ART REVIEW : Works Break Down Word-Image Barrier : The exhibition ‘Three British Book Artists,’ at UC San Diego’s Mandeville Gallery, is a quiet revelation.

Visual artists who use words as their medium have long played a prominent role in art. Early Cubists integrated words in their paintings; Pop artists such as Jasper Johns used words and images with equal fluency. Others followed, all of whom regarded verbal and visual language as intimately, intriguingly linked. Ed Ruscha brought the word to a new iconic status in pictorial art. For some, like Jenny Holzer, words have supplanted images altogether.

The show “Three British Book Artists,” at UC San Diego’s Mandeville Gallery, examines the British roots of contemporary word-image play. All three artists represented--Ian Hamilton Finlay, Tom Phillips and Ian Tyson--rose to prominence in England in the 1960s, but they have had less visibility in the United States. Finlay now has a sculptural work in UCSD’s Stuart Collection, and Tyson is a visiting lecturer at UCSD. Phillips has become known here through his book “A Humument,” but still, the breadth and intelligence of all three artists’ work make this show something of a revelation.

It’s a quiet revelation, however, for “Three British Book Artists” is a quiet show. The relationship between a book and its reader-viewer is primarily a private one, and one that is difficult to translate to the sphere of public exhibition. Books here are encased under glass or single pages are framed and hung on the wall. The immediacy of fingering pages and succumbing to a sequence of thoughts and images is tempered here by necessity. The works are untouchable, but, thankfully, most still have the power to touch the mind even from their sequestered stations.

Of the three artists, Phillips grabs the imagination with the most gusto. Original pages of his “Humument,” a project begun in 1966 and first published in book form in 1980, are remarkably clever in both concept and execution. He took what he called a forgotten Victorian novel and “plundered, mined and undermined its text to make it yield the ghosts of other possible stories, scenes, poems, erotic incidents and surrealist catastrophes which seemed to lurk within its wall of words.”

He drew or painted over the pages of an 1892 book, leaving select words and phrases exposed, sometimes clearly, sometimes just as a barely discernible undercurrent to the images above. By encircling the exposed words and then creating a visual path connecting them, Phillips created an entirely new text that is poetic, evocative and sly.

“I am the window your dream stepped out of,” reads one page. “O art sing the wild choice of mind fruits,” declares another. The poetry forged from the original author’s prose is concentrated and often far more remarkable than the patterned or representational images Phillips painted around the words.

Occasionally, words and images operate in tight collusion, as on the page where a host of murky faces emerges from dark, mottled ground and the only words exposed read, “Sixteen portraits, hanging from a dream.”

Phillips’ fascinating project harks back to the tradition of medieval manuscript illumination, whereas Finlay’s seems to have emerged from more modern sources of inspiration, including Guillaume Apollinaire’s “Calligrams,” published in 1918. Finlay’s writings, like Apollinaire’s, bring out the visual impact of words as much as their meanings. Words do not exist apart from the images they evoke in the mind or actually form on the page, and Finlay mines the relationship between the verbal and visual with wit and a probing intelligence.

Much of Finlay’s work cannot be understood without a solid grounding in the artist’s larger enterprise, his creation of “Little Sparta,” a sprawling, neoclassical garden at his home in Scotland. But some is quite readily accessible, such as the screenprint “Acrobats.”

In this work from 1966, Finlay spells out the word acrobats 10 times in vibrant orange letters on an aqua field. The letters zigzag up and down the page in a perfectly concise evocation of the physical rhythms of acrobats themselves. Most of Finlay’s work is less obvious than this, but for all of its historical referents, metaphysical overtones and conceptual strategies, it is also quite enjoyable on the surface.

Tyson’s work, too, redefines the relationship between word and image in terms of their communicative functions. Traditionally, words provided the narrative, and images the illustration, but for Tyson, as for the other two artists here, the bond between visual and verbal is far more complex than that.

By pairing his own abstract prints with the writings of contemporary poets (such as Jerome Rothenberg, who teaches at UCSD and has collected much of the work on display in this show), Tyson suggests subliminal links between the written or spoken and the seen. Color, in his work, can have concrete meaning, while words may relax into pure form.

Though Tyson’s prints are exceedingly elegant, whether recalling the pristine proportions of Shoji screens or the more dynamic rhythms of Suprematism, his images feel far more passive than the potent words alongside them. The austere lines of Tyson’s accompanying images do little, for instance, to empower the already poignant images evoked by the closing lines of Rothenberg’s poem “Millenium:” “Poetry & Truth/in conflict./When the heart is full it flows out/through the mouth.”

“Three British Book Artists,” at UC San Diego’s Mandeville Gallery, continues through Dec. 13. Hours are noon to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. (619) 534-2864.