ABSTRACT
Historically, built structures have often served as physical supports for works of verbal art in an extended sense: poetry, epitaphs, famous utterances, gnomic wisdom. That changed in the twentieth century, when the modernist practitioners of the International Style, in their campaign to "purify" architecture of inessentials, stripped buildings of texts along with other forms of ornamentation. It all changed again with the onset of postmodern architecture in the 1970s which, along with decoration, playfulness, humor, and other pleasurable elements proscribed by the International Style, reintroduced word-art texts. The chapter explores the new synergy of verbal art and built environments, including landscaped ones, in the postmodern period and the twenty-first century through three case-studies: the Scottish minimalist poet Ian Hamilton Finlay's curated garden at Stonypath (1966-2006) in the Pentland Hills near Edinburgh; Verses (2011), the American installation artist Ann Hamilton's floor of appropriated texts in Ohio State University's main library in Columbus; and Input (2004), a landscaped site on Ohio University's campus in Athens, a collaboration between the landscape-architect Maya Lin and her brother, the conceptual poet Tan Lin. Each piece negotiates different interactions between language and location, bringing together site-specific text-based art and Land Art's ecologically centered practice.
