Just for a little fun, I took a word, and found text generating software, which will make 'text out of your word'... quite an interesting excercise, gave me a good few ideas on presenting text...http://patorjk.com/software/taag/
The meaning of text can change by colour, pattern, text and form... not to mention location and associated imagery.
Marjorie Perloff discusses this in her writings "THE Sound of POETRY/The POETRY of Sound" - whilst artists like J Druckner, write passionately about the word or even letter being important not only by understood meaning, but by font choice, typogrpahic selection, meaning that something can be taken out of context and put into a transformed meaning. Text can call attention to itself as it becomes the completed art piece, as in Mira Schor's and Beuys works, or it could be a part of the overall meaning and fairly concealed in the works of Chiari and Corner... basically, sometimes you have to look for meaning and it's really subjective to the reader... Ezra Pound, poet and writer, spent much of his time making 'art of words'... I particularly enjoy his comment that:
"... it takes six or eight years to get educated in ones art and anothr ten to get rid of that education. Neither can anyone learn english, one can only learn a series of englishes. Rossetti made his own language. I hadn't in 1910 made a language to use, but even a language to think in..."
The importance of language is that even language vs. text has its own modes of materiality. Marjorie Perloff's writrings really stimulated the idea of text as language as art... I would certainly want to spend more time on this specifically. Even looking at Joseph Grigley's exhibition of "textureality", keeps me interested. Basically, texture is like art, it informs and creates a reaction. And, like art, it's complexities ensure that a certain degree of eduction on a piece is needed to guide a person to understand its meaning....
In symbolism, my excercise of ASCII text generation played a big part in my understanding its complexities. Language transforms, meanings evolve, and each generation takes on a different level of meaning in their language. Look at something like text generation for myspace/facebook/msn - you want a smiley face or a glitterly word to convey a meaning? It'll generate it for you. We all know what it means... to a degree. And this isn't a new thing, Joseph Manca discusses this way back to Rennaissance times in his article "Moral Stance in Italian Renaissance Art: Image, Text, and Meaning"...
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