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

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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

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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

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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

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(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.

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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

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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’.

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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

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(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).

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(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

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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.