Period. Point. Dot. This pin-prick-shaped graphic mark takes up a small amount of space but holds a big history. In this talk, I survey the dot’s appearance in visual culture, questioning its pervasiveness and varied meanings across time, with a focus on contemporary art and popular culture in the U.S. in the 1960s. Throughout, I test the hypothesis that the dot – in all its economy of production and simplicity of presentation – challenges presumptions of rhetorical stability.
I start with a selective overview of the dot’s appearance and function in various fields across time: from hieroglyphic dots on Urartian jars (9th-6th Century BCE) that facilitated measurement of their contents; to dotting (“pointing”) of Arabic letters in 7th Century Kufic script, altering (some say) original interpretations of the Qur’an; late 19th C Pointillist painting; the burgeoning of polka dots in 20th C. fashion; Paul Klee’s 1925 Pedagogical Sketchbook proclamation that “A line is a dot on a walk through space” (1953 translation); Yayoi Kusama’s 1968 proclamation that “Polka dots are a way to infinity;” the dot’s complicated rise to fame in Papunya Aboriginal artists’ paintings (1970s onward); pop stars (Miley Cyrus, Katy Perry) wearing bindi, which adorn many South Asian women’s foreheads, for far less sacred purposes; and media designers’ nostalgia for restoring analog-era roundness to rectangular pixels in today’s digital era.
Within this timeline, I pause in the 1960s to conduct a critical analysis of DC Comics’ early 1960s debut of the “Polka-Dot Man” in relation to Roy Lichtenstein’s comics-based Pop Art paintings of the same era. Both relying on the model of the Ben-Day dot, invented in 1879 by illustrator-printer Benjamin Henry Day Jr., their works, when incisively compared, productively problematize the question: Does the dot secure or fluster the very meaning of meaning? And toward what end?
About the presenterKathy O'Dell
Art historian and critic Kathy O’Dell focuses her research on performance art, issues of violence, and the importance of the esoteric. Author of CONTRACT WITH THE SKIN: MASOCHISM, PERFORMANCE ART, AND THE 1970S, she is currently working on DOT: A SMALL HISTORY OF A BIG POINT, a book-length survey and analysis of the pervasive appearance of this tiny pin-prick-shaped graphic mark across time and throughout visual culture, in forms ranging from “high” to popular.