Na początku był logotyp
In the beginning was the Logotype

Summary/Abstract: In the following article I consider the problem of visual language in terms of “the politics of visibility”. The language of visual arts, like natural language, has multiple functions. Contemporary art makes us aware that in each of its functions: cognitive, social and affective, language conceals from us more than it reveals to us. I also relate the above statement to other fundamental concepts of functions of language, including psychological (K. Buhler), axiomatic (R. Jakobson) and functional (M. Halliday). All of these concepts are of hierarchic and deterministic character. They are derived from a concept of thing determined by an idea, a paradigm and a theory constructed on this foundation, and not from the thing itself. The development of visual arts also followed this pattern throughout the ages. It was only in recent years that artistic events diverging considerably from the commonly accepted facts of visual arts were arranged. Such events gain the minimum of social acceptance, which I ascribe to the use of a different language and different approach towards the depiction of reality, which is no longer a representation of reality. I trace the origins of the otherness of the present to the trail delineated by Heraclitus, which we are rediscovering only just now. W.C. Heisenberg, owing to contemporary physics, restored a legitimacy of metaphysics with its primary question about arche, and M. Heidegger laid the foundations for artists to open themselves to new perspectives of more indefinite depictions of reality which reveal the potentiality instead of obscuring reality through description and depiction of possibilities. Based on such premises, my title is, perversely, related to logotype rather than logos. The logotype, including contemporary art and the language used in its creation are absolutely different from words and statements that these allow to formulate.

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