Game of the name : titles and titling of visual artworks in theoretical discussions from 1960 to 2015

Abstract

In this dissertation titles and practices of titling of visual artworks are discussed from art historical, philosophical and theoretical perspectives. The history of titling visual artworks is discussed as a background of the theoretical study, and it focuses, in this study, on titling practices in Western art from the Renaissance to Late Modernism. The main emphasis is on artworks and titles that have already created discussions concerning titles. Despite the long history of the practice, the study of titles has often been ignored or completely neglected. Reasons for this neglect are various. Titles may have been ignored, because they were thought to have a neutral or innocent relationship to the subject matter of the artwork. On the other hand, there are artists and scholars who are anxious towards language (or any other sup-plements). For instance, Modernist Formalism focused on visual two-dimensionality, ignoring and neglecting any references to words or language. In art history, these anxieties are sometimes reflected in anxieties towards the linguistic turn and semiotics. Many contemporary theories, however, comprehend language as something that should not and even cannot be ignored. To evaluate different theories and theoretical discussions from 1960 to 2015, theories are reviewed by analysing types of functions attributed to titles in different theories. One conclusion is that theories and discussions of titles do not form a coherent theoretical object of study but rather fragmented whole. As a synthesis, functions of titles are distinguished into three main functions: des-ignative, captioning, and social. Metaphor and narrative are concepts that have often been raised in dis-cussions of word-image relations. The possibilities of applying these concepts to the title-artwork relation is investigated in the last chapter.