The Art Book Tradition in Twentieth-Century Europe: Picturing Language (ed.) (original) (raw)
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Review By Debasish Lahiri The idea of vision and the idea as vision have a very long history. Idea derives from the Greek verb meaning 'to see'. This deep etymology signals towards the fact that the way one thinks about the way one thinks in Western culture is guided by a visual paradigm. In such a scheme of things looking, seeing and knowing become perilously intertwined. Thus the manner in which one comes to understand the concept of an 'idea' is deeply bound up with issues of 'appearance' of picture, and of image. As the early Wittgenstein had stated, a picture is a fact; and a logical picture of facts is an idea. In fact 'visual culture' has emerged as a history of images rather than a history of art. The visual never comes pure; it is always contaminated by the stain of other senses, touched by other texts and discourses. It is not now a question of replacing the blindness of the 'linguistic turn' with the 'new' blindnesses of the 'visual turn.' To hypostasize the visual risks of reinstalling the hegemony of the 'noble' sense, the visual, we may argue, is 'languaged,' just as language itself has a visual dimension. Word, Image, Text: Studies in Literary and Visual Culture approaches the content and form of Western intellectual history in terms of how they 'look'. The manifest phono-logo-centrism of the volume about 'visualising' culture attests to this point. A general pattern emerges in the essays of the volume whereby we begin from visual forms and talk and theorize and achieve understanding of those forms through mental constructs. The book, in fact, takes off from the complaint that the siblings Poetry (read literature) and Painting have fallen into a disquieting ekphrasis and need to be called back from their esoteric exiles on the margins of modernity. This project of mutually remembering the tattered body of Western art and literary copia under a metaphysical cupola begins in the Early Modern period and extends to the 19th century visual stratification of political power in revolutionary France.
The creative process behind the ten books issued by the Éditions L. Lambert since 1976 does not follow the established order for livres d'artiste. 1 For each of her books, Lucie Lambert (b. 1947) produced a set of prints that she gave to an author, who then wrote texts inspired by them. Such a cursory description, however, does not do justice to the dialogue that was thus initiated between artist and writer. As this essay hopes to show, Lucie Lambert's books display and explore word-image interactions in multifarious, resonant, and evocative ways.
Textuality, Forms of 'Reading', and the Encounter of Art
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This MPhil explores the materiality and non-materiality of art and how this relates to our interpretation in relation to subject and object. It focuses on the visual and the non-visible elements of artworks, considering the conditions and the pre-conditions of the gaze, and its relevance in the moment of perception. Approaching authors in art theory and beyond, writing is discussed as theoretical, fictional and biographical when engaging with the art practices of Gerhard Richter and Hanne Darboven. If the visual does not exist independently, beyond or outside of language, then the visible and the image that art can render, comes as a consequence of being in language. The activity of writing can be used as an instrument to re-approach and re-contextualise the activity of looking at art. It can open dialogues on the spaces between collective and personal thinking and how one relates to this in a creative practice. To engage with our own experiences and cross between the threshold of s...
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In 2005 Fundacja Odnawiania Znaczeń. Polka [Foundation for the Revival of Meanings. A Polish Woman] was set up, managed by Agnieszka Zawadowska. Since that time we have been running scientific and artistic projects together with the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences. We consciously seek new ways for the Polish humanities, revising their basis and, at the same time, preserving what is the most valuable in them. Our initiatives and research works in the fields of history and history of idea taken by us are open to new phenomena both in science and contemporary art. The horizon of these actions is the combination of the humanities, the reflection on history, and artistic undertakings, which means, on the one hand, a desire to meet intellectual challenges of postmodernity and, on the other hand, an attempt to maintain sensitivity to specific historical determinants of the country. In 2005 we developed the exhibition Polka – Medium, Cień, Wyobrażenie [A Pol...
The livre d'artiste in Twentieth-Century France
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Ste´phane MallarmeÁ recent exhibition at the British Library, Breaking the Rules (2007-08), explored early-twentieth-century avant-garde journals and books as a space of experimentation and subversion. The exhibition highlighted the creation of a new aesthetics juxtaposing visual and verbal elements, from Guillaume Apollinaire's calligrammes and Futurist poem-paintings to Dada and constructivist journals, surrealist book objects and livres d'artistes. The term livre d'artiste will be used here to designate various forms of the twentieth-century book in France as a collaboration between poets and painters or texts and images. Given the multiple origin of the livre d'artiste, critical studies are situated at the intersection of several disciplines: the history and technique of the book, art history and criticism, literary studies and semiotics. Three key issues dominate critical debate on the livre d'artiste, relating to its definition (limits and legibility) and historical development (from the livre illustre´to the livre objet); its production (the material book); and its interpretation (relations between words and images). 1 Definitions: from 'livre illustre´' to 'livre objet' Until the end of the nineteenth century, the descriptive or imitative model -Horace's ut pictura poesis -predominated in the practices and accounts of book illustration. Priority was given to the text, the illustrator, usually a professional engraver, providing a visual equivalent of a theme or episode of the narrative. Traditional illustration has been considered as a 'meta-text [. . .] a means of "writing" upon another text that makes it legible in different ways', translating or paraphrasing the text. 2 This logocentric conception of the illustrated book
WORD AND IMAGE In Literature and the Visual Arts
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re-published in a modified version as The Psychoanalytic Approach to Artistic and Literary Expression in Toward the Postmodern, ed. R. Harvey and M. Roberts (Amherst, NY, Humanity Books, 1993, pp. 2-11). Opposing itself to various other psychoanalytic approaches to art and literature (approaches that Lyotard criticises along the way), the paper argues that because artistic and literary works are laden with figure, which operates according to a different logic than that of language, artistic expression must be understood as having properties different from those of spoken or written commentary. Expression is thus set off from meaning, and is shown to reveal a very specific kind of truth: the trace of the primary process, free for the moment from the ordering functions of the secondary process. Its formative operations not only leave their mark on the space in which artistic works appear, but produce new, plastic, figures. Lyotard argues that the artistic impulse is the desire to see these unconscious operations, "the desire to see the desire." Attention to this function of truth and to the role of artistic space in giving the artwork its "play" brings attention back to Freud's analysis of expression in tragedy and its link to the results of his own self-analysis -and thus to the very constitution of psychoanalysis itself.