The modern turn in text-based art—rooted in the socio-political turbulence of the 1970s and crystallised through the 1980s—marked a rupture from earlier textual experiments like Simmias of Rhodes’ shaped verse or the typographic flux of the 1950s-60s, not only by appropriating linguistic and visual structures but by instilling them with ferocious political agency; artists began to treat text not as supplement but as substance, where the signifier itself became the site of protest, memory and reclamation, with form serving content in acts of visual insubordination, as seen in the runaway slave poster reconfigurations of Glenn Ligon, whose Runaways (1993) wields historical form to unveil ongoing racial violence through unsettling mimicry, or in Jenny Holzer’s inflammatory truisms and LED proclamations that hijacked public space to implant feminist and anti-authoritarian thought directly into the civic psyche, echoing Robert Indiana’s more obscure but searing work Mississippi, which sheds the sentimental patina of his LOVE icon to confront regional injustice, all of which reflects a shift toward artists controlling not only message but medium and mode of dissemination, often via non-traditional platforms, zines, Xerox, ephemeral installations or bookworks, a strategy tethered to the feminist, queer and postcolonial movements of the time that reconfigured the career arc of the artist from object-maker to ideological transmitter, and while early visual-text innovations may have framed language as aesthetic play or formal experimentation, the Modern Era’s practitioners constructed a text-art canon defined by appropriation as critique, form as reclamation, and content as insurrection, founding an enduring legacy still urgent in the twenty-first century, where slogans, hashtags, protest placards and AI-generated text now occupy this lineage as its digital descendants.
