Proceeding from Lessing's distinction between poetry and visual art, Boris Groys argues that language is not external to, but resides behind, the image. The image constitutes the scene of a frustrated linguistic desire. Modern visual art sought to avoid the obscenity of staging this unfulfilled desire by conducting a systematic ascetic repression of the linguistic impulse. This negation of linguistic desire culminated in Judd's 'specific objects'. Y et the modern image, Groys emphasizes with reference to Greenberg and McLuhan, still transmits a message, namely that of its medium bearer. Modern artists torture the image and put it into a state of emergency or exception in which it confesses its interior. In the image's sub-medium space, in turn, resides language. Avantgarde artists and modern media theorists share the wish to achieve durability by becoming the media of the media. The border between the image and language, Groys closes, can neither be stabilized nor abolished. A S IS well known, the rivalry between word and image has a long history. In my article, I would like to expand on a relatively new episode of this history^an episode which is still ongoing. I am concerned with the emergence of the word in the image, which occurred in the context of the art of the 1960s. It occurred in the form of explanations and theoretical considerations of the limits and the role of art presented in writing and integrated into the artwork in conceptual art; but also as sound recordings of spoken language, which one can hear in contemporary installations; and, moreover, as poetic citations surfacing amidst the image, like those that can be seen in the images of Anselm Kiefer. Yet how do these texts enter the image? Or how does the spoken word enter an artistic installation? One might think^and this is indeed how it is often
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