Presenters
Abstract
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?