrylic on canvas, 122 x 122 cm.Artist’s collection, London.
(illus 5). Its garish colours (black, blue, red, white and yellow), and bold
lettering style paid homage to crude advertising, commercial sign
painting and the pop art of the 1960s. (Many pop paintings had included
lettering.) Although this painting demanded to become a commodity, its
title – in tiny lettering placed in one corner – told a different story: ‘Not
for Sale’. (The contradiction between the painting’s message and its title
was one consequence of reading semioticians on the varying relations
that could exist between images and captions.) In addition, written on
the back of the canvas was the instruction that it should never be bought
and sold but only given away. Gifts of objects that have been made by
hand surely escape commodification.
There was no intention on my part to create a new genre of painting.
The aim of the ‘semiotic’ paintings was didactic and had a specific
audience in mind: it was an attempt to address formalist and
fundamental painters via their own medium in order to demonstrate
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that even flat expanses of hue were imbricated in language and had social
meanings, which ought not to be ignored if painting was to reference
reality again. Since no gallery was willing to exhibit the paintings or any
journal to publish an account of them during the 1970s, I failed to reach
my presumed audience. (9)
However, the re-politicisation and feminisation of art that occurred
during the 1970s meant that in the second half of the decade, figurative
painting was again employed by community muralists, banner makers, and
left wing artists such as Conrad Atkinson,Terry Atkinson and Margaret
Harrison to depict and comment on events in the world around them.
Since diagrammatic formats, images quoted from the mass media and
language were used in addition to painted passages, it was clear that
abstraction and medium purity had become irrelevant. (10)
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Notes
(1) For a critical review of London exhibitions by these two painters, see:
John A.Walker, ‘John Hoyland & Bob Law’, Studio International,
Vol 191, No. 979, January-February 1976, pp. 79-81.
(2) Although conceptualists gave priority to language, they also used some
diagrams, drawings and photographs.Arguably, Joseph Kosuth’s 1960s gallery
installation consisting of a photograph of a chair, a dictionary definition of the
word ‘chair’ hanging on the wall, and an actual chair placed in front of them,
was one precedent for the ‘semiotic’ paintings. In Kosuth’s installation, the
photo and definition not only had signifieds but also a referent: the real chair.
(3) The curly quote marks had an interesting afterlife. My painting “Orange”
was given to John Stezaker who showed it to some of his
students at St Martin’s School of Art as a ‘talisman’.
20
The quote marks were then parodied in a cartoon that appeared in the
student newspaper cArRoT, No 1. 1971, p. 1 (illus 6).
Two decades later, The Modern Review, a magazine devoted to ‘low
culture for highbrows’, carried an article on quote marks (Vol 1, No. 8,
April-May, 1993, p. 31) as emblems of post-modern irony, and featured
them on its cover (Vol 1, No. 6, December-January 1992-93) and
21
(6) Anonymous, Cartoon in cArRoT, 1971.
reproduced them on various kinds of merchandise: T-Shirts, fridge
magnets, bras, sunglasses, etc. available via a mail order catalogue (illus 7).
22
(7) The Modern Review, Front cover of home-shopping catalogue, circa 1994.Concept:Toby Young; Photo of model by Phil Knott.
(4) ‘Art Diagrams:A Slide-Tape Presentation’,The Gallery,
January-February, 1975.
(5) See: ‘Diagrams: their relevance to art’, Control Magazine, No. 9,
December 1975, pp. 18-20.
(6) Examples of semiotic diagrams are to be found in Roland Barthes’
books Elements de Sémiology, (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1964), (Eng. trans.
Jonathan Cape, 1967) and Mythologies, (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1957),
(Eng. trans. Paladin, 1973).
(7) On the relationship between captions and images, see Roland Barthes’
essay ‘Rhétorique de l’image’, Communications, (4) 1964, pp. 40-51.
(Eng. trans. Working Papers in Cultural Studies, spring 1971, pp. 36-50).
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(8) Peter Wollen, ‘Blue’, New Left Review, Vol 6, November-December
2000, pp. 120-33.
(9) The paintings were discussed with Victor Burgin and a lecture about
them was given to students and staff of the Slade School of Art in
London where they met with a hostile reception. Most of the paintings
from the ‘semiotic’ series were subsequently destroyed.
(10) For a history, see my book: Left Shift: Radical Art in 1970s Britain,
(London & New York: I.B.Tauris, 2002).
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Biographical information: John A.Walker (b. 1938, Grimsby, Lincolnshire)
is a London-based critic and art historian specialising in contemporary
art and mass culture and their relationship to social context and politics.
From 1956 to 1961, he took a fine art degree course in Newcastle upon
Tyne and then moved to London where he worked as a teacher, civil
servant, librarian and freelance art critic before becoming a lecturer in
art history at Middlesex Polytechnic and other art schools. He has
published many articles and books on the interactions between the
visual arts and film, television and pop music. His published books are:
A Glossary of Art, Architecture and Design since 1945, (London: Library
Association, 3rd edn 1992). Art since Pop (London:Thames & Hudson,
1975). Van Gogh Studies: Five Critical Essays, (London: JAW Publications,
1981). Art in the Age of Mass Media (London & Sterling,VA: Pluto Press,
3rd edn 2001). Crossovers: Art into Pop, Pop into Art, (London: Comedia/
Methuen, 1987). Design History and the History of Design, (London: Pluto
25
Press, 1989). Art and Artists on Screen, (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1993). Arts TV:A History of Arts Television in Britain,
(London:Arts Council & John Libbey, 1993). John Latham – the Incidental
Person – his Art and Ideas, (London: Middlesex University Press, 1995).
[With Sarah Chaplin] Visual Culture:An Introduction (Manchester & New
York: Manchester University Press, 1997). Cultural Offensive:America’s
Impact on British Art since 1945, (London & Sterling VA: Pluto Press,
1998). Art and Outrage: Provocation, Controversy and the Visual Arts,
(London & Sterling VA: Pluto Press, 1999). [With Rita Hatton]
Supercollector: A Critique of Charles Saatchi, (London: … ellipsis, 2000).
Left Shift: Radical Art in 1970s Britain, (London & New York: I.B.Tauris,
2002). Forthcoming in 2002: Art & Celebrity, (London & Sterling VA:
Pluto Press).
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(8) Back cover: Nicholas Wegner, Back view of John A.Walker in the ‘Drug Abuse in Maine’exhibition at The Gallery, 65 (A) Lisson St, London, January or February, 1974.