Mixed messages: American correspondences in visual and verbal practices 9781526101792

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Offering a genuinely interdisciplinary contribution to the intersecting fields of art history, avant-garde studies, word-image relations, and literary studies, Mixed messages takes in architecture, notebooks, poetry, painting, conceptual art, contemporary art, comic books, photographs and installations, ending with a speculative conclusion on the role of the body in the experience of digital mixed media. Each of the ten case studies explores the juxtaposition of visual and verbal forms in a manner that moves away from treating verbal and visual symbols as operating in binary or oppositional systems and towards a consideration of mixed media, multi-media and intermedia work as brought together in acts of creation, exhibition, reading, viewing and immersion. The collection advances research into embodiment theory, affect, pragmatist aesthetics, as well as into the continuing legacy of romanticism and of Dada, conceptual art and surrealism in an American context.

Catherine Gander is Lecturer in American Literature and Visual Culture at Queen’s University Belfast Sarah Garland is Lecturer in American Literature and Visual Culture at the University of East Anglia

Cover image: Walker Evans, Untitled [Shoemaker’s Shop, Marigot, St. Martin’s, French West Indies], April 6, 1974. Instant colour print; 7.9 x 7.9 cm (3 1/8 x 3 1/8 in.). Yale University Art Gallery, Katharine Ordway Fund (2010.11.18). © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

G A N D E R • G A R L A N D (eds)

With a foreword by Professor Miles Orvell of Temple University, Gander and Garland’s collection assembles cutting-edge research of renowned and emerging scholars in American literature and the visual arts, including Lauren Weingarden and Caroline Blinder.

MIXED MESSAGES

Mixed messages presents and interrogates ten distinct moments from the arts of nineteenth-, twentieth- and twenty-first-century America where visual and verbal forms blend and clash. Charting correspondences concerned with the expression and meaning of human experience, this volume moves beyond standard interdisciplinary theoretical approaches to consider the written and visual artwork in embodied, cognitive and contextual terms.

MIXED MESSAGES American correspondences in visual and verbal practices

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

ISBN 978-1-7849-9150-0

9 781784 991500

EDITED BY

CATHERINE GAND ER SARAH GARLAND

Mixed messages

Mixed messages American correspondences in visual and verbal practices

EDITED BY CATHERINE GANDER AND SARAH GARLAND

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2016 While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

ISBN  978 1 7849 9150 0  hardback First published 2016 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or thirdparty internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset in Minion and Gill by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

For mum and for Simon, from Catherine For my mother and grandmother, from Sarah

Contents

List of figures List of contributors Foreword by Miles Orvell Acknowledgements

page ix xiii xvii xx

Introduction: to fasten words again to visible – and invisible – things Catherine Gander and Sarah Garland1   1 A poetics of organic expression: Louis Sullivan’s transcendentalist legacy in word and image  Lauren S. Weingarden

18

  2 Photographic studies in the Hawthornes’ American Note-books  Jessie Morgan-Owens

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  3 Fragments of the future: Walker Evans’s polaroids Caroline Blinder

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  4 Cartooning the marvelous: word and image in Chicago Surrealism  Joanna Pawlik

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  5 ‘Twenty-six things at once’: pragmatic perspectives on Frank O’Hara and Norman Bluhm’s Poem-Paintings  Catherine Gander

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  6 ‘Being kept in the dark can be a critical gesture’: Arakawa and Madeline Gins’s Mechanism of Meaning  Sarah Garland

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  7 ‘Then art will change. This is the future’: Nancy Spero’s manifestary practice  Rachel Warriner

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  8 Forms of potential: reading Lawrence Weiner  Katie L. Price

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  9 Testimony by hand: Ann Hamilton’s myein Julie Phillips Brown

161

10 Reading with a knife, or the book art of subtraction: the altered books of Brian Dettmer and Doug Beube  181 Katy Masuga 11 The idea, the machine and the art: word and image in the twenty-first century. Envoi  Catherine Gander and Sarah Garland

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Index

217

Figures

  1.1 Adler and Sullivan, Wainwright Building, St Louis, Missouri, 1890–92. Image in public domain. page 24   1.2 Adler and Sullivan, Wainwright Building, detail of cornice. Photo: Paul Piaget. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, HABS, Reproduction number HABS MO,96–SALU,49 – 6. 25   1.3 Adler and Sullivan, Guaranty Building, Buffalo, New York, 1894–96, detail of column capital and lintel. Photo: John Szarkowski. Copyright © The Estate of John Szarkowski. Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York. 29   1.4 Adler and Sullivan, Schlesinger & Mayer Store (later Carson Pirie Scott Store), Chicago, 1898–1901, view of corner entrance. Inland Architect & News Record, 41 (June 1903). Image in public domain. 30   2.1 Jessie Morgan-Owens, The Old Manse, 2010. Colour negative photograph. Copyright © Jessie Morgan-Owens.  46   3.1 Walker Evans, Untitled [detail of sign lettering: ‘A’], 11 November 1974. Instant colour print, 7.9 × 7.9 cm (3 1/8 × 3 1/8 in.). New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Purchase, Samuel J. Wagstaff Jr. Bequest and Lila Acheson Wallace Gift, 1994. Copyright © 2015 Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence. 54   3.2 Walker Evans, Untitled [detail of sign lettering: ‘$1.00’], 1973–74. Instant colour print, 7.9 × 7.9 cm (3 1/8 × 3 1/8 in.). New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Purchase, Samuel J. Wagstaff Jr. Bequest and Lila Acheson Wallace Gift, 1994. Copyright © 2015 Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence. 55   3.3 Walker Evans, Untitled [trash study], 11 October 1973. Instant colour print, 7.9 × 7.9 cm (3 1/8 × 3 1/8 in.). New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Purchase, Samuel J. Wagstaff Jr. Bequest and Lila Acheson Wallace Gift, 1994. Copyright © 2015 Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence. 57

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 4.1 Krazy Kat (n.d.). Reproduced from ‘Surrealism in the Comics’, Cultural Correspondence, 10/11, special issue ‘Surrealism and its Popular Accomplices’ (1979), 58, with permission of Penelope Rosemont.76   4.2 Smokey Stover (n.d.). Copyright © Tribune Content Agency/ Smokey Stover LLC. All rights reserved. Reproduced from ‘Surrealism in the Comics’, Cultural Correspondence, 10/11, special issue ‘Surrealism and its Popular Accomplices’ (1979), 66, with permission of Penelope Rosemont.  79   5.1 Norman Bluhm and Frank O’Hara, Help! I am Alive, 1960. Gouache on paper, 48.9 × 35.6 cm (19 1/4 × 14 in.). Grey Art Gallery, New York University Art Collection. With permission of the Estate of Norman Bluhm.  91   5.2 Norman Bluhm and Frank O’Hara, Let’s Wait and See, 1960. Gouache on paper, 48.9 × 35.6 cm (19 1/4 × 14 in.). Grey Art Gallery, New York University Art Collection. With permission of the Estate of Norman Bluhm. 94   5.3 Norman Bluhm and Frank O’Hara, Hand, 1960. Gouache on paper, 35.6 × 48.9 cm (14 × 19 1/4 in.). Grey Art Gallery, New York University Art Collection. With permission of the Estate of Norman Bluhm.98   5.4 Norman Bluhm and Frank O’Hara, Reaping and Sowing, 1960. Gouache on paper, 48.9 × 35.6 cm (19 1/4 × 14 in.). Grey Art Gallery, New York University Art Collection. With permission of the Estate of Norman Bluhm.  102   6.1 Arakawa and Madeline Gins, The Mechanism of Meaning 8. Reassembling. fig. 8.2, 1963–71/78. Acrylic, cardboard, lightbulb, lightbulb socket and painted duct tape on canvas, 244 × 173 cm. Photograph by Sally Ritts. Copyright © 1997 Estate of Madeline Gins. Reproduced with permission of the Estate of Madeline Gins. 110   6.2 Arakawa and Madeline Gins, The Mechanism of Meaning 6. Expansion and Reduction – Meaning of Scale, fig. 6.6., 1963–71/78. Acrylic, handkerchiefs, metal, oil on canvas in wooden frame, rubber balloon and rubber band on canvas, 244 × 173 cm. Photograph by Sally Ritts. Copyright © 1997 Estate of Madeline Gins. Reproduced with permission of the Estate of Madeline Gins.  113   6.3 Arakawa and Madeline Gins, The Mechanism of Meaning 3. Presentation of Ambiguous Zones, fig. 3.6., 1963–73/96. Acrylic, oil and pencil on canvas, 244 × 173 cm. Photograph by Sally Ritts. Copyright © 1997 Estate of Madeline Gins. Reproduced with permission of the Estate of Madeline Gins.  115   6.4 Arakawa and Madeline Gins, The Mechanism of Meaning 1. Neutralization of Subjectivity, fig. 1.5., 1963–73/96. Acrylic and photograph on canvas, 244 × 173 cm. Photograph by Sally Ritts.



List of figures

Copyright © 1997 Estate of Madeline Gins. Reproduced with permission of the Estate of Madeline Gins.  123   7.1 Nancy Spero, Notes in Time on Women, 1976–79 (detail from panel 17). Copyright © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts. Licensed by VAGA, New York/IVARO, Dublin 2016/ Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York. 134   7.2 Nancy Spero, Notes in Time on Women, 1976–79 (detail from panel 3/4). Copyright © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts. Licensed by VAGA, New York/IVARO, Dublin 2016/ Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York. 137   7.3 Nancy Spero, Notes in Time on Women, 1976–79 (detail from panel 12/13). Copyright © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts. Licensed by VAGA, New York/IVARO, Dublin 2016/ Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York. 138   8.1 Page from the exhibition publication, Lawrence Weiner: Displacement, 4 April 1991–2 February 1992. Copyright © 2015 Lawrence Weiner / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of Dia Art Foundation, New York. Photograph by Oren Slor148   8.2 Page from the exhibition publication, Lawrence Weiner: Displacement, 4 April 1991–2 February 1992. Copyright © 2015 Lawrence Weiner / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of Dia Art Foundation, New York. Photograph by Oren Slor154   8.3 Page from the exhibition publication, Lawrence Weiner: Displacement, 4 April 1991–2 February 1992. Copyright © 2015 Lawrence Weiner / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of Dia Art Foundation, New York. Photograph by Oren Slor157   9.1 Glass wall of myein installation, with exterior view of the US Pavilion, 1999. The United States Pavilion, 48th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy. Copyright © Ann Hamilton (artist), Thibault Jeanson (photographer). Photograph courtesy of Ann Hamilton Studio and Thibault Jeanson.  163   9.2 Ann Hamilton, myein (interior), with view of gallery inside the US Pavilion, 1999. The United States Pavilion, 48th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy. Copyright © Ann Hamilton (artist), Thibault Jeanson (photographer). Photograph courtesy of Ann Hamilton Studio and Thibault Jeanson. 166 10.1 Brian Dettmer, New Books of Knowledge, 2009. Hardbook cover, acrylic varnish, 16 × 26½ × 10 in. Image courtesy of the artist and Packer Schopf. 183 10.2 Doug Beube, The Silent Question, 2005. Altered book, 7 in. × 10 ft × 6 in. Image courtesy of the artist. 185

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10.3 Brian Dettmer, The Tower of Babble, 2011. Paperback books, acrylic varnish, 28 × 10½ × 10½ in. Image courtesy of the artist and Kinz and Tillou Fine Art. 10.4 Doug Beube, City, 1990. Altered books created between 1990 and 1996, 16 × 36 × 16 in. Image courtesy of the artist.

191 192

Contributors

Caroline Blinder is Senior Lecturer in American Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London. Recent photography-related publications include New Critical Essays on James Agee and Walker Evans: Perspectives on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (2010); ‘American alphabet: photo-textual politics in Paul Strand and Nancy Newhall’s Time in New England, 1950’, The Journal of American Studies (2015); ‘Brassaï’s Chair, Henry Miller and the Eye of Paris’, in Text and Image Relations in Modern European Culture (2011); ‘Sitting Pretty: Modernism and the Municipal Chair in the Work of Kertész and Doisneau’, in Regarding the Popular: High and Low Culture in the Avant Garde and Modernism (2011). Forthcoming publications include ‘Ruses and Ruminations: The Architecture of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men’, in The Centenary Edition of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (2016), and a book-length critical survey on the intersections between literature and photography: Vernacular Visions: The  American PhotoText 1930–1960 (2017). She is currently working on a contribution to the Oxford Research Encyclopaedia on ‘The Photo-Text’. Julie Phillips Brown (PhD, Cornell University) is an Assistant Professor of English at Virginia Military Institute. Prior to her appointment at VMI, she served as the N. E. H. Postdoctoral Fellow in Poetics at the Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Emory University. Her work as a painter, poet and graphic designer informs her research, which focuses on multi-dimensional and multimedia poetry, visual art and digital technology. Her current book project, Tactual Poïesis: Material Translation in Contemporary Women’s Poetry, examines visual and tactile innovations in works by Susan Howe, Cecilia Vicuña, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Amaranth Borsuk. Her essays and poems have appeared in Angels of the Americlypse: An Anthology of New Latin@ Writing (2014), Contemporary Women’s Writing, Columbia Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, Reconfigurations and Studies in American Culture. Catherine Gander lectures in the School of English at Queen’s University, Belfast, where her research addresses the conceptual, practical and philosophical cross-currents between literature and the visual arts in American culture

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and writing. She has published several articles on the subject in international peer-reviewed journals such as the Journal of American Studies and the Journal of Narrative Theory, and was the recipient of the biennial Peggy O’Brien book prize of the Irish Association for American Studies for her monograph, Muriel Rukeyser and Documentary: the Poetics of Connection (2013). She co-edited, with Sarah Garland, the special edition of the European Journal of American Culture on the American Imagetext (2013). She is currently working on two projects: the  recovery of a Deweyan aesthetics for a pluralistic approach to American avant-gardes, rethinking intermedial innovations in poetry and painting through new pragmatic understandings of their affective, cognitive, and social functions; and an examination of the role of art and aesthetics in twenty-first century American fiction. Sarah Garland lectures in American literature and visual culture in the Department of American Studies at the University of East Anglia. Her research looks at the intersections of literary and visual style, and at the functions of the author, artist, reader and audience in acts of interpretation. She has published in international collections and peer-reviewed journals on Gertrude Stein and food writing, on Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag and aestheticism, on baroque and modernist style, on Henry Miller, and on the American bestseller. She co-edited a special edition of the European Journal of American Culture on the American Imagetext (2013) with Catherine Gander, and is currently beginning ‘Packaging Experience’, an interdisciplinary research project on the American avant-garde multi-media magazine in a box, Aspen (1965–71).  Katy Masuga, University of Paris, Sorbonne fellow 2015–16, has taught literature and creative writing at Skidmore College in Paris since 2012. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature and a joint PhD in Literary Theory and Criticism with a focus on comparative modernisms and image and text relations, moving broadly across genres, periods and languages. She is the author of The Secret Violence of Henry Miller (2011), Henry Miller and How He Got That Way (2011) and The Origin of Vermilion (2016, fiction). She has two dozen essays and anthology chapters on subjects including Miller, Beckett, Blanchot, Wittgenstein, D. H. Lawrence, Frankenstein’s Creature, altered books and Shakespeare and Company in Paris and also regularly publishes short stories. Jessie Morgan-Owens is the Academic Director at Bard Early College, New Orleans. She received her doctorate in American Literature from New York University in 2009. Her research in photographic writing in the literature of abolition has been supported by a National Endowment of the Humanities grant and a residency at the Newhouse Center for the Humanities at Wellesley College. In addition to her academic work on photography, she shoots professionally for magazines with the award-winning team Morgan & Owens. Miles Orvell is Professor of English and American Studies at Temple University, Philadelphia. He is the author of The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in



List of contributors

American Culture, 1880–1940 (1989, 25th anniversary reprint 2014), which was co-winner in 1990 of the American Studies Association’s John  Hope Franklin Publication Prize; American Photography (2003); Photography in America (2016); and The Death and Life of Main Street: Small Towns in American Memory, Space, and Community (2012), Zocalo Public Square Book Prize Finalist. Orvell edited John Vachon’s America: Photographs and Letters from the Depression to World War II (2003) and was co-editor of Public Space and the Ideology of Place in American Culture (2009), and of Rethinking the American City: An International Dialogue (2013). He was Editor in Chief of the Encyclopedia of American Studies Online from 2004 to 2011 and received the Bode-Pearson Prize for lifetime achievement, awarded by the American Studies Association (2009). Orvell is presently working on a book on photography, ruins and contemporary culture, called America in Ruins. Joanna Pawlik is Lecturer in Art History at the University of Sussex, where she completed her DPhil in American Studies in 2008. From 2008 to 2011 she lectured in the Department of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Manchester, collaborating with the AHRC Centre for the Study of Surrealism and its Legacies. She was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Manchester until 2014. Her research interests lie in modern and contemporary American art, literature and culture, with particular emphases on transnationalism, avant-gardism and protest. She is currently completing a monograph, titled Remade in America: Transnational Surrealism 1941–1978, which explores legacies of Surrealism in American literary, artistic and activist cultures, focussing on how Surrealism was mobilised by the Beat Generation, the counterculture, the New Left, and the antipsychiatric and Black Arts movements. Katie L. Price earned her PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania, after which she was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto. She currently serves as codirector of the Philadelphia Avant-Garde Studies Consortium and Interviews Editor at Jacket2. Her research concerns twentieth- and twenty-first century literature and art, with an emphasis on North American experimental practices and their relationship to international avant-gardes. She publishes creative and critical writing, and is currently completing two major research projects: Playing at Pataphysics, and Pataphysics Then & Now, co-edited with Michael R. Taylor. Rachel Warriner recently completed her PhD in History of Art at University College Cork, which was supported by the Irish Research Council. Her thesis focuses on the work of Nancy Spero, considering the way in which pain was used as a political tool by the artist. She is also part of the curatorial project Pluck and is on the board of Artefact, the journal of the Irish Association of Art Historians. She has published on the work of Raymond Pettibon and Maggie O’Sullivan, has guest edited the Irish Issue of the The Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, and regularly writes for Enclave Review.

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Lauren S. Weingarden (PhD, University of Chicago) is Professor of Art History at Florida State University. She specialises in modern and contemporary art, architecture, literary theory, postmodern critical theory and word-and-image studies. She is the author of several books and articles on the late nineteenthcentury American architect Louis H. Sullivan, including Louis H. Sullivan and a 19th-Century Poetics of Naturalized Architecture (2009). She has also authored numerous articles on nineteenth-century French modernity, as defined by Charles Baudelaire and represented by Edouard Manet. She is currently completing a book based on this research titled Reflections on Baudelairean Modernity: The Mirror as a Parodic Device in 19th-century French Art and Literature. Most recently she has extended a Baudelairean trajectory to installation art. In 2011–12 she received a Fulbright Core Scholar grant for her project, ‘Trajectories of Baudelairean Modernity: Brazil’s Inhotim in Context’. Her research grants and fellowships also include the Dedalus Foundation Senior Research Fellowship for studies in modernism, visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, and the J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship in Art History and the Humanities, held at the University of Michigan.

Foreword Miles Orvell

Opening Mixed Messages, you will see a volume that affirms unequivocally the centrality of wordimage studies to contemporary scholarship. These essays argue collectively for a new way of thinking about the verbal and the visual, about literature and the arts, beyond what one might have called an ‘interdisciplinary’ approach. They establish through exemplary case studies an approach that opens up a new understanding of a score of artists and that broaches a new methodology as well. It would be impossible to impose any singular narrative or argument on this collection, but many discrete strands run throughout the whole, creating a configuration that is worth describing. Despite the changes of topic – from Louis Sullivan to Walker Evans to Nancy Spero to Ann Hamilton – one feels a common motive, a common purpose in this effort: to articulate our contemporary understanding of these complex texts in ways that respect the viewer/reader’s response. What are the strands that run through Mixed Messages? There is, first of all, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and one might posit the American philosopher as the major progenitor of this volume, by virtue of his celebration of the liberated imagination and of the power of the poet to see in things (whether circles or sunsets, trees or stones) the fluid poetry of the engaged mind. Emerson liberated poetry (in the broadest sense), while at the same time insisting on its physical connection with the common things before us, thus initiating a pragmatic current that would run, as Catherine Gander and Sarah Garland chart it in their introduction, through William James to the twentieth century and John Dewey. Yet Emerson assumed a connection between word and thing that exalted the poet at the same time that it might have closed off yet other circuits of the imagination, and many of the essays in this volume assume as their godfather not the American transcendentalist but the French-American conceptualist, Marcel Duchamp. We can surely tie Duchamp to Emerson in terms of the liberated imagination, the God-like powers of the artist, but Duchamp assumed a power of invention that would have staggered even Emerson. For Duchamp reverses Emerson, beginning not with the thing but with the idea about the thing (Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams would soon explicate the ­multiple

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Foreword

r­amifications of this theme); and Duchamp’s imagination would flourish in places Emerson would never dream of going – a hermetic conceptualism that would be annotated, boxed, miniaturised, hidden, exposed, replicated, allegorised. Duchamp’s conceptualism taught artists that language/idea/thing/ – what we call, after W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘imagetext’ – was a phenomenological node, a site of interwoven constructions, not to be separated; and we see this understanding in virtually all of the artists, post-Duchamp, who are discussed in this volume. Duchamp would also liberate the artist to challenge the basic components of the artwork – whether sense versus nonsense or blindness versus vision (Arakawa and Gins), or the concept of completeness versus fragment (Walker Evans), or the malleability of text beyond the printed page (Frank O’Hara and Norman Bluhm), or the concrete shape of language (Lawrence Weiner), or the metaphoric mutability of the object itself (Brian Dettmer and Doug Beube). Yet another strand in this collection concerns the materiality of the artwork, and here one might invoke the influence of Raymond Queneau and the Oulipo School [Ouvroir de littérature potentielle; workshop of potential literature] – referenced by several of the authors in this volume. Surely Duchamp and Queneau are confrères here, in terms of the playfulness of their approaches, as well as the shared tension between chaos and systematic order, between creation and destruction, that pervades their respective work. Reading about the gestural art of O’Hara and Bluhm, about the perverse playfulness of Arakawa and Gins, about Nancy Spero’s wilful misrepresentations of text, about Ann Hamilton’s fashioning a work on the border of opacity, about the astonishing book sculptures of Dettmer and Beube – one sees in these various manifestations, all admittedly quite different, a deep exploration of the materiality of the artwork. But placing the emphasis on the artwork itself, the object, would actually go against the grain of this whole collection. Beginning with Hawthorne, as Jessie Morgan-Owens beautifully shows us, the locus of attention is (Emerson again) the freedom of the imagination. And it is the freedom of the reader’s imagination, the viewer’s imagination, that is really the text in this volume. The authors focus on made objects, it is true, and they define the hybridities and fusions in these extraordinary works; but methodologically they are exploring the viewer’s response, gently guiding us away from the thing as text and into the response as text. In doing so, they give evidence of the embodied poetics that is mapped out so adroitly in the introduction by Gander and Garland. That introduction lays the theoretical groundwork for the applied case studies that follow, and it points us to a new way of thinking about wordimage relations. Virtually every essay in this volume pays tribute to the seminal work of W. J. T. Mitchell, and his work remains the most important foundation for wordimage studies of the last twenty years. Judging from the uses to which Mitchell is put here, we can give him another twenty years, at least. At the same time, Gander and Garland point beyond Mitchell’s approach – which accepts the primacy of the text – to an approach that is more reader/viewer centred and that integrates ­neurological



Foreword

research along with new thinking about the relationship between the body and the mind. In their concluding ‘Envoi’ (how nice to be reminded of Chaucer in this context: ‘Go, little book’), Gander and Garland expand on their effort to synthesise aesthetic genealogy and the neuroscience of attention, making note that our contemporary mentality is embedded in a screen environment in which images and words engage and disengage promiscuously on every webpage we visit: ‘Extended Mind Theory’, they note, marries our cognitive processes with the material forms with which we engage, in a confirmation of Marshall McLuhan’s insight, decades ago, that ‘all media are “extensions of man”’.1 I have referred to the essays here as case studies, and each of them opens up new ways of thinking, not only about their subjects but about collateral projects. At the same time, the reader will think of dozens of works, dozens of artists, whose work could fit comfortably into the scope of this volume. For example, leaving Hawthorne aside, only one essay touches on photography (Walker Evans) where studies of wordimage projects could find a virtual museum of possible subjects – from Lewis Hine and Edward Curtis to Margaret Bourke-White and W. Eugene Smith to Robert Frank and Rich Goldberg to Duane Michals, Gregory Crewdson and Jeff Wall. But Gander and Garland (in their Envoi) are pushing equally into the new arts of performance, of digital media, of hybrid sculpture, of embodied and disembodied consciousness. All of which is to say that the present volume points provocatively to directions that others will, I’m sure, be following.

Note 1 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Berkeley, CA: Ginko Press, 2002 [1964]). See Gander and Garland, ‘The idea, the machine, and the art: word and image in the twenty-first century. Envoi’, this volume.

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Acknowledgements

Both editors would like to thank Miles Orvell, for his generosity, intelligence and expertise; the contributors to this volume – their individual brilliance is even more dazzling when they are gathered together here; the delegates at our ‘American Imagetext’ conference in June 2011 at UEA, including W. J. T. Mitchell; the Walker Evans Archive at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, for permission to reproduce Walker Evans’s ‘Shoemaker’s Shop, Marigot, St. Martin’s, French West Indies’ on the cover of this volume; the peer reviewers of this book, for their insight, their enthusiasm and their generosity; and everyone we worked with at Manchester University Press, for their professionalism and support. Sarah would like to thank the Reversible Destiny Foundation, New York, and the Estate of Madeline Gins for their kindness in providing images and reproduction rights for this volume; James Hurley for unfailing love and support; Catherine Gander, for her consideration and generosity as a co-writer, for her tenacity, and for always being ready to uncork and share a new bottle of ideas. Catherine would like to thank the Grey Art Gallery, New York (particularly Michele Wong), for allowing me a private viewing of O’Hara and Bluhm’s Poem-Paintings and for being so kind and accommodating; Cary Bluhm, for her generosity in granting image reproduction rights; Alessio Benavoli, for providing endless calm, kindness, love and G&Ts; Sarah Garland, for her level-headedness, her humour, and for our shared capacity to work far more effectively when art, cake and coffee are present.

Introduction: to fasten words again to visible – and invisible – things Catherine Gander and Sarah Garland

Word and image studies have advanced immeasurably over the last twenty years or so. As yet, however, the interpretive strategies generated have focused largely on European products and philosophical traditions. This volume represents the first sustained and collective effort to resituate the critical discourse within an intellectual framework more fully matched to the particular contexts and histories of Anglo-American visual-verbal relations in works of artistic experimentation, and to bring together the complex relationships in these works between the imagistic, the symbolic and the concrete. Mixed Messages assembles essays on modern and contemporary works that challenge the historic separation of visual and verbal, instead reading poetry, illustrated texts, artists’ books, philosophy, conceptual art, architecture, painting, comic books, photography, digital media, installations and exhibitions as places where images and texts meet and are mutually enhanced. By returning to books and artworks as physical objects whose existence is relative to and interdependent with the viewing subject, the scholars in this volume, like the individuals whose work they discuss, move beyond semiotic trends in word and image studies to consider the materiality, and through this the sensuous and affective dimensions, of American experience. The American philosophical tradition – grounded in a phenomenology that is strongly pragmatic, a theory of cognition that is rooted in embodied experience, and an epistemology that is both bound up in the world of objects and that draws on transcendentalist and Romantic currents – can provide a new way to understand the messages of mixed media and the interarts generated by, within and about the United States. In his rakish, daguerreotyped self-portrait, etched in lieu of an author signature in the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855), Walt Whitman blended the rapidly developing techniques of photography with an innovative, vernacular poetry, using mechanical reproduction and the new technologies of the visible both metaphorically and physically to present himself, and his book, as a singular image of the multitude.1 By combining image and text, Whitman was attempting to bring together, and indeed create, ‘essentially the greatest poem’: America. Whitman incited his readers by example to defy the stability of singularity, ‘Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself … I am large, I contain multitudes.’2

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As Lauren Weingarden notes in her essay on Louis Sullivan’s transcendentalist blending of urban and pastoral architecture after Whitman, his words echoed his country’s central dilemma: the constant renegotiation of the concept of national unity with the reality of its internal diversity. For Whitman, as for his contemporary, the transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, key to the poetic ideal of capturing the American landscape as a true arena of cultural and ontological expression was to realign the visual and the verbal, to ‘fasten words again to visible things’.3 However, in the study of the literary and the pictorial in conjunction, from Gotthold Lessing’s Laocoön (1766) onwards, image and text, and imagery and the material, have been read largely as binaries and singularities, contradictory elements that collided and competed whenever they were brought together. This contrary relationship has been maintained by semiotic readings that seek to bring the methodology of literary studies to visual studies (and vice versa), by ekphrastic readings that look to create an equivalent or counterpart to the visual, and by thematic readings that bury the formal differences between representations in image and text in explorations of common content and concept. Scholarship continues to rely heavily on the application of critical theories that have their roots in the thinking of Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes, which, although initially useful, have now been repeated so often that the standard approach to mixed media work has become to dematerialise it into structural, systemic, metaphoric or thematic elements. Indeed, it is the contention of this book that the pervasive European methods of theoretical analysis in word and image studies have not made for significant advances in contemporary researches into American word and image relations. Criticism as dematerialisation cannot easily deal with the graphic surface of image and text works; nor can it easily work with notions of affect, or go further into how image and text might join formally and synaesthetically with sound, movement and touch. To make sense, for example, of Gertrude Stein’s counsel that ‘a writer should write with his eyes, and a painter paint with his ears’, we would argue that it is necessary not only to understand the historic context of her engagement with modern European aesthetics, but to recognise and entertain correspondences between the aural, oral, visual and metaphoric in her prose-poetry, and see those correspondences as at least partly grounded in her work with the physician, psychologist and philosopher, William James.4 As the essays in this book demonstrate, drawing from the American philosophical tradition can open new pathways into the particular historical contexts and formal details of inter-artistic works. That is not to say that transatlantic cross-currents do not exist in terms of method and style in modern word-image works. This collection, however, concentrates on the ways in which American artists, writers and practitioners have rejected, adapted or collaborated with European influences in an effort to ‘make new’. Reclaiming the history of that transatlantic conversation, we maintain, is also tracing the history of its American interlocutors, without falling back on exceptionalist paradigms. Just as the relationships between these national  influences can be ones of productive exchange and tension, of substitution, supplement or



Introduction

juxtaposition, the correspondence of forms – particularly in mixed media and intermedial work – can constitute an intervention in an established hierarchy of verbal and visual value and meaning. The contemporary globalised works and concerns in evidence in the contributions to this volume of Sarah Garland, Katie L. Price and Julie Phillips Brown respond to some of the latest, most markedly cosmopolitan moments in an American tradition that has always been in dialogue with non-American traditions; globalisation makes that dialogue all the louder. Thus, while several of the essays in this book address works that signify the vernacular and the national, the volume’s trajectory arcs towards a consideration of how understandings of globalised aesthetics and embodied experience might be combined with analyses of the formal aspects of artworks. Both exploring and advocating cross-disciplinarity, the scholars whose work is presented chronologically on the following pages share a number of fundamental concerns and inquiries. Foremost among these is the way in which the verbal and the visual not only relate to each other across disciplines, but across other modes, and across historical moments and cultures. The scholars in this volume conceive of words as spoken, seen and heard as well as read, and images are understood not only in the sense of both mental images and flat plane images, but also in the context of three-, four- (and, in the case of the pataphysical works in Price’s essay, and the Duchampian speculations in Garland’s essay, sometimes more) dimensional models that can be experienced visually, aurally, haptically and even, in the context of Ann Hamilton’s myein, olfactorily. Julie Brown’s contention that myein elicits ‘alternate reading practices which engage the entire sensorium at once’, for example, connects with her understanding of the immersive artwork as demanding a somatic commitment from the visitor in which testimony and witness are bound up in a ‘complicated and mutually transformative’ relationship between the human body and the text. She draws on Johanna Drucker’s formulation of ‘marked’ typography as one that ‘aggressively situates the reader in relation to various levels of annunciation in the text – reader, speaker, subject, author – though with manipulative utilization of the strategies of graphic design’.5 Rachel Warriner’s essay on Nancy Spero’s manifestary use of the imagetext also utilises Drucker’s work on marked and unmarked typography alongside an analysis of Spero’s polemical use of historic quotation to draw out affective resonances of texts treated as and with images. Weingarden’s essay on modernist architect Louis Sullivan’s metaphysical borrowings from Whitman and Emerson, Katy Masuga’s essay on Brian Dettmer’s altered books, Catherine Gander’s essay on the ‘conversational’ poem-paintings of Frank O’Hara and Norman Bluhm, and Garland’s essay on Arakawa and Gins’s installation practices, all consider the relationship between ideas as they are captured in books as sign systems and ideas as they are crystallised and lived, in buildings, books, action art and installations as physical, visual entities. The writers and artists who form the subjects of this collection, the authors of these essays argue, see mixture and multiplicity in form and in content as an opportunity for multi-sensory involvement, correspondence and creation.

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The basis for such a pluralistic approach is lodged in a prevailing pragmatic attitude to American thought, taking shape in the prizing of a human, multisensorial ‘experience’ of the world, in evidence from Emerson through John Dewey and William James to Richard Rorty and Stanley Cavell. This collection explores such embodied gestures, taking its cue from Dewey’s appraisal of ‘art as experience’ to offer multi-disciplinary approaches to understanding the everyday, practical importance of visual and verbal interrelations. The following essays demonstrate the ways in which such theory informs literary and artistic practice, aiming to challenge, if not overcome, the problems of critical expression in much contemporary word and image scholarship. The problem Dewey articulated in 1934 is still with us today: ‘the trouble with existing theories is that they start from a ready-made compartmentalisation, or from a conception of art that “spiritualises” it out of connection with the objects of concrete experience’.6 That word ‘experience’ has particular Anglo-American resonance, although understandings of the term vary widely between American and European traditions. One reason for the ‘compartmentalisation’ bemoaned by Dewey was the enduring legacy in the West of an Enlightenment philosophy of dualism, especially in theories of meaning-making and aesthetics. As human engagement with elements of beauty and nature were increasingly separated from practical commitments to the workings of daily life, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy and psychology advocated the delineation of the ‘mind’ to distinct faculties such as reason, understanding, sensation, feeling and imagination, which in turn could be grouped into two camps: cognitive and corporeal. As several contemporary philosophers of mind (Mark Johnson chief among them) have pointed out, ‘this differentiation of cognitive functions reinforced a pervasive mind/body dualism and generated a series of foundational dichotomies between the “higher” faculties and functions and the “lower” ones – understanding versus sensation, cognition versus feeling, reason versus emotion’.7 Even Immanuel Kant, whose Critique of Judgment (1790) suggested a composite of imagination, feeling and reasoning in the experience of meaning, was loath to abandon the mutual exclusivity of the perceived relationship between cognition and emotion. These reductive theories were, as Johnson attests, ‘carried forward most fatefully into twentieth-century aesthetic theory’,8 and, we argue, remain crystallised in the tacit critical opposition between word and image. However, in the United States a resistance to classical dualism emerged. Ralph Waldo Emerson, generally now considered a proto-pragmatist in the American vein, was staunchly against the Lockean empiricist trust in sense data, equating it with Kant’s Understanding, and advocated a reconciliation of man and nature that combined a transcendental synaesthesia (Emerson’s infamous eradication of ‘mean egotism’ to become a ‘transparent eyeball … part or particle of God’) with a hearty ‘self-reliance’.9 Perhaps the first to fully voice a national need to split from European traditions of Reason and Aesthetics, Emerson, as Martin Jay has noted, was a friend of the family of William James, the ‘father’ of American pragmatism and a psychologist whose theories of embodiment



Introduction

and mind–body integration appear to owe something to Emerson’s essays on ‘Nature’ (1836), ‘The American Scholar’ (1837) and ‘Experience’ (1844). Emerson’s drive to reunite the human with the divine through a profound connection to the natural environment relies heavily on correspondences between what he saw as the falsely dichotomised human ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ faculties. If through feeling and sensation one can come to a cognitive understanding of one’s place in the world (and its attendant meanings), resulting in a closer correspondence with the ‘Oversoul’, then the way to this reconciliation is by return to a method of communication through which truth is channelled and received more directly than via the rhetorical rumblings of bookish learning. Real experience, for Emerson, required a ‘poet’ to see it and then translate it. This involved the profound understanding that original truth came to humanity as a ‘picture language’: ‘Nature offers all her creatures to [man] as a picture language … things admit of being used as symbols, because nature is a symbol, in the whole and in every part.’10 It is the poet’s eye, according to Emerson, that can ‘integrate the parts’ of the fragmented American landscape, because he who wields words correctly understands that they are but one symbol system in a semiotic universe: ‘we are symbols, and inhabit symbols’. Words have been dislocated from their original imagery, but Emerson’s belief that ‘wise men pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again to visible things’ carries with it an intrinsic commitment to a pragmatic notion of embodiment, whereby sensation, emotion and cognition conjoin in a fully processual experience of the world, and where words and images are part and parcel of a connective, integrated universe which is ‘the externalisation of the soul’.11 Emerson’s advocacy of both a visceral and symbolic connection to lived experience can be traced forward to John Dewey’s aesthetics, particularly, for the purposes of this book, his aesthetics of ‘art as experience’. As Thomas Alexander has noted, Dewey’s pluralistic notion of ‘experience’ has until quite recently been largely misunderstood, at least in philosophical circles. This is partly to do with Dewey’s decision to ‘reconstruct an existing language rather than fabricate a new one’;12 the European definitions of ‘experience’ that were pre-established during the Enlightenment tended to cloud understandings of Dewey’s interpretation of the term, because, as Alexander notes, ‘ever since Locke, the term had come to mean a subjective event, a constellation of “ideas” lodged inside a “mind” brought about by the operations of certain physical powers upon us’.13 For Dewey, however, experience is rooted in a more Emersonian naturalist embodiment, constituting an embodied process whereby a person’s interactions with her or his environment are mediated by the symbolic systems that human social relationships inevitably entail. In Experience and Nature (1925) and Art as Experience (1934), Dewey explains that the crucial dimension of experience is the aesthetic realm, or art. For Dewey, aesthetics is at the core of human significance, providing as it does an intense, dynamic and highly integrated experience of meaning, while utilising everyday resources of meaning-making. All the faculties and senses are engaged in ‘art as

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experience’ because there is always the impulsion for wholeness in order to make sense of the world. If the ‘highest because most complete incorporation of natural forces and operations in experience is found in art’, then art, for Dewey, is organically ‘the culminating event of nature as well as the climax of experience’.14 Dewey’s notion of embodiment, therefore, turns on the human’s (or creature’s) active engagement with and through his or her environment; the body becomes the event of meaning itself. ‘In this connection the usual sharp separation made between art and science is criticised’, asserts Dewey.15 Traditional arguments separating disciplines, faculties and social symbol systems are not given credence in Dewey’s pragmatist philosophy of embodiment, because we are always already engaged with our environment, and there is no absolute division between the organism and its surroundings. However, this holistic interpretation of experience and meaning-making was never fully understood or adequately applied to the spheres of ‘art and science’ until the late twentieth century. Alexander states that until Richard Rorty brought about its revitalisation with his 1979 book, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Deweyan thought ‘had suffered virtual total eclipse since his death at the age of ninety-three in 1952’.16 This is not entirely true; as Gander’s essay demonstrates, Deweyan aesthetics pervaded the New York art scene at the very least during the 1950s and into the 1960s. Deweyan ideas about education were also inspiring and travelling outwards from the radical practices in evidence at Black Mountain College, North Carolina, in this period. In terms of aesthetics, however, Dewey’s concepts both of embodiment and of art as the locus of a heightened, integrated experience of meaning were largely ignored and misunderstood. Perhaps the closest approaches to this pragmatist tradition were made in the field of visual psychology. Rudolph Arnheim’s ground-breaking texts Art and Visual Perception (1954) and Visual Thinking (1969) appealed to Gestalt psychology to argue for a ‘perceptual thinking’ that refutes a Cartesian mind/body dualism and celebrates the embodiment of thought and meaning. ‘Perception starts with the grasping of striking structural features’, Arnheim wrote in 1954, anticipating advances in cognitive linguistics and neuroscience by thirty years.17 At roughly the same time, Nelson Goodman’s analytic aesthetics formulated a turning point in AngloAmerican philosophy: Languages of Art (1968) remains ground-breaking in its semiological dismantling of the divide between artistic and scientific practices in a general theory of mind. Goodman’s thesis of symbolic cognitivism, whereby our experience of the world is represented to us in a series of separate semiotic systems, situates words and images as equally important in our creation and recording of experience. However, as the book’s title would suggest, Goodman’s stance was linguacentric; if analogy and reference are equivalent to symbolising in Goodman’s view, then not only does language provide the template for comprehending verbal and visual symbol systems, but these systems remain both locked in and distinctive. Since the 1980s pragmatist approaches stemming from Deweyan philosophies have infused several areas of artistic and scientific enquiry, laying the ground for



Introduction

a more unified conception of multi-modal works. The now prevalent Embodied Mind Theory (EMT) assumes an essentially pragmatist point of view, in that it shares several of pragmatism’s key evolutionary tenets of cognition: namely, that embodied cognition is situated within a dynamic, phenomenological relationship between organism and environment; that it ‘operates relative to the needs, interests and values of organisms’; and that it is social and correspondent – ‘carried out co-operatively by more than one individual organism’.18 What’s more, EMT holds that cognition is an active process, not a mimetic response to external stimuli. The range and reach of theories of embodied cognition are too extensive to detail in this introduction, but suffice to say that enquiries into areas of narrative theory, aesthetics, linguistics, psychology, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, evolutionary biology and philosophy have all benefited from developments in this area. Some of the most exciting implications for word and image studies derive from the notions that both image and text are derived from bodily experience. This too has the potential to radically undercut the traditional opposition set up between written texts as mind-bounded symbolic systems and pictorial images as sensory and affective structures. For example, researches by the likes of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson into cognitive poetics have uncovered the physiological connections between our use of metaphor and verbal imagery and our sensory interaction with our environment, going further to link these findings to a neuronally embedded empathy with others.19 Johnson argues that ‘since much of art makes meaning without words or linguistic symbols, art reminds us that meaning is not the exclusive purview of language. Indeed, linguistic meaning is parasitic on the primordial structures and processes of embodied interaction, quality and feeling.’20 Philosopher of mind Shaun Gallagher leads the way in a renewed disciplinary interest in the intersubjective corporeality of embodied phenomenology (after Dewey and Maurice Merleau-Ponty).21 Psychology  philosophers such as Jesse Prinz and Antonio Demasio have extended William James’s theories of embodied emotion (i.e., emotions are forms of perception of bodily interactions with the world) to examine the pathways linking perception and feeling in the cognitive neuroscience of emotions, including emotive reactions to artworks.22 This new path of investigation has led to the hybrid discipline of neuroaesthetics, in which scholars such as Margaret Livingstone, Semir Zeki, Barbara Stafford and G. Gabrielle Starr are making interesting steps in mapping the neural substructures of aesthetic experience in order to reconfigure our relationship with the arts.23 These researches are profoundly pragmatic, acknowledging and extending Dewey’s emphasis on embodied cognition and art as process whereby percept and concept interpenetrate in our experience of the world, and must be understood in correspondence, not in competition. Taken seriously by the humanities and beyond, they have the potential to overhaul our understanding of the role of indexicality in both image and text, and to connect words and pictures as they are conventionally understood to embodied arts like dance and

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song, to the gesamtkunstwerk, and to those arts such as architecture, painting, sculpture and calligraphy that preserve the body’s traces in the final work. In another context, this is perhaps one of the resonances of James Elkins’s consideration of non-Western  traditions of image-making in On Pictures and the Words that Fail Them (1998). Here, Elkins traces word and image as interdependent concepts in ‘the Greek etymology of graphein, the Chinese text on the origins of painting, and the Persian history of painting and calligraphy’ and in the Visn ̣udharmottara Purān ̣a  so that ‘“image–making” depends on painting,  which  comes from  dancing, which relies on instrumental music, which derives from vocal music, which springs from language itself’.24 As Joanna Pawlik quotes Chicago Surrealist Franklin Rosemont observing, Krazy Kat ‘owes much to its graphic interpretation of the primordial urge to dance’ and in this sense  reminds  us that ‘it is our whole bodies that read’. Importantly, dance is invoked in other essays in this collection. Gander notes that O’Hara was an avid follower of dance, and his collaborative Poem-Paintings with Bluhm have been interpreted as balletic gestures; Spero’s Notes in Time on Women also alludes to dance in its corporeal expression of freedom in ‘Appraisals, Dance and Active Histories’. In this model the artist, the performer and the receiver’s experience of meaning in the world includes – that is, is not set up in opposition to – the experience of making and apprehending artworks. This continuity between the experience of art and that of everyday life forms one branch of the kind of pragmatism found in Susanne Langer’s and Brian Massumi’s scholarship on participation and absorption. It is also found in the dedication to perceptual and intellectual change that runs through the Romantic works in this book, as well as the modernist, dissident, avant-gardist and postmodernist works that seek to transfer radically altered meaning or experience from the work to the world. These works assume that experiences of and through words and images are complex and entangled parts of a wider lived whole that involves intricate networks between emotion, perception and cognition. As Hans-Georg Gadamer writes: ‘In the experience of art there is present a fullness of meaning which belongs not only to the particular content or object but rather stands for the meaningful whole of life.’25 If aesthetics looks to be creating increasingly more connections and exchanges between physical and cognitive processes, advances have also been made in extended cognition studies, leading to a theory of cognitive integration that deconstructs another implicit split, this time between embodied mind and disembodied matter. Andy Clark and David Chalmers first formulated Extended Mind Theory in 1998, when they posed the simple question, ‘where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?’26 Clark and Chalmers’s theory that material, external devices – including written language – constitute a ‘supersizing’ of the mind in that they extend cognitive function out into the world holds that this coupling system is a process by which the mind constantly influences, and is influenced by, the ‘external’ world. Richard Menary has taken this further, posit-



Introduction

ing that ‘writing is thought in action’.27 In a passage that bears strong resemblance to Dewey’s own thought, Menary writes: It is through our bodies that we primarily engage with the world and through this engagement the body is constantly integrating with the environment. When body and environment co-ordinate, the environment becomes part of the resources the organism has for acting, thinking or communicating.28

Garland’s essay in this volume adopts this integrated approach to investigate the meaning-making patterns of what she calls ‘spatialised imagination’ in Arakawa and Gins’s installation project The Mechanism of Meaning – a project whose name recalls William Carlos Williams’s famous maxim that a poem is a ‘machine made of words’.29 Under this integrated approach, the artwork as machine and the reader are part of the same, moving, dynamic experience, and are recreated together in the moment of apprehension. As Gins puts it: ‘the artwork of interest beginning, middle, and always for us has been a PERSON’.30 A shared experiential materiality, particularly as it is tied in with physicality, becomes a third term that disrupts the binary of subject and object, as well as that of image and text. Not all of the following essays adopt a strongly pragmatist approach (nor should they, for that would be to advocate a reductionist perspective of the very type we wish to challenge). But they do, in some form or method, examine American correspondences in visual and verbal practices in terms that emphasise the conversational, combinative and embodied elements of making and reading meaning through the symbolic interactions of word and image. What is interesting for the editors and the contributors of this book is that the points of contact and overlap between these developments in literary, scientific and artistic disciplines remain largely untheorised. Investigations are vitally needed into how a combinative application of these approaches might help us assess the meaning of intermedial aesthetic experience. We are not assuming or arguing for a sameness in the cognitive processes of seeing images and in reading words; there have been enough researches into the workings of the human brain to tell us this would be foolhardy. We are, however, adopting the pragmatist stance that human experience is not (and should not have been) ontologically divided. The division of ‘verbal’ and ‘visual’ systems of meaning-making is erroneous, for as Johnson asserts, ‘the processes of embodied meaning in the arts are the very same ones that make linguistic meaning possible’.31 The so-called linguistic turn that dominated twentieth-century philosophy situated meaning as primarily linguaform and propositional.32 However, as Martin Jay affirms, there is danger in the assumption that ‘nothing meaningful can appear outside the boundaries of linguistic mediation’, because in that event ‘no term can escape the gravitational pull of its semantic context’.33 Price’s essay in this collection explores this position in relation to the conceptual artworks of Lawrence Weiner, whose apparently linguacentric aestheticism she reveals as a deep-rooted materialism, the meaning of which is located in language’s structural relations. As such, Price argues, Weiner’s works ‘defy media specificity, temporal fixity and spatial stability’ in order to

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‘continually negotiate between perceptive and cognitive modalities’. Johnson’s plea for ‘a Dewey for the twenty-first century’ is one that we share, not least in support of Dewey’s claim that meaning-making in art is in many ways ‘the exemplary or even paradigmatic case of all human meaning-making’.34 What cases can be made, then, for artworks – be they paintings, poems, comics, photographs, installations, sculptures or buildings – in which (and between which) significant formal, symbolic and aesthetic correspondences are made between words and images? And how may we write about them? Many of the works examined in the essays that follow play upon the relationships between different speeds of apprehending image and text elements, different physical scales of image and text, different levels and types of ambiguity between modes, different relationships to the senses and to embodied perception, different relationships with symbology and mental imagery, the difference between the eye’s saccades as it runs over a phrase or a sentence and as it roams across an image, different emotional valences between word and image, and different logical and illogical propositions. Indeed, one challenge when writing about this blending of differences is present in the fact that there is still no viable word for a viewer who also reads, or a reader who also views. The viewer/reader, reader/viewer, or viewer-reader, or reader-viewer that the authors of these essays work with is a makeshift term, and it brackets out the connotations of the body in a way that may not be helpful. (Arakawa and Gins use ‘reader-perceiver’, which is one step closer, perhaps.)35 If neuroscience seems to be proving W. J. T. Mitchell right in his suggestion that ‘all media are mixed media’, it is also true that – as he goes on to suggest – ‘they are not all mixed in the same way, with the same proportions of elements’.36 These fine and shifting textures are, to borrow Whitman’s formula, multitudes contained within complex structures of perception and understanding, and it is for this reason that we are not proposing a single taxonomy of word and image relations. Mitchell, Elkins and others have lamented the fact that meaning in the visual arts is reduced to representation, is described in verbal terms that attempt to master or even ‘other’ the visual. In On Pictures and the Words that Fail Them Elkins reminds us of the common genesis of pictures, writing and notation in mark-making, arguing that the absolute distinction of image, text and notation dissolves when one searches for origin stories. The earliest examples of markmaking, he argues, writing about a Middle Paleolithic disc with a man-made cross through the centre, ‘might have been, in short, a picture, a sign, a token, a gesture, a sculpture, an image or a meaningless artifact’.37 This ambivalence, he argues, is ‘at the root of all Western image-making’, and can only in practice be reduced by contextualising the object.38 Still, ambiguities and ambivalences remain, particularly at the level of the individual mark which can shift between semiotic and sub-semiotic modes fairly easily in, for example, the case of handwritten and painted forms. Cy Twombly’s work might be a case in point here: in paintings such as those in the Note series (2005–07) or Nini’s Painting (1971) Twombly’s line and brushstroke reprises script without signifying as script, while in works such as Quattro Stagioni (A Painting in Four Parts) (1993–95) he uses legible



Introduction

words alongside sub-semiotic marks to produce an energetic counterpointed play between inscription and coloured daubs and patches. The essays in this collection occasionally employ the term ‘imagetext’ to refer to those cultural products in which the written word and the visual image are in some way contiguous. Coined by Mitchell in 1994, ‘imagetext’ is a word the compound nature of which attempts to do away with notions of conflict and binarism that the two words, if hyphenated or split by a forward slash, represent: The slash designate[s] ‘image/text’ as a problematic gap, cleavage, or rupture in representation. The term ‘imagetext’ designates the composite, synthetic works (or concepts) that combine image and text. ‘Image-text’, with a hyphen, designates relations of the visual and verbal.39

A pioneer in word and image studies, Mitchell’s Picture Theory (1994) and earlier Iconology (1986) are seminal texts in the field, not only for bringing the importance of such studies to the surface of researches in art, literature and culture, but also for highlighting the dangers in traditionally comparative readings that rely too heavily on prevailing tropes of differentiation (temporal and spatial, conventional and natural, for example) between visual and verbal representation. Such interartistic comparison, as fellow pioneering scholar Wendy Steiner has stated, ‘reveals the aesthetic norms of the period during which the question is asked’, which in turn helps us define our own, contemporary aesthetics – an endeavour that discloses both ‘value’ and ‘disappointment’.40 However, Mitchell’s claim that ‘the best preventative to comparative methods is an insistence on literalness and materiality’ is one with which the essays in this collection agree.41 Thus, contributions by Blinder, Brown, Gander, Garland, Masuga and Price especially support Mitchell’s proposition that we approach language and visuality in intermedial works as a ‘heterogeneous field of discursive modes requiring pragmatic, dialectical description rather than a univocally coded scheme’,42 while simultaneously pushing beyond this formalist materialism to consider language and art as processes in correspondence and conversation. This collection, then, by helping to redefine the ‘imagetext’ and the ‘image-text’ to allow for understandings of materiality, embodied experience and cognition, serves Mitchell’s call for ‘a critical openness to the actual workings of representation and discourse, their internal dialectics of form understood as pragmatic strategies within the specific institutional history of a medium’.43 It is no coincidence that three of the essays – by Blinder, Gander and Price – call upon the thought of a poet whose commitment to the vernacular of everyday American experience is expressed via a profound engagement with visual and verbal realms of creative expression. William Carlos Williams, whose training as a doctor of medicine allowed him a heightened understanding of the connections  between human physiology, perception and cognition, advocated an ‘embodiment of knowledge’ that refuted the false ‘opposition’ between science and the arts (including philosophy), and argued for ‘the integrity of the human organism  – thought and feeling, sense and intellection, mind and body’.44

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Williams’s poetics revolved throughout his life around two central themes: the processes of what he understood as ‘imagination’ – the creative force, capable of repeating evolution – and the application of that force in the interaction of the self with ‘things’ to reveal a profound, embodied knowledge of the world. For Williams, the path through both was visual; in several ways, he remains the twentieth-century incarnation of Emerson’s figure of the poet, fastening words again to visible things in a manner that articulates and evokes their connected existence and pluralistic workings on the self’s body and mind. In her discussion of Walker Evans’s polaroids, Blinder invokes Williams’s strikingly Deweyan conviction that it is the artist’s job to apply his gift of seeing and expression to ‘everything, every day, everywhere’ in order to ‘elucidate, to fortify and enlarge the life about him and make it eloquent’.45 The observant snapshot images of Evans’s later oeuvre correspond with the immediate particulars of Williams’s poetry, to his keen attention to the ‘stuff’ of contemporary experience, often found by the roadside and otherwise overlooked. By helping to give things an eloquence, Williams as poet-artist is not ventriloquising the image but allowing it a verbal expression that enlarges it in the reader’s mind. As Price comments in relation to Weiner’s suggestive syntactical strokes, there is both an ambiguity and directionality of linguistic meaning in Williams’s most famous poem ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ that opens a space on the page and in the mind for the pluralistic potentiality of meaning. If, as Williams argued, there are ‘no ideas but in things’, there are also no things but in the ideas of them, and images and the words that evoke those images (be they mental or otherwise) are engaged in perpetual conversation. This is the setting for Gander’s interpretations of Frank O’Hara and Norman Bluhm’s Poem-Paintings, which, she argues, both conceptually and formally assume Williams’s definition of the poem as ‘a field of action’ in which visual and verbal gestures inform and enlarge each other in an energetic back-and-forth. Gander has written elsewhere about Williams’s use of image schemas and formal visuality in his ekphrastic poetry, noting the ways in which recent advances in neuroaesthetics aid our understanding of the correspondences between perception and cognition – between the (written, spoken) word and (visual, mental) image – in Williams’s verse.46 Such cross-disciplinary approaches push the boundaries of word and image studies beyond comparative paradigms, aligning with Williams’s own contention that A new world is only a new mind and the mind and the poem are all apiece.47

Blinder’s essay also connects this multi-perspectival approach to pragmatic aesthetics. Both authors explore elements of the gesture as aesthetic abstraction, examining the social spirit of art by suggesting new ways of looking at works in which abstracted images and verbal symbols work alongside and with each other to reconfigure relations of affect, memory and the everyday. Katy Masuga’s



Introduction

essay extends Williams’s edict of ‘no ideas but in things’ to a penetrative discussion of Brian Dettmer and Doug Beube’s book sculptures. Her appropriation of Mitchell’s notion of ‘double consciousness’ to investigate the potentialities of meaning within three-dimensional imagetexts from which words have been carved connects to embodied cognition’s functioning along the double, intertwining pathways of non-conscious and conscious processes. Pushing the dimensions and meanings of the ‘imagetext’ into a realm of semiotic materialism, Masuga utilises Wittgensteinian concepts of mental imagery to demonstrate relationships between aesthetic conception and linguistic preconception. While Williams remains very much grounded in the visible world, many of the works in the pages that follow seek to use image and text together either to invoke the unseen or the supra-seen, or to rework perception to create it as a form of visionary newness. In this tradition words are both an entrapment in the quantified exchanges of the present, and a prompt to go beyond themselves. (Indeed, this paradox is manifest in the historic use of the term ‘experience’; as Jay has written, despite being a ‘term of everyday language’, the word ‘experience’ ‘has often been used to gesture towards precisely that which exceeds concepts and even language itself’.)48 That this Romantic paradigm remains an influential one for this collection far beyond the end of the Romantic movement suggests that part of the correspondence between image and text is about loss, about death, and about evoking something – often in these essays, an ideal – beyond both the symbolic and the material. Jessie Morgan-Owens’s essay on Sophia and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s use of daguerreotypy as ‘linguistic practice’ draws on Emerson’s invocation to fix natural facts to language and its attendant blending of veracity and romance. The practice’s efficacy is tested when the Hawthornes record the eidetic image of the recovered corpse of a drowned girl in their note-books and novels, prompting Morgan-Owens to interrogate the relation between reality and reflection. For Hawthorne, she argues, ‘photographs are metaphors, not evidence’, which nevertheless work to stave off the loss of the visual object. In the opening essay, Weingarden manoeuvres the ancient metaphor ut pictura poesis (as in painting, so in poetry) to consider architect Louis Sullivan’s work as ut poesis architectura – a project ‘premised on architecture’s emulation of both lyric poetry’s intensely subjective expression and its sister art of naturalistic landscape painting’. Blinder’s essay adds to this philosophical continuum, moving from early transcendentalist ideas about photography, aesthetics and the phenomenological world, through to late twentieth-century polaroids. Her analysis of Walker Evans’s lesser-known works involves a renegotiation of Friedrich Schlegel’s contribution to Romantic aesthetics in the notion of the fragment that connects the polaroids with what she sees as a defining American aesthetic: ‘Emerson’s romantic, pragmatic idea of the American project as a never-ending process of creation’. Emerson’s rhetoric of correspondences in which ‘natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts’ persists as practitioners of the visual call on the image to intercede on behalf of the unsayable. Warriner’s critique of Nancy Spero’s imagetext installation as within the avant-garde tradition of the visual art

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manifesto makes a claim for the artist’s ‘redesignation of fragments into a different signifying register’. In Notes in Time on Women, argues Warriner, image and text are ‘set in tension with one another’ in order to create a materiality that challenges entrenched patriarchal semiological norms. The historical reach of these ideas also begins to construct a narrative about the ways in which debates that constrict the visual as literature’s ‘other’ have continually drawn on Romantic ideas about vision, seeing and understanding, as well as on an imagined split between intellectual and rational symbols and visceral, emotional images. The unseeable and unsayable is present in this collection’s later essays in a very different mode, too, where the image and text combinations are used to highlight the limits of language in nonsense, illogic, humour and dissonance. This play between image and symbol underscores Joanna Pawlik’s reading of the ways in which the Chicago Surrealists’ invocation of a comic-book ‘hysterical hieroglyph’ that encodes a revolutionary pleasure principle attempts to reconcile Marx’s reading of the products of labour as social hieroglyphs with Freud’s reading of dream images as ‘priestly hieroglyphs’. The subversive and anarchic capacity of the image-text to construct moments beyond linguistic logic is also in evidence in essays by Price and Garland, who find moments of meaningful, politicised destruction in avant-garde works that have been called Surrealist, Dadaist and Conceptual, and in works that embody the constructive critical dialogue with European and Asian aesthetic traditions. Like Pawlik, Warriner looks at the political potential for radicalising meaning in mixed media texts, and, like Garland and Gander, she invokes the avant-garde manifesto as it is used to draw out questions about the ways in which mixed formal economies can take apart old habits of, and old oppositions between, looking, gazing and reading. In this introduction and the essays that follow, we have not sought to present fixed methodologies and argue for specific approaches to such pluralistic problems as reside at the intersections of word and image. Rather, we offer new pathways into discussions on the relations between visual studies and textual practices. These pathways necessarily cross the fields of aesthetics, physiology, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, literary studies, philosophy and art history. We are deeply interested in moving beyond word and image studies that read verbal–visual relations in terms of arguments and metaphors49 and for this reason we propose a set of methods that emphasise a more historically and culturally specific position, arguing for a more physical, embodied and processual approach that stresses the experience, production and ontology of the cross-currents between words and images. The following essays are themselves correspondences, and provide illuminating perspectives on the ways in which the mixed messages of word and image continue throughout the twentieth and twenty-first century to  throw light on the formation and understanding of the modern American imagination.



Introduction

Notes   1 Miles Orvell has written convincingly of the influence of the camera and the exhibition hall on Whitman’s poetic vision and technique in The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880–1940 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1989).   2 Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, ed. Michael Moon (New York and London: Norton, 2002), p. 77.   3 Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Nature’, in Emerson’s Prose and Poetry, ed. Joel Porte and Sandra Morris (New York: Norton, 2001), p. 37.   4 Robert Bartlett Haas (ed.), A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1971), p. 31. For Stein and pragmatism, see Joan Richardson, A Natural History of Pragmatism: The Fact of Feeling from Jonathan Edwards to Gertrude Stein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).  5 Johanna Drucker, The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909–1923 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 97.   6 John Dewey, Art as Experience (London: Penguin, 2005 [1934]), p. 10.   7 Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 210.   8 Ibid., p. 211.   9 Emerson, ‘Nature’, p. 29; ‘Self-Reliance’, p. 120, in Porte and Morris (eds), Emerson’s Prose and Poetry. 10 Emerson, ‘The Poet’, in Porte and Morris (eds), Emerson’s Prose and Poetry, p. 187. 11 Ibid. 12 Thomas M. Alexander, John Dewey’s Theory of Art, Experience and Nature: The Horizons of Feeling (New York: SUNY Press, 1987), p. xiii. 13 Ibid. 14 John Dewey, Experience and Nature (New York: Dover Publications, 1958 [1925]), p. xvi. 15 Ibid. 16 Alexander, John Dewey’s Theory, p. xi. 17 See George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 18 Johnson, The Meaning of the Body, p. 119. 19 See George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999). 20 Johnson, The Meaning of the Body, p. 218. 21 See Shaun Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006). 22 See Jesse Prinz, Gut Reactions: A Perceptual Theory of Emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Antonio Demasio, Decartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain (New York: Vintage, 2006). 23 See Margaret Livingstone, Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing (New York: Abrams, 2002); Semir Zeki, Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Barbara Stafford, A Field Guide to a New Meta-Field: Bridging the Humanities-Neurosciences Divide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); G.  Gabrielle Starr, Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013).

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Mixed messages 24 James Elkins, On Pictures and the Words that Fail Them (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 204. 25 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Crossroad, 1960), p. 63. 26 Andy Clark and David Chalmers, ‘The Extended Mind’ (1998), in Richard Menary (ed.), The Extended Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), pp. 27–42, p. 27. 27 Richard Menary, ‘Writing as Thinking’, Language Sciences, 5 (2007), 621–32, 630. 28 Richard Menary, Cognitive Integration: Mind and Cognition Unbounded (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 77–8. 29 William Carlos Williams, ‘Author’s Introduction (The Wedge)’, in Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams (New York: New Directions, 1954), p. 256. 30 Martin E. Rosenberg, ‘An Interview with Arakawa and Gins’, January/February 2010, https://independent.academia.edu/MartinERosenberg. 31 Johnson, The Meaning of the Body, p. 209. 32 Ibid., p. 213. 33 Martin Jay, Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006), p. 6. 34 Johnson, The Meaning of the Body, pp. 212, 218. 35 Terminology relating to the skilful practice of reading word-image interventions is also lacking. James Heffernan’s coinage ‘picturacy’ perhaps come closest. See James A. W. Heffernan, Cultivating Picturacy: Visual Art and Verbal Interventions (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2006). 36 W. J. T. Mitchell in Oliver Grau (ed.), MediaArtHistories (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), pp. 395–408, p. 399. 37 Elkins, On Pictures and the Words that Fail Them, p. 164. 38 In that chapter Elkins is also arguing that the ‘triad of pictures, writing and numerical notation is richer by half than the commonplace duality of word and image’ (On Pictures and the Words that Fail Them, p. 165). This volume begins to interrogate this; however, there is still much more work to be done on this question, particularly in the relationship between mathematical symbols, the body and mental imagery. See George Lakoff and Rafael E. Núñez, Where Mathematics Comes From (New York: Basic Books, 2000). 39 W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 89. Emphasis in original. 40 Wendy Steiner, The Colors of Rhetoric (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 18. 41 Mitchell, Picture Theory, p. 90. 42 Ibid., p. 97. 43 Ibid. 44 Ron Loewinsohn, ‘Introduction’, in William Carlos Williams, The Embodiment of Knowledge, ed. R. Loewinsohn (New York: New Directions, 1974), p. xxiv. 45 Blinder’s quotation in her essay in this volume, from William Carlos Williams, ‘Sermon with a Camera’, New Republic (October 1938), 282. 46 Catherine Gander, ‘“The Physiology of the Nervous System and the Processes of the Imagination”: Ekphrasis and Artful Language in William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All’, paper delivered at IAWIS/AIERTI (International Association of Word and Image Studies) triennial conference at the University of Dundee, 11–15 August 2014; in production for publication at time of going to press.



Introduction

47 William Carlos Williams, Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems: Collected Poems, 1950–1962 (New York: New Directions, 1962), p. 76. 48 Jay, Songs of Experience, pp. 4, 5. 49 Liliane Louvel’s valuable, if Eurocentric, Poetics of the Iconotext (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011) is a prime example of this approach.

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A poetics of organic expression: Louis Sullivan’s transcendentalist legacy in word and image Lauren S. Weingarden For most of the twentieth century, modernist viewers dismissed Louis H. Sullivan’s architectural ornament and his lyrical, theoretical writings as emotional outbursts of an outmoded romanticism. Taking Sullivan’s notorious dictum, ‘form follows function’, as their critical standard, modernist historians such as Hugh Morrison and Sigfried Giedion imposed a strictly utilitarian reading upon his skyscraper designs.1 In order to claim Sullivan’s place as a father of twentiethcentury modernism, they extolled his designs as direct expressions of a building’s internal structural, spatial, programmatic and material conditions. In doing so, modernist viewers mistook Sullivan’s idea of organic expression as synonymous with their own rationalist-functionalist one. Yet when Sullivan wrote about the specifics of architectural practice and design, he deliberately undermined and even subverted practical problems and solutions. Instead, he focused on metaphysical ones, speaking of architectural design as the poetic practice of metaphorand symbol-making derived from nature. As we shall see, it was to this poetic end that Sullivan devised a geometric symbolism of primary structural elements and an organic style of ornament inspired by America’s native landscape conditions. In this essay, I contest the functionalist interpretation of Sullivan’s skyscraper designs and his system of architectural ornament.2 Here I present an alternative interpretation of Sullivan’s writings and designs by reclaiming his position within a nineteenth-century Romantic/transcendentalist discourse on organic expression. Such a discourse forged reciprocities between verbal and visual representations of nature and its vital essence, analogies akin to the ut poesis pictura tradition. It was in this historical, interartistic context that Sullivan sought to create a new American art, what he called ‘the true, the Poetic Architecture’.3 I thus review Sullivan’s artistic choices and his formation of an innovative means of organic expression by showing how he translated the Romantic ideal of ut poesis pictura – as in poetry, so in painting – into architectural forms, what I call ut poesis architectura – as in poetry, so in architecture. As the phrase is used here, the ut poesis architectura project is premised on architecture’s emulation of both lyric poetry’s intensely subjective expression and its sister art of naturalistic landscape painting. As I will show, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s writings on



A poetics of organic expression

language and poetry were central to Sullivan’s conception of organic expression and its symbolic representation. Subsequently, Walt Whitman’s poetry and prose were pivotal to Sullivan’s transformation of architecture into an image of the American landscape. Extending both the nationalist and spiritualist ends of his transcendentalist models, Sullivan conceived ‘the true, the Poetic Architecture’ as an architecture grounded in nature and the forces that shape it. Since Emerson’s idea of a new American art informed Sullivan’s earliest and most fully developed artistic theory, I begin with a review of the architect’s transcendentalist legacy as it was transmitted from the philosopher. Sullivan was raised in the Boston area during the 1860s and early 1870s, where New England transcendentalism thrived. Here, Sullivan was schooled in Emerson’s teachings, which promoted the myth of America as the new Eden or ‘Nature’s nation’.4 To sustain this myth and thereby attain an indigenous art form, Emerson instructed artists in every medium to use the poet and poetic techniques as models for translating all things natural and manmade as symbols of the divine mind. As he put it, ‘Nature offers all her creatures as a picture-language … because nature is a symbol in the whole and in every part’.5 For Emerson, these symbol-making procedures would not only ensure America’s moral, spiritual and cultural progress but also guarantee a spiritual-organic unity between the fine arts and the applied, mechanical and utilitarian arts. He therefore prophesied, ‘Proceeding from a religious heart [‘genius’] will raise to a divine use the railroad, the insurance office, the joint-stock company; our law, our primary assemblies, our commerce, the galvanic battery, the electric jar, the prism, and the chemist’s retort; in which we seek now only an economical use.’6 In his essay ‘The Poet’ (1844), Emerson argued that the poet sanctifies the nation’s material gains by cultivating spiritual growth in nature. Emerson here identified the poet’s acts of naming and saying with the genius’s capacity for interpreting and recreating a universal, symbolic language of nature. He therefore defined the poet as ‘a beholder of ideas, and an utterer of the necessary and causal’.7 Emerson also described the poet’s creative process as a dynamic interaction with nature, in which the poet’s thoughts, actions and words become contiguous with ‘divine energy’ or the ‘Divine Mind’.8 Consequently, Emerson contended that the poet stands one step nearer to things, and sees the flowing or metamorphosis; perceives that thought is multiform; that within the form of every creature is a force impelling it to ascend to a higher form; and following with his eyes the life, uses the forms which express that life, and so his speech flows with the flowing of nature.9

For Emerson, the poet’s language functions for and represents the processes of metamorphosis. Poetry thus liberates language from its utilitarian purposes so as to follow nature in the creation of new forms through which metamorphosis takes place. In Emerson’s words: ‘[N]ature has a higher end, in the production of

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new individuals, than security, namely, ascension, or, the passage of the soul into higher forms’. He further explained that poetic ‘expression is organic, or, the new type which things themselves take when liberated’.10 To prevent materialist values from overtaking spiritual ones, Emerson proposed the poet’s linguistic acts as an aesthetic model for reconnecting manmade things with the cosmic whole. He further equated the severance of words from their origins with the ‘dislocation and detachment [of ‘things’] from the life of God’, and, he concluded, it is this severance ‘that makes things ugly’. The poet not only reconnects the disparate objects of nature with each other, but also, ‘by deeper insight’, he ‘re-attaches even artificial things, and violations of nature, to nature’. It was in view of this insight that Emerson differentiated the makers from the readers of poetry: Readers of poetry see the factory-village and the railway, and fancy that the poetry of the landscape is broken up by these; for these works of art are not yet consecrated in their reading; but the poet sees them fall within the great Order not less than the beehive or the spider’s geometrical web.11

As symbol-reader and symbol-maker, the poet presents ‘artificial’ things as changing facts of nature, answering the spiritual need of the ‘new age’ in two ways: he not only reconciles the disparate entities of God’s creation, but also creates new word-symbols from man’s creations to signify divine essence. When Sullivan addressed architectural matters from a theoretical position, he followed Emerson’s instructions to restore ordinary words and structural imagery to their organic meanings and symbolic functions. Notably, this etymological restoration pervades his treatise on organic architecture, entitled Kindergarten Chats (1901–02).12 Here, in a series of 52 chapters, Sullivan composed a pedagogical narrative of a classroom-trained architectural student’s initiation to organic architecture within a natural setting. The chapter entitled ‘What is an Architect?’ especially exemplifies how Sullivan responded to the Emersonian task of reconciling the natural with the manmade, on the one side, and to Emerson’s advocacy of poetic innovation, on the other, in similarly linguistic ways. Accordingly, Sullivan allows the student to redefine the word architect. The acolyte first denigrates the violated meaning of the architect as ‘an engineer, a carpenter, a merchant, a broker, a business man or what not’, attributes that altogether constitute ‘the hybrid-architect’.13 He then proceeds to proclaim the ‘true function of the architect’; that function being ‘TO INTERPRET AND INITIATE … such buildings as shall correspond to the real needs of the people’, both social and physical.14 The student’s (Emersonian) lesson is complete when he realises the linguistic analogy between words and building materials and the architect’s poetic/revelatory function in making this analogy concrete: It is not … the words that make the poem, it is the manner in which the words are marshalled, organized and vitalized, that makes a poem a poem. And just so with building materials; they must be organized and vitalized in order that a real



A poetics of organic expression building may exist. Therefore to vitalize building materials, to animate them collectively with a thought, a state of feeling, to charge them with a subjective significance and value, to make them a visible part of the genuine social fabric, to infuse into them the true life of the people, … as [when] the eye of the poet, looking below the surface of life, sees the best that is in the people – such is the real function of the architect; for, understood in these terms, the architect is one kind of poet, and his work one form of poetry … Truly it is inspiring, when one begins to acquire the faculty of looking at things with the inner or spiritual eye!15

In this chapter, as in the entire treatise, Sullivan guides the student from practical to poetic solutions. No less important, poetic solutions first and foremost require a mastery of the architect’s ‘technical equipment’ to gain ‘the efficiency and power to express the poetic thought – just as language and a knowledge of words are the technical equipment of the literatus’.16 Sullivan’s conclusion serves as an aphorism of the architect’s poetic function: ‘The true work of the architect is to organize, integrate and glorify UTILITY’.17 I now want to argue that Emerson’s exegesis regarding the poet’s mode of representing metamorphosis informed Sullivan’s credo ‘form follows function’. Indeed, Sullivan’s reattachment of architectural words and building elements to their natural and primordial meanings is pivotal to his lineage within the transcendentalist tradition. In this light, I maintain that Sullivan intended ‘form follows function’ to be synonymous with metamorphosis rather than the rationalist/functionalist attributes to which modernists ascribed. From this Emersonian perspective, Sullivan’s theoretical writings reveal his conception of architectural elements as word-symbols with which to compose building designs expressing the vital essence of nature and, more specifically, representing the American landscape. In Kindergarten Chats, Sullivan replaced the standard, rationalist definition of the axiom ‘form follows function’ with a deistic one. Here Sullivan allowed the student to express his advanced understanding: ‘In a state of nature the form exists because of the function, and this something behind form is neither more nor less than a manifestation of what you call the infinite creative spirit and what I call God.’18 Likewise, in his essay on the skyscraper, ‘The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered’ (1896), Sullivan indicated how he enacted the poet’s revelatory function as a namer or sayer. Here he redeemed the skyscraper from a commercial and technological enterprise into a God-given creation. As Sullivan put it, the true architect ‘must realise at once and with the grasp of inspiration that the problem of the tall office building is one of the most stupendous, one of the most magnificent opportunities that the Lord of Nature in His beneficence has ever offered to the proud spirit of man’.19 ‘The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered’ not only reiterates Emerson’s poetical notion of beautifying and thereby redeeming utility, it also replays Emerson’s poetical notion of rectifying the fragmentation of nature incurred by industrialisation and commodification. Just as the Emersonian poet’s restorative vision ‘re-attaches even artificial things, and violations of nature, to nature’ and to

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the ‘great Order’, Sullivan conceived the new ‘fact’ of the steel-framed skyscraper as an extension of and supplement to nature. In other words, Sullivan made these ‘new and necessary facts’ coalesce into the ‘logical’ foundation of poetic expression. These reconciliatory procedures concur with Emerson’s conclusion that when mechanical works are set to ‘noble and adequate’ tasks, they reveal ‘a step of man into harmony with nature’ and, in a related maxim, that ‘when science is learned in love, and its powers are wielded by love, they will appear the supplements and continuations of the material creation’.20 In ‘The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered’, Sullivan constructed a three-part exegesis that recounted how to proceed from material design ‘problems’ to their artistic ‘solutions’. He thus announced ‘the tall office building … as a problem to be solved – a vital problem, pressing for a true solution’. To initiate this solution, Sullivan identified the specific, practical forces that shaped the new form: offices are necessary for the transaction of business; the invention and perfection of the high-speed elevators make vertical travel, that was once tedious and painful, now easy and comfortable; development of steel manufacture has shown the way to safe, rigid, economical constructions rising to a great height; continued growth of population in the great cities, consequent congestion of centers and rise in value of ground, stimulate an increase in number of stories; these successfully piled one upon another, react on [property] values – and so on, by action and reaction, interaction and inter-reaction.21

Proceeding to the second phase, Sullivan presented his logical solutions to the general problem, providing a rationalist analysis of his skyscraper style. Starting with the programmatic exigencies of the plan and ending with the tectonic and spatial solutions in the superstructure, he enumerated six practical functions and their reciprocal ‘forms of expression’. According to this scheme, Sullivan first treated the basement as a hidden container for the central electrical, plumbing, heating and ventilating equipment. He then described the next two areas – the ground- and second-storey bank and retail facilities, occupying large, open layouts enhanced by widely spaced structural piers and by broad plate-glass windows for direct, natural light. Regarding the fourth section, consisting of uniformly treated office cells, Sullivan frankly stated that these cells ‘look all alike, because they are all alike’. Sullivan drew particular attention to the attic storey as the fifth element of design. Here, he explained, ‘the circulatory system’, emanating from the machinery contained in the basement level, ‘completes itself, and makes its grand turn, ascending and descending’. Finally, Sullivan explained the contrast between the broad expanse of the attic wall and the strong horizontal projection of the cornice, as an aesthetic expression of ‘the fact, – namely, that the series of office tiers has come definitely to an end’.22 Having articulated the pragmatic problems and solutions, Sullivan then reformulated the skyscraper problem to address its artistic-qua-transcendentalist solution. At this point, his pragmatic approach and lucid style shift to philosophical matters and lyrical prose writing. As he put it:



A poetics of organic expression Problem: How shall we impart to this sterile pile, this crude, harsh, brutal agglomeration, this stark, staring exclamation of eternal strife, the graciousness of those higher forms of sensibility and culture that rest on the lower and fiercer passions? How shall we proclaim from the dizzy height of this strange, weird, modern housetop the peaceful evangel of sentiment, of beauty, the cult of a higher life?23

Sullivan’s rhetorical shift matches his Emersonian turn in considering the artistic solution to the skyscraper. Specifically, he followed Emerson’s precept that the poet liberates language from its utilitarian functions to propel the ascension of the soul. Sullivan thus claimed ‘loftiness’ as the chief characteristic of the tall office building. Therefore, he asserted, the skyscraper ‘must be tall, every inch of it tall … It must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exultation that from bottom to top it is a unit without a single dissenting line’.24 To this end, Sullivan subordinated structural realism to poetic expression and symbolic forms in his skyscraper designs. The Wainwright Building (1890; figure 1.1) exemplifies how Sullivan made verticality the essence of skyscraper design. Here he paired structural piers with non-structural ones, accentuating their attenuated proportions in unbroken parallel lines. In the latter case, Sullivan exaggerated the recession of the horizontal spandrels, which mark the building’s upper floor-levels, with ornamental panels of deeply shadowed and highlighted relief surfaces that contrast with the piers’ smooth surfaces. This pier-and-lintel design masks the skyscraper’s steel-cage construction, which distributes load-bearing functions throughout the structure, thereby mitigating the pier’s supportive purpose in traditional construction and materials. Sullivan further emphasised vertical dimensions by raising the slender piers on a two-storey base and framing them between corner piers widened beyond structural necessity. While the actual, metallic corner supports are not much wider than the elevation supports, the broadened corner masses contrast with and thereby heighten the elevation’s vertical effects. Sullivan mirrored this framing system on the two main (south and east) street elevations to give the appearance of a unified rectangular block. In doing so, he obscured the (actual) irregularity of the mass that accommodates the asymmetrical U-shaped plan. On the west side elevation, four bays of the pier-and-lintel units, framed by broadened piers, recede into a light court, retained by an unadorned fenestrated brick wall. When viewing the Wainwright Building from street level, we can further discern how Sullivan suppressed logical and practical considerations to address higher aspirations. Following Emerson’s instructions for visualising metamorphosis, Sullivan guides the viewer’s eyes through the vertical dimensions of the rectangular mass to the attic storey. Here abstract rectilinear order dissolves into organic ornament (figure 1.2). In these unique designs, undulating curves and counter-curves intertwine with geometric and foliate motifs effecting nature’s ‘divine energy’. Sullivan crowned the ascending vertical mass with a boldly projecting cornice. Despite its actual size, the cornice seems to hover over the attic storey, an ephemeral effect enhanced by the dappled light and shade upon the ornamental relief surfaces.

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1.1  Adler and Sullivan, Wainwright Building, St Louis, Missouri, 1890–92.



A poetics of organic expression

1.2  Adler and Sullivan, Wainwright Building, detail of cornice. Photo: Paul Piaget.

In this building design, both the parts and the whole function metaphorically. Structural elements and mass-composition suggest but do not literally represent the technological facts. This metaphorical representation, in turn, functions for a metaphor writ large: the ornamented skyscraper represents the metamorphosis of material, manmade facts into the spiritual realm. By reformulating the skyscraper as an ‘artistic’ problem, rather than a technological or economic one, Sullivan demonstrated that as a poet-architect he used ‘not words but building materials as a medium of expression’.25 Now steel-frame construction encased in brick and terracotta became his materials for depicting the fluid reciprocity between physical and spiritual facts. In the Wainwright Building, the fusion of solid structural forms and evanescent surface textures resonates with the poet’s ‘speech which flows with the flowing of nature’. This metaphoric reading of the Wainwright Building provides a basis for explaining how Sullivan’s search for a new American style was consonant with the Emersonian poet’s acts of linguistic reconciliation. As we have seen, the poet as ‘language-maker’ not only names and speaks with word-symbols but also retrieves lost poetic origins of words. Emerson denounced the current ‘detachment’ of words from their natural meanings. To reverse this process he presented the poet as a ‘genius who repairs the decay of all things’ and ‘re-attaches things

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to nature and to the whole’.26 Sullivan invoked such passages from Emerson’s text in the conclusion to ‘The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered’. Here, he prophesied that when the true architect reveals ‘the beauty, the exquisite spontaneity, with which life seeks and takes on its forms in an accord perfectly responsive to its needs’, then ‘it may be proclaimed that we are on the high-road to a Natural and satisfying art, an architecture that will soon become a fine art, in the true, the best sense of the word’.27 This Emersonian reference, among others, suggests that Sullivan’s skyscrapers should be read as poetic acts, serving as the medium through which the poet-architect reconnected a technological fact with its natural origins. Walt Whitman’s poetry and prose provided Sullivan with an Emersonian model for reattaching words and manmade things to natural origins. More specifically, Sullivan derived from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass a poetic pattern and pictorial language with which to represent naturalised technology in the American landscape. It must be emphasised, however, that Sullivan concerned himself with later editions of Leaves of Grass, two volumes of which the architect owned. In these revised editions, the poet replaced his early dissonant free verse with the more conventional Romantic style of lyrical verse and rhythmical meter. Given this stylistic shift, Sullivan wrote to Whitman in 1887 praising him as ‘the greatest of Poets’, ‘who can resolve himself into unison with Nature and Humanity … [and] blend the soul harmoniously with materials’.28 Sullivan thus discovered in Whitman’s later works a concrete programme to realise, in the architect’s words, ‘the presence of American romanticism’ through which ‘nature yield[s] up her poetic secrets’ and brings to fruition a ‘national style’.29 From the time of writing this letter, Sullivan began to adapt the poetic behaviour of Whitman’s ‘divine literatus’ to his own artistic acts. In Democratic Vistas, the collection of Whitman’s theoretical essays published in 1871, the poet characterised the ‘divine literatus’ as a ‘seer’ who attaches wordsymbols to natural and manmade things so as to reveal ‘identities of the spiritual world’ and thus ‘indicate the path between reality and … souls’.30 Assuming this Emersonian role, Whitman revealed that incessant change in the real world was but a progressive unveiling of the ‘Kosmos’, a phenomenon manifested by the dynamic interaction of the ‘Me’ and the ‘Not Me’.31 He also explained how, as ‘divine literatus’, he reconciled apparently contradictory images of rural and urban existence and organic and mechanical forces into triadic symbols of the Kosmos, the Me and the Not Me. ‘Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun’32 best illustrates how Whitman used juxtaposition, parallelism and repetition of words and phrases to create an ideal synthesis of the city and nature with the cosmos, what has been called ‘urban pastoralism’.33 Whitman begins the poem by praising nature for its abundance of life and restorative forces, as summarised in the last line of part I: ‘Give me solitude, give me Nature, give me again O Nature your primal sanities’.34 In part II, however, he switches his allegiances to the city. Here, he admonishes nature, singing ‘Keep Your Splendid Silent Sun’, and instead he revels in the city clamour:



A poetics of organic expression

‘Give me faces and streets/ give me these phantoms incessant and endless along the trottoirs’.35 As literary historian James Machor has observed, throughout the poem Whitman sets up oppositions and tensions in order to dissolve them, by linking the two scenes of city and nature as ‘mirrored images’.36 The repeated parallel phrasing of ‘give me’ in each half of the poem suggests that nature and city equally fulfil the poet’s desire for ‘kinship’ and ‘plenitude’. The poem ends on this note, suggesting that a seeming choice between the two realms of experience is ‘unnecessary and even irrelevant’.37 ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’ (1860, 1881; a poem that Sullivan annotated in his copy of Leaves of Grass) is an example of how Whitman naturalised the industrial city.38 Viewing the Brooklyn cityscape from a river-borne ferry, the poet first identifies himself with the natural forces in the aqueous setting, and thereby reconnects the Me and the Not Me with the Kosmos. From this transcendental view, the poet shows how the city is all part of one ‘simple, compact, well-join’d scheme’.39 Whitman thus described urban sights and sounds as replete with visual and visceral pulsations ‒ foundries aglow with burning chimneys, skylines animated by glass and iron facades, and streets and wharfs resounding with human and mechanical forces. At the same time, he interlaced and dissolved these physical facts with ephemeral, natural modulations ‒ the scintillating rays of a setting sun, the rhythmic flow of river water and the graceful flight of airborne seagulls. Sullivan used Whitman’s example to fulfil his Emersonian task in two ways. First, he renamed the triadic structure of Whitman’s cosmology as the ‘Infinite Creative Spirit’, a primordial generative force, and its sensible elements, the ‘objective’ and the ‘subjective’. Secondly, he made an organic mode of ornament analogous to poetic expression of the landscape. Sullivan also conjoined Emerson’s theory of language with Whitman’s triadic cosmology by restoring the elemental language or the ‘alphabet of our architectural art’ to its organic origin. In doing so, Sullivan formulated an architectural symbolism analogous with Whitman’s word symbolism. In two chapters of Kindergarten Chats, Sullivan verbally reduced the pier, lintel and arch to ‘three physical facts [or] symbols’. Under the chapter titles ‘The Elements of Architecture: Objective and Subjective – Pier and Lintel’ and ‘Arch’, he re-infused primary structural forms with primordial meaning and codified their symbolic functions. On the one hand, he identified the vertical pier and the horizontal lintel with ‘growth and decay, the elemental rhythms of birth and death’.40 On the other, he declared that ‘The arch [is] the most nearly human and the most nearly divine. It is both objective and subjective to the utmost degree.’41 In the essay ‘Ornament in Architecture’ (1892), Sullivan articulated how he transformed poetic procedures into an architectural means of representation. Here he inquired: ‘Why do we need ornament?’42 He first answered this question by suggesting a moratorium on ornament so that the poet-architect could rediscover the beauty and primal meanings of ‘pure and simple’, ‘elemental’ forms; these he regarded as objective, logical articulations of ‘man’s relation to nature

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and to his fellow man’. However, for Sullivan, designing reductivist geometric mass-compositions was merely the first phase in making rational construction artistic. At this stage, Sullivan declared, ornament is ‘mentally a luxury, not a necessary’. Yet it was just this ‘luxury’ that Sullivan, the poet-architect, was most concerned with. He thus argued that ornament satisfies an emotional necessity, ‘a craving to express … romanticism’. Sullivan expressed this romanticism verbally and visually by conceiving ornament as ‘a garment of poetic imagery’ with which to clad ‘strong, athletic, and simple forms’.43 Viewing such statements in relation to his skyscraper designs, we can see that Sullivan reconceived ornament as the subjective, organic counterpart to the objectively rendered masscomposition and underlying steel skeleton. For Sullivan, when organic/subjective ornament and geometric/objective masses are created together, they converge as a symbolic representation of the Infinite Creative Spirit. As his poetical theory suggests, Sullivan conceived the ornamented skyscraper as a signpost of democratic vistas analogous to Whitman’s urban pastoralism. That is, the skyscraper takes its place in America’s cultural and natural landscape, at once signifying and contributing to man’s spiritual evolution. In nature’s nation, Sullivan pronounced, ‘the soul of man [is] free to grow, to mature, to seek his own’. ‘But’, he added, for this we must turn again to Nature, and … learn the accent of its rhythmic cadences. … We shall learn from this … that we behold the unfolding of the soul in all its beauty, and know that the fragrance of a living art shall float again in the garden of our world.44

From this image-making perspective, we should look again at how Sullivan designed the ornamented skyscraper as a representation of the landscape and its restorative function. In his most Whitmanesque skyscraper, the Guaranty Building (1894–96), Sullivan achieved the dialectical synthesis upon which his theory writing was based.45 By clothing the entire geometric framework and the (exposed) structural elements in a poetic ‘garment’ of ornament, he fully realised what he called ‘our image of poetic art: utilitarian in foundation, harmonious in superstructure’.46 Here, the subtly varied ornamental patterns simultaneously record and dissolve the tensions and junctures of the underlying steel-cage construction (figure 1.3). As well, repeated relief patterns enhance the piers’ ascending and descending lines to connote nature’s ceaseless rhythms of growth and decay. Sullivan elaborated this rhythmic continuum by replacing the piers’ flat entablatures, used in the Wainwright Building, with half-circle arches that spring from slender vertical supports and adjoining extrados. In the attic storey, Sullivan further mitigated the objective-subjective duality of skyscraper construction. In doing so, he extended the pier-and-arch contours into interlacing strapwork and botanical flourishes that reach beyond and dissolve the cornice frame. Finally, if we view the entire building as an architectural means of poetic expression, the interaction of reductivist structural frame and scintillating surface textures evokes a process of dematerialisation. This process sustains an organic harmony



A poetics of organic expression

1.3  Adler and Sullivan, Guaranty Building, Buffalo, New York, 1894–96, detail of column capital and lintel. Photo: John Szarkowski.

comparable to Whitman’s verbal interweaving of urban imagery with the evanescent rhythms of nature. In conclusion, I want to review Sullivan’s poetic project as it was lastly realised in the Schlesinger & Mayer Store (later Carson Pirie Scott Department Store, 1898–1901).47 In this design, Sullivan apparently separated the objectiveutilitarian functions from the poetic functions of architectural design. The superstructure grid of showrooms and offices starkly contrasts with the ornate foliage that envelops the two-storey base and frames the corner entrance (figure 1.4). As was widely recognised at the time, this two-part solution served his client’s retail strategies. Positioned exactly at street level, the ornamented base and its large display windows were designed to attract pedestrian shoppers – the majority of whom were female – to the merchandise within the store’s showrooms. Of equal importance for Sullivan, the ornamented base facilitated his own artistic purposes. Here, his organic ornament, comprised of intertwining geometric forms and botanical motifs, is cast in iron and painted green to suggest the sun-dappled surfaces of verdant foliage and to invoke America’s pastoral ideal. Notwithstanding the practical demands of designing a department store or a tall office building, Sullivan’s designs must also be seen as his attempts to bring nature to the city. Faced with commercial and technological exigencies and

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1.4   Adler and Sullivan, Schlesinger & Mayer Store (later Carson Pirie Scott Store), Chicago, 1898–1901, view of corner entrance. Inland Architect & News Record, 41 (June 1903).

increasingly crowded urban conditions, Sullivan extended Emerson’s emphasis on the redemptive effects of not only the artist’s but everyman’s return to nature. Emerson, in fact, made this embodiment of nature the keystone to American democracy. As he explained in ‘The Young American’, the nation’s social, political, economic and technological progress depended on each individual’s unencumbered immersion in the nation’s natural paradise. Emerson thus equated civic duty with active engagement with nature: How much better when the whole land is a garden, and the people have grown up in the bowers of a paradise. Without looking, then, to those extraordinary social influences which are now acting in precisely this direction, but only at what is inevitably doing around us, I think we must regard the land as a commanding and increasing power on the citizen, the sanative and Americanizing influence, which promises to disclose new virtues for ages to come.48

Sullivan rendered this embodied return to nature an imperative for the users of his buildings as well. Whether directing our visual ascent to the attic storey, our views of urban life through window frames, or our corporeal movement through



A poetics of organic expression

entranceways, Sullivan made the presence of nature physically and psychically felt. Organic relief ornament emerges from each of these focal points. Enframed by these ornamented architectural elements, we too become enveloped by the vital rhythms and vegetation of the forest interior, rural footpath and prairie field. Seen in this Emersonian way, Sullivan’s poetic means of architectural representation parallel Whitman’s pictorial poetics of landscape representation. Each substantiates the text-image matrix of a transcendentalist discourse on organic expression and its realisation in democratic cultural practice.

Notes  1 See Hugh Morrison, Louis Sullivan: Prophet of Modern Architecture (New York: Museum of Modern Art and W.W. Norton, 1935); S. Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1941), pp. 391–2. Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture was originally presented as the Charles Eliot Norton lectures for 1938–39.  2 The counter-arguments set forth in this essay are fully developed in Lauren S. Weingarden, Louis H. Sullivan and a 19th-Century Poetics of Naturalized Architecture (London: Ashgate, 2009).   3 Louis H. Sullivan, ‘Emotional Architecture as Compared with Intellectual: A Study in Objective and Subjective’, paper read before the 28th annual convention of the American Institute of Architects, October 1894, published in Inland Architect & News Record, 24 (November 1894), 32–4; rpt. in Sullivan, Kindergarten Chats (1918) and Other Writings, ed. Isabella Athey (New York: Wittenborn, 1947), p. 200. Hereafter cited as Sullivan, KC 1947.  4 Cultural historian Perry Miller attributed to Emerson the coinage of the phrase ‘Nature’s nation’; see ‘The Romantic Dilemma’, in Miller, Nature’s Nation (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 201.   5 Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘The Poet’ (1844), in Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (New York: Library of America, 1983), p. 452.   6 Emerson, ‘Art’, in Porte (ed.), Essays and Lectures, p. 440.
   7 Emerson, ‘The Poet’, pp. 449–50; cf. Emerson, ‘Language’ (1849), in Porte (ed.), Essays and Lectures, pp. 20–5.   8 Emerson, ‘The Poet’, p. 450.   9 Ibid., p. 459. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., p. 455. 12 Kindergarten Chats appeared in 52 consecutive issues of the Interstate Architect & Builder between 1901 and 1902. The series was posthumously published and edited by Claude Bragdon as Kindergarten Chats on Architecture, Education and Democracy (Lawrence, KS: Scarab Fraternity Press, 1934). Sullivan’s 1918 revision of the 1901–02 essays was reprinted in Athey (ed.), Kindergarten Chats. 13 Sullivan, KC 1947, p. 139. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., p. 140. 16 Ibid.

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Mixed messages 17 Ibid., p. 141. 18 Ibid., p. 46. 19 Sullivan, ‘The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered’, Lippincott’s, 57 (March 1896), 403–9; repr. KC 1947, pp. 202–13. 20 Emerson, ‘Art’, p. 440.
 21 Sullivan, ‘The Tall Office Building’, p. 202.
 22 Ibid., pp. 203, 205. 23 Ibid., p. 202. 24 Ibid., p. 206. 25 Sullivan, KC 1947, p. 140. 26 Emerson, ‘The Poet’, pp. 455–7. 27 Sullivan, ‘The Tall Office Building’, p. 213. 28 Sullivan, letter to Walt Whitman, 9 February 1887, published in Sherman Paul, Louis Sullivan, An Architect in American Thought (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962), pp. 1–3. 29 Sullivan, ‘Characteristics and Tendencies of American Architecture’, Inland Architect & News Record, 6 (November 1885), 58–9; rpt. KC 1947, p. 180. 30 Whitman, Preface to Leaves of Grass, first edition (1855), in Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan (New York: The Library of America, 1982), p. 10. Throughout Democratic Vistas Whitman refers to the ‘literatus’ as the most spiritual evolved literary artist who seizes and represents the dialectic oppositions of matter and spirit manifested in the cosmos; see, for example, Kaplan (ed.), Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Prose, pp. 932–4, 986–94. 31 For Whitman’s articulation of the Kosmos, see Kaplan (ed.), Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Prose, pp. 984–5, note; see also pp. 973, 978; for ‘Me’ and ‘Not Me’, see ‘Specimen Days’, in Kaplan (ed.), Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Prose, p. 895. 32 Whitman, ‘Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun’ (1865, 1881), in Kaplan (ed.), Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Prose, pp. 446–7. 33 See James L. Machor, ‘Pastoralism and the American Urban Deal: Hawthorne, Whitman, and the Literary Pattern’, American Literature, 54 (October 1982), 330, 334. 34 Whitman, ‘Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun’, p. 446. 35 Ibid., p. 447. 36 Machor, ‘Pastoralism and the American Urban Ideal’, p. 333. 37 Ibid. 38 See also Machor’s analysis of ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’, pp. 336–7. I detected Sullivan’s marginal notations of ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’ in his personal copy of Leaves of Grass, currently held at the American Institute of Architects, Washington, DC. 39 ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’ (1860, 1881), in Kaplan (ed.), Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Prose, p. 308. 40 Sullivan, KC 1947, pp. 120–3. See also pp. 46 and 159 where Sullivan redefines ‘form follows function’, replacing the standard, rationalist definition with a metaphysical one; and ‘Emotional Architecture as Compared with Intellectual: A Study in Objective and Subjective’, pp. 191–201. 41 Sullivan, KC 1947, pp. 123–4. 42 Sullivan, ‘Ornament in Architecture’, Engineering Magazine, 3.2 (1892), 633–44; rpt. KC 1947, p. 187. 43 Sullivan, KC 1947, p. 187.




A poetics of organic expression

44 Ibid., p. 190. 45 For a comprehensive building history, see Joseph Siry, ‘Adler and Sullivan’s Guaranty Building in Buffalo’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 55.1 (1996), 6–37. 46 Sullivan, KC 1947, p. 161. 47 For a comprehensive study, see Joseph Siry, Carson Pirie Scott: Louis Sullivan and the Chicago Department Store (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). 48 Emerson, ‘The Young American’ (1844), in Porte (ed.), Essays and Lectures, pp. 216–17.

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Photographic studies in the Hawthornes’ American Note-books Jessie Morgan-Owens

These Note-Books, by the way – this seems as good a place as any other to say it – are a very singular series of volumes; I doubt whether there is anything exactly corresponding to them in the whole body of literature. Henry James, Hawthorne (1879)

In 1866 and 1867 the recently widowed Sophia Peabody Hawthorne corresponded with editor James T. Fields and his wife Annie over the posthumous publication of excerpts from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s note-books in The Atlantic Monthly and in a subsequent book.1 As she copies and cuts Nathaniel’s notes for posterity – omitting her own entries, reliving their honeymoon years at Concord – she finds two passages that appear to her to be ‘photographic’ in their minuteness of detail. Whereas Hawthorne’s critics, beginning with his son Julian, would find the realist tone of these note-books startlingly different from that of the romances, Sophia finds only consanguinity. In her correspondence with the Fieldses she refers to a ‘wonderful photograph’ of the night a drowned woman’s body was pulled from the Concord river near their home at the Old Manse: I have come across a long, minute account of the drowning and finding of the girl in Concord River, from which Zenobia’s death is taken. In the Blithedale Romance it is very succinct. Shall I copy this wonderful photograph of the terrible night Mr. Hawthorne spent with Mr. Channing seeking and finding the body…2

Sophia assumes this ‘wonderful photograph’ to be of interest because it served as source material for the fiction. Similarly, their daughter Una’s ephemeral beauty would become Pearl’s uncanny indistinctness in The Scarlet Letter (1850). Sophia names six entries from 1848, ‘The photographic study of the children’, which she remembers he wrote ‘at the very time he was writing The Scarlet Letter!’ She distinguishes Nathaniel’s authorial labour upstairs from note-book writing downstairs: ‘he used to come from his labor of pain to rest by observing the sports and characteristics of the babies and record them’. She then adds a comment concerning Hawthorne’s critical legacy: ‘This gives a new and peculiar interest to the record. The germ of Pearl is here.’3



Photographic studies in the Hawthornes’ American Note-books

These quotations come from MA 569, known as ‘the family note-book’, which the Hawthornes began with the birth of Una in March 1844. Nathaniel’s last entry in the commonplace note-books, ‘Twenty Days with Julian & Little Bunny by Papa’, records the adventures of father and son, beginning on 28 July 1851 when Sophia and their daughters were away. Approximately a year later, Sophia makes a similar set of entries, which Patricia Dunlavy Valenti has called ‘Eighteen Days with Una, Julian, Rose, and Little Turtle and Puss’.4 In these, her final entries in the note-books, on 7 September 1852, Sophia refers to the shared labour of documenting their family life with a reference to America’s first photographic technology, the daguerreotype, when she writes, ‘I wish I had leisure to daguerreotype and paint the hours as they go as my husband did when I was away’ (italics mine).5 In the sections that follow, I will examine each of Sophia’s photographic analogies by considering, at her invitation, the relationship between these realist non-fictional records and key scenes from Hawthorne’s Romantic fiction. Generations of editors have echoed Sophia’s photographic metaphors as a way of representing the Hawthornes’ note-books.6 According to the editors of a new transcription of MA 580, entitled Ordinary Mysteries, these commonplace notebooks served the Hawthornes as ‘the nineteenth century equivalent of snapshot albums or home movies’. Moreover, this ‘photograph’ of their home life ‘has been developed twice’: first by Nathaniel, then by his editor, Sophia.7 Paul Auster, in his 2003 introduction to a reprint of Twenty Days with Julian and Little Bunny by Papa, feels Hawthorne’s historical project succeeded because it had stood the test of time: ‘In his modest deadpan way, Hawthorne managed to accomplish what every parent dreams of doing: to keep his child alive forever.’8 Auster thinks cameras ‘rarely record anything more than the surfaces of things’; even so, he retains the photographic metaphor to describe the relationship between words and pictures: ‘A century and a half later, we are still trying to discover our children, but these days we do it by taking snapshots and following them around with video cameras. But words are better, I think, if only because they don’t fade with time.’9 In locating for this study the ‘wonderful photographs’, ‘snapshots’ and ‘daguerreotypes’ to be found in the Hawthornes’ note-books, letters and published works, I have encountered a methodological difficulty: how to determine what it was, precisely, that Sophia and others found so ‘photographic’ about these passages. This difficulty compounds when we recognise that the textual imitations these critics indexed as ‘photographic’ could not be made as photographs at that time. The Hawthornes dilate the prosaic limitations of early photography as they transform photographic images into literary images; for example, they ‘daguerreotype’ the children at home at a time when studios reigned, and make ‘photographs’ of a night-time emergency before the advent of flash photography. In a similar argument, Lara Langer Cohen carefully demonstrates that Hawthorne knew that no daguerreotype could have been made by natural means in the dark, close setting described for the post-mortem daguerreotype of Judge Pyncheon of The House of the Seven Gables (1851). Hawthorne chooses not to attribute the

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impossible image to daguerreotypist Holgrave’s magical heritage; this conspicuous absence gestures at a mystery that only foreknowledge of the daguerreotype process can solve.10 As an aside, this study of these ‘photographic’ passages also shows that the extensive scholarship on daguerreotypy in The House of the Seven Gables only hints at the full measure of the Hawthornes’ engagement with photography in their pursuit of a medium through which to envision romance.11 Daguerreotypy is a key metaphor in that novel, to be sure, but here I will also consider photography’s cameo appearances in three out of four of Hawthorne’s romances. By 1851 daguerreotypes had been in Hawthorne’s life and language for a dozen years, yet the Hawthornes regularly ignore the well-known limits of photographic technology, choosing instead to focus on its capability as metaphor for representation. In their writings, they frame photographs of continuous time, capture ‘after-images’ available only to the imagination, and call for photographs of complex thought or to image nature’s immensity. All of these concepts of the ‘photographic’ begin in the capabilities of the technology, before transcending its limitations of time and light.

‘An indescribable, ideal charm’ We can appreciate the malleability of concepts of the daguerreotype if we begin with a brief, easily overlooked example from Hawthorne’s most realistic work of fiction. In The Blithedale Romance (1852), the narrator Miles Coverdale describes a painting as made by a hungry artist, ‘heightening his imagination with his appetite’, who depicts a brace of ducks with ‘the accuracy of a daguerreotype’. Coverdale praises the ‘lifelike representation of a noble sirloin’; this steak is rendered with such juiciness ‘that the beholder sighed to think it merely visionary’.12 Before the term ‘photographic’ became common usage in the late 1850s, the verb ‘to daguerreotype’ often was used in a figurative analogy, meaning ‘to represent or describe with minute exactitude’.13 In ‘Photography: The Emergence of a Key Word’, Alan Trachtenberg notes that in 1839 photography materialised ‘not just as a practice of picture-making but as a word, a linguistic practice. It was not very long before “daguerreotype” became a common verb that meant telling the literal truth of things.’14 However, in a customary move, Hawthorne claims that this visual representation exceeds the ‘literal truth of things’. This ‘lifelike’ meal transcends the literal to approach its Platonic ideal, before becoming by the paragraph’s end a metonym for life itself: ‘All these things were so perfectly imitated, that you seemed to have the genuine article before you, and yet with an indescribable, ideal charm; it took away the grossness from what was fleshiest and fattest, and thus helped the life of man, even in its earthliest relations, to appear rich and noble.’ Without a hint of contradiction, he employs ‘the accuracy of a daguerreotype’ to visualise an imaginary, ‘indescribable, ideal charm’, free from the ‘grossness’ of flesh and fat.15 Coverdale finds spiritual facts about corporeal experience in the minute detail and exactitude of this juicy steak.



Photographic studies in the Hawthornes’ American Note-books

Coverdale’s scalar leap from the literal to the ideal should alert us to the true purpose of what Henry James complains of as Hawthorne’s ‘extremely objective’ and ‘minute and often trivial chronicle’: details help us to see beyond, or to see through, ‘the genuine article’ to its ideal. Here I am agreeing with a similar claim Laura Saltz makes for Margaret Fuller’s concept of the daguerreotype, when she takes to task easy alignments of the photographic with material representation. Saltz writes that these authors were ‘constructing their transcendental or romantic visions through their engagements with the material world, rather than in opposition to it’.16 The ‘realist’ Hawthorne of the note-books was of the same mind as the author of the romances; he sought to produce writing that, like the description of the noble sirloin cited above, captured both the grossest detail and the spiritual stuff it represents. This association between daguerreotype and the indescribable ideal appears in the earliest photographic metaphor in his writing. In December 1839 Nathaniel identifies in the daguerreotype an invitation to spiritualise its grasp of detail: ‘I wish there was something in the intellectual world analogous to the Daguerreotype … in the visible’, he writes to Sophia shortly after the daguerreotype first arrived in Boston, ‘which might print off our deepest, and subtlest, and delicatest thoughts and feelings, as minutely and accurately as the above-mentioned instrument paints the various aspects of Nature.’17 This oft-quoted comment follows the charming excuse that daydreams have thus far prevented him from writing the expected letter: ‘it is next to impossibility for me to put ideas into words. Even in writing these two or three lines, I have fallen into several long fits of musing.’ His foundational analogy puts forward the new technology to represent daydreams, not reality. He intends to photograph a subterranean stream of thought and emotion that has escaped his distractible pen, which suffers in comparison to the daguerreotype. ‘Never was I so stupid as tonight’, he complains, and though his ‘fancy is bright enough’, he claims to be without ‘command of external symbols’ to express himself. This ‘striving to talk on paper does but remove you farther from me’.18 In later years, as I discuss in the next section of this essay, he will describe his own writing practice as observation that seeks to catch the subject unawares, like a daguerreotype, which flickers in and out of view; writing in 1839 he complains that ‘It seems as if Sophie Hawthorne fled away into infinite space, the moment I strive to fix her image before me in order to inspire my pen.’19

Pen problems In their two shared note-books, the Hawthornes repeatedly remark that their pens are unfit to transcribe their world. Nathaniel concludes the ‘Sleepy Hollow’ passage, an eight-page record of a morning in July 1844, with the comment, ‘When we see how little we can express, it is a wonder that any man ever takes up the pen a second time.’20 Sophia echoes this sentiment at the end of the notebooks, in 1852: ‘I scrawl as fast as my pen can go & write nothing & that illegibly’.21

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Their experiments in non-fictional description – in the form of several entries of dense pages of records of daily life, written by both partners – have in common a ‘minute’ attention to detail that resolves in complaint and dismissal. Their pens cannot keep pace with experience so broadly defined; even the most resolute attempts to get it all down on paper find their surroundings full of details that are, in turn, too evocative of the ephemeral world to succeed. These problems, they insist, reveal that their experience together exceeds their ability to record it. Even baby Una, writes her father, ‘tried to grasp a handful of Sunshine. She also grasps at the shadows of things, in candle light.’22 These notes are suggestive, for her parents have ‘tried to grasp sunshine’ with photographic description rooted in actual experience, as well as ‘shadow’, the subterranean thoughts that open up from this practice of detailed observation. The ‘Sleepy Hollow’ passage is Nathaniel’s longest single attempt to relate events ‘exactly as they happen’. He names the terms of his experiment: ‘To sit down in a solitary place (or a busy and bustling one, if you please) and await such little events as may happen, or observe such noticeable points as the eyes fall upon around you.’23 As he explains, seeing is not performed in a moment, but within narrative time: And how strange is the gradual process with which we detect objects that are right before the eyes; here now are whortleberries, ripe and black, growing actually within reach of my hand, yet unseen till this moment. Were we to sit here all day, a week, a year, and doubtless a lifetime, objects would thus still be presenting themselves as new, though there would seem to be no reason why we should not have detected them all at the first moment.24

This ‘gradual process’ of visual apprehension is described in the note-book as a natural fact, which, as Emerson exhorts in ‘Nature’ (1836), provides access to spiritual facts associated with the impossibility of fixing images on a page. As Leo Marx reminds us in his seminal reading of this passage, ‘Although Hawthorne’s account includes an element of representation – he draws upon actual objects and events – his chief concern is the landscape of the psyche. The inner, not the outer world, is what interests him most as he sits there in the woods.’25 Incomplete, static records of these thoughts, like the clouds, Nathaniel writes, ‘are material enough, alone, for the observation either of an idle man or a philosopher’.26 The passage suggests that even after a lifetime in the same spot, perception would continually present new information representative of the depths of that inner world. For that reason, his introductory essay, ‘The Old Manse’, written two years later, concludes with pride in his failure to capture everything at once. He marvels at his inability to achieve written representation from the rich, ever-shifting mirage of perception and memory that surrounds him in his newly married life in the country. He complains that his record of observation does not touch the whole depth of his ability to spiritualise his surroundings – ‘How little I have told!’ – and he blusters that writing produces a ‘shallow’ and ‘scanty’ record of thought, when compared to the available material his spirit provides:



Photographic studies in the Hawthornes’ American Note-books How narrow – how shallow and scanty too – is the stream of thought that has been flowing from my pen, compared with the broad tide of dim emotions, ideas, and associations, which swell around me from that portion of my existence! How little I have told!27

He claims that pen on paper is too limited to achieve what he might be capable of, if hands were faster or pens more reliable. Sophia’s phrase for journal-keeping, cited on the first page of this essay – ‘daguerreotype and paint the hours as they go’ – also suggests a desire for continuous representational activity, but she does not get the leisure that such labour requires. Much of her record of family life while her husband is away is composed in an exhausted afterimage, late at night with baby Rose, and not in the busy moment. She complains, ‘but I have not a moment all day & and it is late at night before I can sit down to write & then I scrawl as fast as my pen can go & write nothing & that illegibly’.28 Her record includes far more quotations from the children than her husband’s entries; whole conversations about turtles or angels are recorded in her hand. ‘I wish I had recorded all our conversations’, she writes. ‘Some of [Una’s] thoughts & observations have been so remarkable. It is in vain to go back.’29 When conversing with Julian, she writes ‘Tomorrow I must keep a paper near & scribble down his words as he utters them.’30 Sophia does not find the journal a relief from labour, but an addition to the work of parenting. She enacted the radical education reforms of her brother-in-law, Horace Mann. She herself learned in the progressive classrooms of her sister Elizabeth Peabody; the air of educational reform generated by her neighbours, the Alcotts, also influenced her. For Sophia and Nathaniel, the home-schooling of their children was vital cultural work, and these note-books are a record of their radical approach to the art of living.31 Quite often Sophia sounds the same note of disappointment that characterises Nathaniel’s entries: she writes, ‘It’s not much use to write such skeletons’ and ‘my journal is good for nothing’ and ‘I am not fit to think or write’.32 Valenti sees in these comments a woman reaching for a relationship with her husband, which eludes her grasp.33 At one point Sophia considered the project and its object – to fulfil her husband’s wishes by following his own example – a failure: ‘This journal takes all my time … & after all it is a miserable, disjointed journal, all hop, skip & jump & nothing valuable told. But I write, because my husband wished it so much – & what else do I desire but to do what he wishes? I only wish it were better done.’34

‘The photographic study of the children’ Sophia compares herself to the memory of Nathaniel, who ‘used to come from his labor of pain to rest by observing the sports and characteristics of the babies and record them’.35 She tellingly characterises Nathaniel’s writing in the

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commonplace journal as leisure, distinct from his ‘labor of pain’ writing fiction upstairs; in contrast, Nathaniel refers to the photographic studies of the children as ‘his historical labors’. Written in what we would call ‘real time’, Sophia calls the six passages I cited in my introductory paragraph ‘The photographic study of the children’, made while Nathaniel was writing The Scarlet Letter.36 His ‘photographic study of the children’ begins on Sunday morning, 19 March 1848, which I cite here at length to give a sense of its detail and its refrain of elusive immediacy: Julian is dressed in a little knit woollen jacket, bordered and girdled with purple and scarlet – a check gown underneath – knit gaiters on his short legs – one leather shoe, and one of cloth embroidered … He is now, at ½ past 9, clambering into a chair beside me – up and down, two or three times a minute – talking about various matters, and expressing, sometimes in one word what might be elaborated into sentences. Una has just come in; and puts me so far behind my subject that I am almost tempted to give it up in despair. Their mother has now taken them, one in each hand, and is walking with them across the room – glancing through the sunshine which falls upon the carpet. Now Una offers her finger to Julian, and they march together … her auburn curls come down over her shoulders with extreme grace; and as to her delicate little phiz, its spirit, grace, and sensibility, elude the pen that would describe them.37

Twice in the first paragraph of this effort to describe his children and their activity, we hear a note of exasperation and impossibility. The ineffability of childhood busyness becomes a refrain in these six passages, as does the attention paid to the still objects – clothing, books, chairs and blocks – that make up the scene. Nathaniel despairs of the task before him, ‘to describe the continual vicissitude’ of his children. When he tries his hand at capturing Una, she ‘eludes the pen that would describe’ her face. Early on, we hear Sophia ask, ‘Oh if Papa could only write down this little face’, in reference to Julian, on her lap.38 But Julian too is as ‘impossible to describe [in] all his actions and moods, as to paint the shifting hues on a dove’s neck’. The frustration of capturing ‘the continual vicissitude’ of children prevails: ‘Before one action can be written down, another is begun.’39 Meanwhile, four-year-old Una looks on with full understanding of this experiment, and ‘with all possible satisfaction’. Nathaniel writes, late in the first entry: Enter Una – ‘Where is little Julian?’ ‘He has gone out to walk’ ‘No; but I mean where is the place of little Julian, that you’ve been writing about him’. So I point to the page, at which she looks with all possible satisfaction; and stands watching the pen as it hurries forward. ‘I’ll put the ink nearer to you’, says she. ‘Father are you going to write all this?’ she adds, turning over the book. ‘Father, why do you write down stairs? – you never wrote downstairs before’. Then she babbles about ‘salerata bread-cakes’, which she says she ate at Mrs. Lee’s. I tell her that I am now writing about herself – ‘that’s nice writing’, says she.40

The clarity with which Una grasps her father’s project suggests that these ‘historical labors’ have been discussed beforehand, as she knows that Julian’s image might be found in the note-book. Notably, Una says that this is the first time she



Photographic studies in the Hawthornes’ American Note-books

has seen her father writing downstairs, indicating that this might also be the first time he has attempted to write them down. Sophia claims that ‘the germ of Pearl’, the child at the centre of The Scarlet Letter, can be found in these passages. Both Julian and Pearl show great creativity in animating objects into dolls, but reading the romance alongside the note-book clearly demonstrates that Hawthorne patterned the elf-child Pearl by his measure of Una. ‘Una fixes her eyes on mamma’s face, with such stedfastness that mamma beseeches her not to look so directly into her soul’, he writes, and like Pearl’s attention to the scarlet letter her mother wears, Una’s open gaze ‘embarrass[es] the springs of spiritual life and the movement of the soul’.41 Nathaniel negatively reflects upon on the transitory nature of Una’s moods. He describes her beauty as ‘the most flitting, transitory, most uncertain and unaccountable affair’. Even more troubling is Nathaniel’s admission that something ‘elfish or angelic, but at all events, supernatural’ about Una ‘frightens him’. At such moments, he claims, ‘I cannot believe her to be my own human child, but a spirit strangely mingled with good and evil, haunting the house where I dwell.’42 Likewise, Hawthorne describes ‘Pearl’s aspect’ as ‘imbued with a spell of infinite variety’ and ‘invested with a strange remoteness and intangibility’. The ‘elvish’, ‘airy sprite’ Pearl ‘glimmers’ and ‘hovers’ through The Scarlet Letter, failing to register in the text as wholly human.43 Scenes of child’s play set in the Puritan past as represented in The Scarlet Letter reframe a ‘photographic study’ Nathaniel quickly made to capture the present. Lloyd Pratt explains in Archives of American Time that the ever-passing present is ‘that self-transcending increment of modern time’, which according to social theory marks this ‘particular species of present tenseness’ as modern.44 In the Preface to The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne claims his romance will attempt to connect the past with ‘the very Present that is flitting away from us’.45 Nathaniel writes, at the end of a long day in ‘photographic study of the children’: ‘the future too soon becomes the present, which, before we can grasp it, looks back upon us as the past; – it must, I think be only the image of an image’.46 The real, the ‘flitting present’, this author suggests, gloriously exceeds our capacity to represent it. In his expression of excess, Hawthorne writes a supplemental text, or ‘image of an image’, that refers back to the real, but cannot match it for depth and value: a ‘stream’ of representation split from the ‘broad tide’ of experience. Hawthorne lets us know that these pages do not adequately represent the fulsome nature of his relationship to his surroundings or his children, his ability to experience spiritual excess, or his submergence in a swollen river of ‘emotions, ideas, and associations’.

‘Wonderful photograph of the terrible night’ The ‘succinct’ five-page passage that Sophia calls a ‘wonderful photograph of the terrible night Mr. Hawthorne spent with Mr Channing’ pulling a corpse from the

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Concord river provides the closest analogue between the imaginary world created by Hawthorne’s romances and the world he recorded in the note-book. On 9 July 1845 he chronicles ‘a long, minute account of the drowning and finding of the girl [Miss Hunt] in Concord River, from which Zenobia’s death is taken’.47 If we compare the passage in the note-books against The Blithedale Romance, we can locate a distinct frame around an actual event that has been embedded as what Sophia calls a ‘wonderful photograph’ in the romance. Both minute and consequential details of Miss Hunt’s drowning recorded in the note-books reappear in The Blithedale Romance: both women have dropped their handkerchiefs, local men cast for their bodies with long poles and hay-rakes, rigor mortis forces the corpses into assuming a perpetual attitude of prayer, and Thoreau’s boat, a pleasure craft for the Hawthornes, becomes a makeshift hearse. Moreover, Nathaniel supposes that Miss Hunt killed herself for ‘want of sympathy’, which he determines ‘a severe penalty for having cultivated and refined herself out of the sphere of her natural connections’.48 In The Blithedale Romance, the failed love interview that precedes Zenobia’s death suggests that this dangerous combination of cultivation and want of sympathy attends Zenobia’s suicide as well. As in the previous section, I might be recounting the relationship between any writer and his or her source material but for a key moment that is repeated nearly verbatim across the two texts. The narrator(s) – Nathaniel Hawthorne and Miles Coverdale – form a visual memory while pulling the bodies – Miss Hunt’s and Zenobia’s – from the river. ‘I steered towards the bank, gazing all the while at Zenobia, whose limbs were swaying in the current close at the boat’s side.’49 Hawthorne makes two significant amendments in copying this passage from the note-books: he replaces ‘all the while looking’ with ‘gazing all the while’, and he names ‘this dead girl’s body’ as Zenobia.50 This close textual resemblance between two events, one actual and one fictional, marks the moment the event becomes an image seared on the narrators’ memories. Nathaniel writes, ‘I never saw nor imagined a spectacle of such perfect horror … She was the very image of a death-agony.’51 ‘For more than twelve long years I have borne it in my memory’, Coverdale complains, a photographic memory such that he ‘could now reproduce it as freshly as if it were still before my eyes’.52 The originals, or photographic plates, for Coverdale’s photographic memory are stored in the horrific spectacle recorded in the note-book, where Sophia finds them many years later. This passage suggests what we colloquially call a photographic memory, or what psychology calls an eidetic image, recalled or reproduced with startling accuracy, clarity and vividness. In Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun (1860), Hilda describes the creation of such a photographic memory, when she explains to Miriam how her copy of the portrait of Beatrice Cenci retains the ‘mysterious force’ of the original: I had no recourse but to sit down before the picture, day after day, and let it sink into my heart. I do believe it is now photographed there. It is a sad face to keep so close to one’s heart; only what is so very beautiful can never be quite a pain. Well;



Photographic studies in the Hawthornes’ American Note-books after studying it in this way, I know not how many times, I came home, and have done my best to transfer the image to canvas.53

In texts from this period, photographs on the heart – exemplified by the ‘wonderful photograph’ of Miss Hunt/Zenobia’s drowning and the tragic photograph Hilda holds in her heart – appear in narrative as a mnemonic effort to commit a scene to the memories of other characters and, it is hoped, the reader. In this respect, Hawthorne’s impression took: reviewers found The Marble Faun to be attractive for the ‘almost photographic fidelity with which objects are brought before the mind. In a few well chosen, and it maybe be homely words, the author will give you a picture … that once looked upon, can never be forgotten.’54 Audiences value photographic memories for both the level of detail transmitted to the eye and the impress of the picture on their memories. Nathaniel writes of Miss Hunt, ‘If she could have foreseen … how her maiden corpse would have looked eighteen hours afterwards, and how coarse men would strive with hand and foot to reduce it to a decent aspect, and all in vain – it would surely have saved her from this deed.’55 From here on, the photographic memory of her corpse inoculates against Romantic images of death by drowning. With Miss Hunt’s or Xenobia’s corpse firmly fixed in the mind’s eye, a reader could ‘foresee’ what tragedy looks like; thus this image harbours a redeeming force. Hawthorne’s male protagonists confess to a fear of the imminent loss of the visual object that drives them to look too long. In The House of the Seven Gables, Holgrave admits to ‘a feeling’ he could not account for, as he explains to Phoebe; an ‘indefinite sense of some catastrophe, or consummation impelled me’ to make a death-scene daguerreotype of Judge Pyncheon. This daguerreotype ‘consummates’ the visual experience of death; made ‘to preserve a pictorial record’, as a ‘memorial valuable to myself’ and as ‘a point of evidence’ that might exonerate Clifford Pyncheon – these three rationalities belie the initial ‘indefinite sense’ that motivated Holgrave’s impulse to expose the Judge in death.56 Coverdale also experiences a ‘nameless presentiment’ drawing him to the riverside at midnight. He takes a modest stance towards what he sees there: ‘Were I to describe the perfect horror of the spectacle, the reader might justly reckon it to me for a sin and a shame.’57 In his journal, Nathaniel does not hesitate. In his ‘photograph’ of the body, Miss Hunt is rendered in minute and disturbing detail. What both narrator and author find most terrifying is how women’s bodies might be transformed to ‘marble image[s] of a death agony’, marked by a ‘terrible inflexibility’ that cannot be reordered or concealed. This ‘terrible inflexibility’ of Miss Hunt’s corpse in note-book and romance resists Hawthorne’s warnings against reading fact into fiction. In the Preface to the House of the Seven Gables, he writes: ‘Not to speak of other objections, it exposes the Romance to an inflexible and exceedingly dangerous species of criticism, by bringing his fancy-pictures almost into positive contact with the realities of the moment.’58 The Blithedale Romance is based in ‘the realities of the moment’; Hawthorne says it is ‘a faint and not very faithful shadowing of BROOK FARM, in Roxbury’.

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In the Preface, Hawthorne acknowledges that ‘he has occasionally availed himself of his actual reminiscences’, recorded in his note-books, if only to give ‘a more life-like tint to the fancy-sketch’. He beseeches the reader not to put The Blithedale Romance ‘exactly side by side with nature’, as I have done here. Grant the author ‘license with regard to Everyday Probability’, Hawthorne asks, because ‘the Author has ventured to make free with his old, and affectionately remembered home, at BROOK FARM, as being, certainly, the most romantic episode of his own life – essentially a day-dream, and yet a fact – and thus offering an available foothold between fiction and reality’.59 However, in the rewriting of Miss Hunt’s suicide as fiction, the ‘succinct’ and ‘wonderful photographs’ from the note-book retain an ‘inflexible’ quality that resists fictionalisation. Jean-Luc Nancy reminds us that in framing the image, we set it apart as ‘distinct’: ‘the distinct stands apart from the world of things considered as a world of availability … availability for use’.60 In Hawthorne’s retelling of his midnight experience, the image announces itself by this trait of distinctness. Hawthorne washed over many details in transcribing his experiences at Brook Farm and Concord in the crossing from note-book entry to romance, but the ‘terrible inflexibility’ of the ‘wonderful photograph’ of the drowned girl remains fundamentally unaltered, distinct and set apart from the narrative flow. The fixity of the death image – set aside as unavailable for ‘use’, by which I mean here revision into story – in the transition between note-book and romance is what attracts the attention of editor Sophia as ‘photographic’. Photographs do not change with time, as narratives do.

The Concord river The Concord river’s sluggishness creates a reflective surface that masks a dark sub-surface. Sophia writes of her time on the river, ‘who would ever imagine that there was mud & fire & rock under our little boat instead of that rare picture’.61 She gestures towards an actuality of hardship that persists below the surface ideality of their life. Nathaniel writes, when looking at the river from a distance, ‘Each tree and rock, and every blade of grass, is distinctly imaged, and, however unsightly in reality, assumes ideal beauty in the reflection.’62 Sophia writes of when the river is ‘utterly still, so that it was impossible to tell where the tangible ended & the reflected began on the margin’, though the reflected appears ‘far more beautiful & fresh’.63 They appear to find the surface reflection to be a more perfect copy than their real life. At the end of their first summer at the Manse, Sophia comments: ‘The river was perfectly still and soft, taking all the trees & heaven captive in its depths, where we decided that they were more real than those we could touch & see above; at least as real – why not?’64 To live in the reflection, rather than the reality, is here rendered as a joint decision. In making this choice, they choose ‘the distinct’, to use Nancy’s secular term for the sacred, over their material lives. But however much they desire to make real the reflected



Photographic studies in the Hawthornes’ American Note-books

image in the river, its power lies in distance, in its withdrawal from touch.65 A few days later, on 18 September 1842, Nathaniel makes an entry that he will use as the conclusion for ‘The Old Manse’: I have never elsewhere had such an opportunity to observe how much more beautiful reflection is than what we call reality. The sky, and the clustering foliage on either hand, and the effect of sunlight as it found its way through the shade … all these seemed unsurpassingly beautiful, when beheld in upper air. But, on gazing downward, there they were, the same even to the minutest particular, yet arrayed in ideal beauty, which satisfied the spirit incomparably more than the actual scene. I am half convinced that the reflection is indeed the reality – the real thing which Nature imperfectly images to our grosser sense. At all events, the disembodied shadow is nearest to the soul.66

Why do the Hawthornes establish a superlative relationship between reality and reflection – ‘how much more beautiful reflection is than what we call reality’, which ‘satisfied the spirit incomparably more than the actual’ (italics mine)? Why, as they marvel at this successful sameness, does the ideal attach to the reflection and the ‘photographic’ rather than the ‘unsightly’ original? ‘All seemed rejoiced to be in that faery world’, Sophia writes of its surface reflections; ‘the disembodied shadow is nearest to the soul’, Nathaniel concludes. Nathaniel toys with an inverse perception as a provisional model for representation in the note-books, when he says he is ‘half convinced’ that the reflection is reality. This inversion of the mirrored world becomes the modus operandi as described in the Prefaces to the romances. Sophia lauds this attention to surface reflection as the superior metaphysics when she writes that Nathaniel’s writing does not ‘meddle’ or build platforms in the depths of truth, but instead, by focusing on its surface, truth ‘lays upon him like the blessed sunshine, full & broad’.67 As he writes to Fields, ‘the fact is, in writing a romance, a man is always, or always ought to be, careering on the utmost verge of a precipitous absurdity, and the skill lies in coming as close as possible without actually tumbling over’.68 Our primary relationship as readers of Hawthorne proceeds from this inversion of page and reality, this dive over the ‘precipitous absurdity’. The photograph attached to this essay (see figure 2.1), one of a series I have made of reflections in the surface of the Concord river from the vantage point of  the boat dock at the Old Manse, makes clear that this collective decision to distinguish reality from reflection is a wilful fiction. Our relationship with representations, as ‘reflections of reality’, can be even more keenly seen in photographs. Widely considered to be a ‘minute’, ‘accurate’ and veracious mimetic device,  these convictions rest on a wilful suspension of disbelief. The seeming contradiction between Hawthorne’s glorifying assessment of the reflection in the river and what I have called his ‘pen problems’ – the ‘inadequate’ or ‘unworthy’ reflections of time and thought in the note-books – demonstrates how fully Hawthorne subscribed to a vision of the world as a totality that exceeded written representation.

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2.1  Jessie Morgan-Owens, The Old Manse, 2010. Colour negative photograph.

In The Office of The Scarlet Letter, Sacvan Bercovitch explains that Hawthorne’s prose ‘tells us that meaning, while indefinite, is neither random nor arbitrary; rather it is gradual, cumulative, and increasingly comprehensive’.69 This accretion of meaning through multiple images of light and dark, like multiply exposed photographs, does not attribute to any one reading, no matter how ‘minute or accurate’, the power to supersede another. In Hawthorne’s semiology, photography represents both the solidity of judgement based on visual evidence and failure in the attainment of truth. Photographs condemn judges, persuade lovers and satisfy avengers, but they do not, finally, resolve plots. In the 1840s and 1850s, as today, photography was not often written of as yielding to ambiguity, but it should not surprise readers of Hawthorne that photographic writing, like all writing, on second glance, points to conclusions more often than it records them. Photographs are metaphors, not evidence. In Hawthorne’s text, they are metaphors for evidence of a spiritual world. Hawthorne’s recurrent use of photographic writing, like much of his descriptive prose, ultimately remains a ‘narrow, scanty, and meagre record of observation’ whose shallowness masks the supply of ‘emotions, ideas, and associations’ that requires interpretation to achieve even the most indefinite of resolutions.



Photographic studies in the Hawthornes’ American Note-books

I offer in closing a contrast in Whitman’s photographic lines, which suggest that the act of observation itself generates meaning: ‘In these Leaves, everything is literally photographed – nothing is poeticized’.70 Details of the visual nature of an object or subject, in Whitman’s poems, through time and accumulation, arrive at truth. Although Thoreau found that making the inward outward ‘was not easy’, according to Emerson, the register of the work Walden has been measured in photographic terms. Harriet Beecher Stowe introduced her character Uncle Tom in a daguerreotype; Whitman introduces himself in Leaves of Grass with an engraving from a daguerreotype. As I have shown, at the heart of key scenes in Hawthorne’s romances we find ‘photographic studies’ from the note-books. These authors, and many others, begin these descriptions of their own writing practice in the fertile metaphor of the photograph. The role of the ‘photographic’ in language reveals our hopes for a visual technology that falls short  of  achieving the total and accurate representation we desire of it. This shortcoming, I suggest, invites the reader to supplement a partial realisation of the visual and material world drawn in imaginary ‘photographs’. By restoring to photography the nineteenth-century values of indelible, minute and whole representation that nineteenth-century readers and writers sought in accurate representation – in place of our own expectations of a fully reproducible, alterable and immaterial form of representation – we can more fully apprehend not only how ­‘daguerreotypes’ might be made of the imaginary stuff of photographic writing, but also to what real-world uses these imagined images might be applied.

Notes   1 The first note-book they kept together, known as MA 580 or ‘the honeymoon journal’, serves as the basis for Hawthorne’s introductory essay for Mosses from an Old Manse (1846) and consists of regular entries by both partners in the first year of their marriage, from July 1842 through 1843. Following custom, I will use ‘Nathaniel’ and ‘Sophia’ to refer to the historical persons who composed these commonplace journals and ‘Hawthorne’ to refer to the author of the published work.   2 31 May 1867, letter to James T. Fields. In Nicholas R. Lawrence and Marta L. Werner (eds), Ordinary Mysteries: The Common Journal of Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne, 1842–1843 (Collingdale, PA: Diane Publishing, 2005), p. 323.   3 12 August 1866, letter to James T. Fields. Boston Public Library MS C.11 (108).   4 Foundational readings of the history and character of these antiphonal note-books can be found in Lawrence and Werner (eds), Ordinary Mysteries, and Patricia Dunlavy Valenti, ‘Sophia Peabody Hawthorne’s “American Note-books”’, Studies in the American Renaissance (1996), 118.   5 Valenti, ‘Sophia Peabody Hawthorne’s “American Note-books”’, 170.  6 T. Walter Herbert opens his study, Dearest Beloved: ‘The Hawthornes obeyed an impulse to capture and preserve the ordinary scenes of family life, an enterprise for which photography and home videos now provide a readier technology.’ T. Walter

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Mixed messages Herbert, ‘Introduction’, in Dearest Beloved: The Hawthornes and the Making of the Middle-class Family (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995), p. xiv.   7 Lawrence and Werner (eds), Ordinary Mysteries, p. 7.   8 Nathaniel Hawthorne, Twenty Days with Julian and Little Bunny by Papa, intro. Paul Auster (New York: New York Review Books, 2003), p. xliv.   9 Ibid., p. xliii. 10 Lara Langer Cohen, ‘What’s Wrong with this Picture? Daguerreotypy and Magic in the The House of the Seven Gables’, Arizona Quarterly, 59.1 (2004), 40–69. 11 For daguerreotypy and romance in The House of the Seven Gables, in addition to Cohen, ‘What’s Wrong with this Picture?’, see Alan Trachtenburg, ‘Mirror in the Marketplace: American Responses to the Daguerreotype, 1839–1851’, in The Daguerreotype: A Sesquicentennial Celebration, ed. John Wood (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 1989), pp. 60–72; Trachtenburg, ‘Seeing and Believing: Hawthorne’s Reflections on the Daguerreotype in The House of the Seven Gables’, American Literary History, 9.3 (1997), 460–81; Trachtenburg, ‘Photography: The Emergence of a Keyword’, in Martha A. Sandweiss (ed.), Photography in Nineteenth-Century America (Fort Worth, TX: Amon Carter Museum, 1991), pp. 17–47; Susan Williams, Confounding Images: Photography and Portraiture in Antebellum American Fiction (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), chs 2 and 3; Cathy N. Davidson, ‘Photographs of the Dead: Sherman, Daguerre, Hawthorne’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 89 (1990), 667–701; Carol Schloss, In Visible Light: Photography and the American Writer: 1840–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), ch. 1; Shawn Michelle Smith, American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), ch. 1; Paul Gilmore, The Genuine Article: Race, Mass Culture and American Literary Manhood (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), ch. 4; and Marcy Dinius, The Camera and the Press (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), ch. 2. 12 Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance, in The Collected Novels, ed. Millicent Bell (New York: Library of America, 1983), p. 785. 13 Oxford English Dictionary, ‘Daguerreotype’. Both the noun and verb entries for ‘daguerreotype’ define both the photographic process and its figurative connotations. Under Daguerreotype, noun: ‘2. figure An exact representation or description. Obs. (since the daguerreotype itself has yielded to improved photographic processes).’ Under Daguerreotype, verb: ‘2. figure To represent or describe with minute exactitude. Obs.’ This entry offers two examples of early and late figurative uses of the verb: ‘All Daguerreotyped into the mind’s eye’ (1839) and ‘That daguerreotyping power which he possesses beyond any other writer of the time’ (1861). 14 Trachtenberg, ‘Photography: The Emergence of a Keyword’, p. 17. 15 Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance, p. 785. 16 Laura Saltz reads a new turn in recent scholarship that suggests that American transcendentalist philosophy can be characterised by its tendency to see a connection between the material and spiritual. ‘The Magnetism of a Photograph: Daguerreotypy and Margaret Fuller’s Conceptions of Gender and Sexuality’, ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, 56.2 (2010), 106–34. 17 ‘Letter to Sophia Peabody’, 11 December 1839, in The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne: Vol. 15, The Letters 1813–1843, ed. William Charcat (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1989), p. 384. Hereafter CE.



Photographic studies in the Hawthornes’ American Note-books

18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Entry for 27 July 1844, The American Note-books, CE VIII, p. 250. 21 Entry for 7 September 1852, Valenti, ‘Sophia Peabody Hawthorne’s “American Notebooks”’, 170.
 22 Entry for 27 July 1844, The American Note-books, CE VIII, p. 250. 23 Ibid., p. 245. 24 Ibid., p. 247. 25 Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 28. 26 Entry for 27 July 1844, The American Note-books, CE VIII, pp. 245ff. 27 Hawthorne, Mosses from an Old Manse, Tales and Sketches, ed. Roy Harvey Pearce (New York: Library of America, 1982), p. 1147. 28 Entry for 7 September 1857, Valenti, ‘Sophia Peabody Hawthorne’s “American Notebooks”’, 170. 29 Entry for 9 February 1850, ibid., 158. 30 Entry for 30 August 1852, ibid., 160. 31 For more on Sophia’s experiences, see Megan Marshall, The Peabody Sisters: Three Sisters who Ignited American Romanticism (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2005). 32 Entries for 31 August 1852 and 1 September 1852, Valenti, ‘Sophia Peabody Hawthorne’s “American Note-books”’, 162. 33 Valenti, ‘Sophia Peabody Hawthorne’s “American Note-books”’, 125. 34 Entry for 5 September 1852, ibid., 167. 35 19 August 1866, letter to James T. Fields, Boston Public Library MS C.11. 36 12 August 1866, letter to James T. Fields, Boston Public Library MS C.11. See also 28 March 1867 to James T. Fields. 37 The American Note-books, CE VIII, pp. 398–435. 38 Ibid., p. 399. 39 Ibid., pp. 399, 403, 407. 40 Ibid., p. 403. 41 Ibid., p. 414. 42 Ibid., pp. 430–1. 43 Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, in Bell (ed.), The Collected Novels, pp. 195–6. 44 Hawthorne’s historical romance, Lloyd Pratt argues, will manage to ‘remain continuous with certain by-gone time[s]’ rather than articulate a break or progressive time. Archives of American Time: Literature and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), p. 65. 45 Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables, in Bell (ed.), The Collected Novels, p. 351. 46 The American Note-books, CE VIII, p. 406. 47 31 May 1867, letter to James T. Fields, in Lawrence and Werner (eds), Ordinary Mysteries, p. 323. 48 The American Note-books, CE VIII, p. 266. 49 The Blithedale Romance, p. 836. 50 The American Note-books, CE VIII, p. 263. 51 Ibid., pp. 263–4. 52 The Blithedale Romance, p. 837.

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Mixed messages 53 The Marble Faun, in Bell (ed.), The Collected Novels, p. 905. 54 ‘Hawthorne’s Marble Faun’, The Lady’s Home Magazine, ed. T. S. Arthur and Miss Virginia F. Townsend, 15 (1860), 60. 55 The American Note-books, CE VIII, p. 264. 56 The House of the Seven Gables, p. 612. 57 The Blithedale Romance, p. 837. For a comprehensive analysis of the ‘inconsistent and erratic’ narrator of The Blithedale Romance, see Michael Borgstrom, ‘Hating Miles Coverdale’, ESQ, 56.4 (2010), 363–90. 58 The House of the Seven Gables, p. 352. Emphasis mine. 59 The Blithedale Romance, p. 633. 60 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Ground of the Image (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), p. 2. 61 Entry for 24 August 1842, Valenti, ‘Sophia Peabody Hawthorne’s “American Notebooks”’, 130. For more on the relationship between the Hawthornes’ marriage and the river, see Herbert, Dearest Beloved. 62 Entry for 7 August 1842, Lawrence and Werner (eds), Ordinary Mysteries, p. 49. 63 Entry for 24 August 1842, Valenti, ‘Sophia Peabody Hawthorne’s “American Notebooks”’, 130. 64 Entry for 4 September 1842, Lawrence and Werner (eds), Ordinary Mysteries, p. 132. 65 Nancy, The Ground of the Image, p. 2. 66 Entry for 18 September 1842, Lawrence and Werner (eds), Ordinary Mysteries, p. 137. 67 Entry for 19 November 1843, ibid., p. 281. 68 Letters, CE XVI, p. 371. 69 Sacvan Bercovitch, The Office of the Scarlet Letter (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 19. 70 Walt Whitman, Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts (New York: NYU Press, 1984), p. 1524.

Fragments of the future: Walker Evans’s polaroids Caroline Blinder

The feeling for projects – which one might call fragments of the future – is distinguishable from the feeling for fragments of the past only by its direction: progressive in the former, regressive in the latter. What is essential is to be able to idealise and realise objects immediately and simultaneously: to complete them and in part carry them out within oneself.1

This examination into the photography of Walker Evans (1903–75) seeks to re-evaluate Evans’s late polaroids – largely overlooked in comparison to his more iconic 1930s documentary work – as exemplary of the ‘Romantic fragment’; that is to say, as works that present themselves as part of, or fragments of, larger projects, and that do so in ways that are both self-conscious and deliberate. In this respect, the concept of the Romantic fragment is read by the eighteenth-century German philosopher Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel as part of a longer process within modernism, indicative of the moment when incompletion and fragmentation, rather than acting as a failure, represent the most productive means for the continuation of art itself. According to Samuel Weber, ‘neither self-contained nor self-sufficient; the fragment acquires significance only through what comes after it in order to become what alone it can never be’.2 Thus while John Szarkowski saw Evans’s work as ‘a reaffirmation of photography’s central sense of purpose and aesthetic: the precise and lucid description of significant fact’, the polaroids paradoxically offer the viewer a fragmented version of those significant facts – the streets, the objects and the signage – that Evans originally became famous for photographing.3 In Evans’s late polaroids in particular, the sense that they are ‘neither self-contained nor self-sufficient’ renders them more akin to preliminary studies for an ongoing project rather than finalised visions of the urban landscape.4 While Evans is commonly read primarily as one of the chief proponents of a modernist photographic aesthetic, his polaroids of fragmented objects, signage, advertising and billboards from the early 1970s until his death in 1975 prove the importance of the Romantic fragment as a constituent part of modernist aesthetics. In fact, Evans’s fragments, both as the photographic subject matter of his polaroids and in his own collection of fragmented objects, exemplify a modernist

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adaptation of what Schlegel would call ‘fragments of the future’, later incorporated into the twentieth-century German philosopher Walter Benjamin’s theory of ‘infinite reflection’.5 While Evans never articulated his own practice in such terms, his photography nonetheless exemplifies how fragmentation, as subject matter and praxis, mimics the Romantic idea of art as ideally work in progress or studies for future projects rather than as a work of mimetic exactitude. The idea of work in progress, I hope to show, is fundamental to both Evans’s practice and to Schlegel’s definition of the fragment. Defining ‘the Romantic kind of poetry as still in a state of becoming, that, in fact, is its real essence: that it should forever be becoming and never be perfected’, Schlegel used the fragment to define a Romantic ethos in contrast to a more classical one and, as such, it has predominantly been read as indicative of an aphoristic, more experimental turn within Romantic poetry.6 In modernist terms, the idea of the fragment can also be read as a form of knowingness in terms of the artistic process, an assertion of selfreferentiality that lends itself to more contemporary readings of the self-reflective nature of photography.7 While Schlegel’s fragment is often read as a way to illuminate a written text’s self-consciousness of its own incompleteness, Evans’s late polaroids – with their constant referencing of linguistic signifiers unmoored and cut loose from their original context – acknowledge the discursive limitations of art. These are limitations, as we shall see, that Evans continuously visualises by referencing his earlier photographic subject material and then reframing it as fragments of its former self. In Evans’s 1930s documentary photographs of sharecropper interiors, shop fronts and commercial signage, objects and people were situated within the larger context of certain unmistakable economic and historical factors. Nonetheless, while the polaroids share much of the same subject matter, the same propensity towards the dilapidated, the used, the discarded remnants of lived life, they are more than simply contemporary versions of Evans’s 1930s documentary aesthetic. By being cropped to represent only constituent parts of what would have been shown in its entirety thirty years before, the polaroids gesture – paradoxically – in a very deliberate way towards what was once whole as well as towards what might, conceivably, one day be whole again. In other words, the limitations of Evans’s polaroids, the fact that they so visibly constitute fragments of objects, becomes a way to conceptualise a connection rarely made: namely, the connection between photographs both as cohesive works of art and as works of art that rely on a notion of fragmentation for their aesthetic charge. In re-examining Walker Evans’s later polaroids as fragments of earlier projects and ideas, and as self-contained ruminations on photography’s ability to reflect on representation itself, we may rethink his oeuvre in its entirety. In this particular instance, I wish to illustrate some of these mechanisms through a closer look at a distinct series of Evans’s late polaroids taken with an SX-70. According to Christopher Bonanos in Instant: The Story of Polaroid, the ‘SX-70 was unveiled teasingly and gradually, over a couple of years, with sneak peeks doled out carefully to industry people … the big revelation [was]



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at a Polaroid shareholders’ meeting in April 1972’.8 Walker Evans, as did André Kertész, obtained an SX-70 quite quickly after its release and shot thousands of photographs over the succeeding fourteen months. As he explained in an interview at the time: ‘Nobody should touch a polaroid until he’s over sixty. You should first do all that work … It reduces everything to your brain and taste.’9 Apart from a series dedicated to portraits of friends, students and models, the vast amount of Evans’s output using his Polaroid SX-70 camera consists of variations on the subject of the fragment: discarded signage, road signs, singular letters, onedimensional objects, advertisements partially torn and illegible, and perhaps the clearest referent to Evans’s earlier material from the Depression Era: the handwritten sign indicating commerce at its most basic level. Most noticeable are those polaroids that relate to Evans’s earlier images of similar objects, road signs, debris and other pieces of the American landscape where the polaroid picture itself, like a fragment, seems to indicate what Schlegel called ‘a once constituted or future whole’; objects that are recognisably iconic but also somehow altered through the perspective of the camera. The most obvious examples of this practice can be found in Evans’s very last series of polaroids: images of individual letters – taken from road signs, advertising and other public signage – designed to eventually be sequenced alphabetically into a book of letters. Evans had planned, according to his biographer Jerry Thompson, a project that would eventually create his own personal version of the American index, a lexicon of Americana able to encompass vernacular culture in its written form from A–Z. For Evans, the issue, however, was not how to encompass ‘all’ of vernacular culture, but how to prove the transcendent quality of those everyday objects otherwise deemed disposable, lacking in conventional value and increasingly part of an ever-present consumer culture. In this respect, the polaroids were part of an ongoing project because they, like Evans’s work from the 1930s and 1940s, focus on a working vernacular culture in which the inherent beauty of the mundane and the everyday is made visible through the photographer’s lens. While there are similarities between Evans’s black-and-white photography of the 1930s (particularly of interiors, furniture and personal belongings) and the later polaroids, his focus on the constituent parts of the alphabet in his ‘letter’ images pushes the linguistic element to the fore in ways that seem less about the social context of the images’ production and more about their potential as signifiers in their own right (see figure 3.1). In the accompanying wall writing for his exhibition ‘Walker Evans: Forty Years’ at the Yale Art Gallery in 1972, Evans states: The photographer, the artist, ‘takes’ a picture: symbolically he lifts an object or a combination of objects, and in so doing he makes a claim for that object or that composition and a claim for his act of seeing in the first place that in each instance his vision has penetrating validity.10

In seeking to counter the definition of his work as solely documentary by nature (a lifelong preoccupation for Evans), and in seeking to redefine the public’s

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3.1  Walker Evans, Untitled [detail of sign lettering: ‘A’], 11 November 1974. Instant colour print, 7.9 × 7.9 cm (3 1⁄8 × 3 1⁄8 in.). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Walker Evans archive, 1994 (1994.245.36) © Walker Evans archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

perception of what constitutes a ‘documentary’ eye, Evans relies on the visionary abilities of the artist and the process of looking itself. In figure 3.2, for instance, the juxtaposition of a recognisable dollar sign with the number 1, an advertisement for some unknown commodity, necessitates our focusing on the dollar sign and its graphic beauty, rather than its practical application. There is something distinctly quaint about the size of the dollar sign



Fragments of the future

3.2  Walker Evans, Untitled [detail of sign lettering: ‘$1.00’], 1973–74. Instant colour print, 7.9 × 7.9 cm (3 1⁄8 × 3 1⁄8 in.). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Walker Evans archive, 1994 (1994.245.28) © Walker Evans archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

in proportion to its accompanying number; something poignant in the faded red that once was meant to be punchy and noticeable. This is a vision both recognisably American and vernacular, as the attempt to render a sense of depth looks homemade rather than prefabricated. Here, Evans is more interested in how the selective focus on objects aids the perpetuation of their meaning than he is in rendering them accurately. As in the Schlegelian belief in the Romantic fragment

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as a process of infinite becoming, a process that never finalises itself, perpetuation in this respect is not antithetical to an idea of wholeness, but a reminder of the fragment as a project always in the process of becoming. The dollar sign in Evans’s polaroid is beautiful in its simplicity but, more importantly, it is a beauty that relies on our vision of it as something extracted, something asking to be recognised in a way that distinguishes it from how we usually ‘read’ a dollar sign. As Samuel Weber points out, the very thing that connects the concept of the Romantic fragment to modernity ‘lies not in the effort to dissolve the work in an absolute and ultimately self-identical critical reflection … but that by undermining the integrity of the individual “form” at the same time allows the singular work to “survive” … even as a different kind’.11 If for Evans the photographer’s gaze is the intuitive ability to make ‘a claim for that object or that composition and a claim for his act of seeing in the first place’, then we might ask whether the polaroids can, in fact, undermine the integrity of the individual form, as Weber puts it. Evans’s iconic images of the interiors of sharecropper homes in the 1930s, where singular objects such as vases, ornaments and photos are shown fastidiously placed on tables and walls, seem after all to indicate quite the opposite, namely objects shown in their entirety, the discreet distance between camera and objects an indication of a sense of respect, even neutrality. The polaroids, on the other hand, crop out of the picture frame all extraneous elements in an attempt to get as close as possible to the signs themselves. One of the last images in Jerry Thompson’s The Last Years of Walker Evans (1979), for example, shows Evans crouching on a pavement to get as close as possible to the writing on the tarmac. In this sense, there are clear differences in the distance between Evans and his subjects, while on other thematic levels Evans’s polaroids are clear variants of his earlier praxis. Like the early documentary work, the polaroids seem to search for some sense of wholeness through the minute and the everyday, and like earlier Evans photographs, they too operate within an unmistakably larger American landscape. It is not simply the use of recognisable iconography, the dollar sign and typography seen in figure 3.2, that reminds us of where we are; it is also – in many of Evans’s polaroids (figure 3.3 is one such instance) – the attraction of the discarded as a nonetheless permanent fixture within American culture. In the fascination with litter lies an understanding that, as Jeff Rosenheim puts it in his introduction to Walker Evans – Polaroids, ‘in the roadside lay the “stuff” of the contemporary world’.12 While it is apparent that Evans gravitated towards such items as debris, broken utensils, wayward signs and discarded shacks throughout his photography, the Romantic impetus at play in the polaroids is nonetheless different from the earlier material. Rather than elevate the fragmented objects to something nearly sacrosanct in the polaroids, a charge that one might have levied at the sharecropper interiors with their forlorn broken ornaments and torn calendars as indicators of the quiet austerity of their surroundings, the objects in the polaroids – flattened coke cans and discarded pieces of furniture, for example – are more reminiscent of abstract art and graffiti and thus appear more conceptual in their overall focus.



Fragments of the future

3.3  Walker Evans, Untitled [trash study], 11 October 1973. Instant colour print, 7.9 × 7.9 cm (3 1⁄8 × 3 1⁄8 in.). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Walker Evans archive, 1994 (1994.245.69) © Walker Evans archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In figure 3.3, a recognisable discarded coke can adds a flash of red into an image where a swathe of black borders one side, the pavement the other. In many of the polaroids, the muted colours, murky browns and urban greys, seem to add an indeterminate texture to objects already hard to define. In this instance, the vertical lines also give the appearance of three distinct zones, a more luminous one, a grey area and a velvety black. If the idea of the Romantic fragment dictates that the most accurate representation of a thing is not the thing in total but a rethinking

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of the totality of the thing through its fragmented form, then Evans’s polaroids of isolated letters also take on an additional, almost conceptual meaning in this respect. Evans was acutely aware of the fact that photography, like language, often labours under being shown sequentially, that it cannot escape being a sequential art form the minute it becomes institutionalised, for instance, in museums, books and various other photo-textual endeavours. In this respect, even singular letters will always inevitably be ‘read’ syntactically, even when shown in fragments as a sort of alternate alphabet. The traditional sequence may be disturbed in this ‘alphabet’ but it will always in some shape or form be recognisable. The idiosyncratic nature of the letters means that there is no risk of reading them as coming from the same source and yet, inevitably, they function simultaneously in isolation and in tandem once exhibited together (see figure 3.2). Evans’s fascination with letters isolated from conventional syntactical meaning may, then, gesture towards the pop art of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, with its gleeful use of commercial fonts and recognisable packaging. Nonetheless, the ramshackle nature of Evans’s alphabet, the discarded coke can, signals a melancholia that is much different from pop art’s embrace of a commodified American landscape. In Evans’s own words, the Romantic impulse has to be present for ‘the garbage can … to be beautiful. Some people are able to see that – see and feel it. I lean toward the enchantment, the visual power of the aesthetically rejected object.’13 For Weber, the Romantic fragment is thus ‘characterised by an intersection of what is present and what is absent, of the real and the ideal’.14 Similarly, we might say that the letters operate in isolation as idealised icons as well as part of a wider set of images. This sense of endless permutations, of what John Tagg calls Evans’s predisposition towards ‘reordering, insertions, recategorisation, and regrouping’,15 stresses Evans’s antipathy towards rigid narratives, towards any  unnecessary foreclosure of meaning. Much has been written about the sequencing of American Photographs (1938), Evans’s first monograph and the catalogue for his groundbreaking show at MoMA the same year. And yet, as Tagg also points out, despite the ‘rigid binding of the book’, American Photographs retains ‘a sequence that might be undone by a provisionality that allowed the reader to imagine the book unmade and remade again’.16 For Tagg, then, American Photographs forms a precursor – emotionally and conceptually, if not in the actual look of the photographs – to the type of experimentation later enacted in the polaroids. Like the polaroids, Evans’s early images resist, in these terms, any genuine measure of truth to the point where the camera becomes, for Tagg, ‘both crypt and encrypting machine … a portal to a world that has no message, that is addressed to no one, and that is seen not as “present” but, as Evans precisely put it, “as the past – as always already lost”.’17 Tagg unites his reading of Evans’s aesthetics to a form of detachment towards the social; a detachment in line with Evans’s reputation as a somewhat elitist artist at heart. Nonetheless, the images of fragments from the 1930s, foregrounded as the painstaking documentation of the worn-out and soon to be obsolete possessions of the sharecroppers, are inevitably invested with social meaning. So how



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do we demarcate between these early ‘fragments’ and those in the polaroids? Schlegel’s idea of fragments of the future, rather than the past, is useful here. In a Schlegelian sense the polaroids are fragments of the future because they force the viewer to contemplate what is not there, the missing letters, the unseen word or sign, rather than what was, last year’s calendar, the torn photograph of a more affluent ancestor on a sharecropper’s wall. In this sense, the missing parts of the letters also serve to make them strangely universal, even in some ways removed from the American landscape itself, in ways that are simply impossible in the early black-and-white images. In comparison with Evans’s earlier photographs of broken utensils and worn-out domestic objects that reference the social and historical circumstances of their production, the polaroids, instead of signalling the collective loss of the Depression era, seem a more personal, or as Tagg would have it, a more melancholy form of realism. This is not to say that the polaroids don’t show an engagement with and a fidelity to the immediate world that aligns them with a particularly American tradition, simply that there is something decidedly wistful in Evans’s later outlook. Another neo-Romantic American, Ralph Waldo Emerson, posed a relevant rhetorical question in ‘The American Scholar’: ‘What is man born for, but to be a reformer, a re-maker of what man has made?’ – a question that in many ways defines an idealised version of the American artist that persisted well into the twentieth century.18 Emerson’s Romantic, pragmatic idea of the American project as a never-ending process of creation can be equally applied to Evans’s distinct sense of the American landscape as an ongoing process, a site of cultural practice continuously refashioning itself. In similar ways, the polaroids attempt to remake their own subjects, while simultaneously remaining faithful to the actual origins of those subjects. If we can call this a distinctly American reworking of German romanticism, it is because its idealism is born out of a sense of pragmatic responsibility, the responsibility that the artist has in putting the materials of lived life into the public domain. As Paul Hamilton states in his re-reading of the Romantic fragment, a ‘democratising of access to the work of art’ is made ‘by rendering the work’s uniqueness fragmentary … and thus one part of the unfolding history of its continuing significance in different forms’.19 The answer is partly that Evans saw the process of ‘remaking’ or ‘reforming’ as something intrinsic rather than harmful to the integrity of the objects portrayed. David Campany’s extensive study of Evans’s magazine work illuminates the significant amount of projects that Evans photographed and captioned for various magazines, in which titles such as ‘Downtown: A last look Backward’ in Fortune (1956), and ‘America’s Great Architecture is Doomed, it must be Saved’, in Life (1963), indicate a perpetual interest in both documenting and, in some ways, memorialising a vanishing America.20 In fact, the desire to come ever closer to many of the same subjects that he initially photographed in the 1930s becomes an extension of a project from which he had never truly deviated: namely to establish the fragment as a cipher for the integrity of the object as a whole, to in a sense define the fragment itself as subject.

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In these terms, Evans’s photography, like Schlegel’s philosophy, is not searching for the unconditional first principle, but – rather – is happy to engage in a process of infinite approximation. As Rodolphe Gasché concludes in his introduction to Schlegel’s Athenaeum Fragments: If the Romantic fragment can be demarcated from a notion of fragment that is a part of a once constituted or future whole, it is because it thematises an essential fragmentation of the whole as such … The Romantic fragment cannot be thought properly except if it is seen to articulate a problematic relative to the transcendental idea of totality.21

Rather than read the search for an ‘unattainable whole’ as a sign of a failed project, it becomes, in Evans’s case, a way to identify the importance of approximation as both the subject of the photograph and the most apt way of describing the act of taking the photograph itself. In this respect, photography might indeed have conformed to Schlegel’s desired vision of an art form: ‘that is fragmentary both in form and content, simultaneously completely subjective and individual, and completely objective’.22 For Andrei Codrescu, in his introduction to Signs, a collection of Evans’s early black-and-white images of signage, the fascination with the ‘self-referential nature of the sign’ proves that Evans’s images can be read as ‘meditations on the art of photography’.23 Nonetheless, while Codrescu recognises the ‘self-referential nature’ of Evans’s interest in signage, he argues that ‘[b]eyond the injunction to look at these fragments of language as a picture, the only commentary involved has to do with the evident modernity of the assemblage’.24 Codrescu’s main point, that meditation on the art of photography attends mainly to how it is put together, is clearly valid, but strangely, Codrescu ignores the possibility that within the assemblage lie multiple reference points – reference points that go beyond the obvious modernity of the advertisements and slogans of the period, and which later emerge more clearly in the polaroids. In figure 3.2, for instance, the signage from which the letters are taken seems to be recognisably American even if of indeterminate origin; likewise, it could be something relatively contemporaneous or something dilapidated and old. Evans uses the polaroid film and its tendency to wash out contrast as a specific ploy here, the lyrical or nostalgic sense of the signage accentuated by the polaroid’s colours, which are reminiscent of the picture postcards from the turn of the century that Evans used copiously to collect.25 As such, the polaroids reference both Evans’s earlier use of signage in the 1930s and 1940s, and the earlier, genuinely vernacular views of small town America taken by amateur photographers and sold as picture postcards. In this way the polaroids not only insert themselves into the personal history of the photographer’s aesthetics (Evans’s picture postcard collection), they also insert themselves into a public history, thus commenting on their own historical as well as artistic processes. By 1974 the polaroid, indicative of a growing trend among consumers to have instantaneous images, even if of lesser quality, also seemed to signal the end of



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a particular type of concerned documentary photography. In the photographer Jacob Holdt’s American Photos (1970–75), an obvious nod to Evans’s American Photographs, the shock value of racial disparity and other graphic displays of social inequality left little room for the details of domesticity that had fascinated Evans. Nonetheless, the recent return of the polaroid seems to have proven the innate desire of photo-enthusiasts for expediency as well as a deep-rooted nostalgia for a pre-digital sense of images as permanent objects in their own right. For Evans, the polaroid, rather than a disavowal of his earlier 1930s work, was an expedient way to continue his interrogation of the potential of those objects, both found and discarded, that he had in fact focused on throughout his career. One could be tempted to read this as a form of memorialisation of pre-industrial America, just as it is tempting to see Evans’s agrarian interiors as proof of the perseverance of something pure and untainted by capitalist ideologies. Nonetheless, the polaroids, with their sparse subject matter, are more concerned with photography itself as an act of memorialisation. For Jean Baudrillard in The System of Objects, the ‘memorialisation’ of certain objects constitutes an unspoken critique of modernity, a critique in which objects are designated as collectible antiques by the bourgeoisie precisely because they invest the outmoded with capital value. By memorialising certain objects that are rapidly becoming obsolete, a reinvestment in the derelict and the outworn is made which suddenly gives the fragment an emotional, as well as a commercial, exchange value. For Baudrillard, of course, the search for such objects – and Evans’s lexicon of images are prime examples of such a search – by necessity implies a regressive form of art; an art that relies not on innovation but on something more akin to a collector’s desire for antiques. Antiques, within the wider schematics of Baudrillard’s reading of accumulation and capital as governed by unconscious forces, imply a desire to ‘escape into one’s own childhood’, to arrest time rather than to render its inherently progressive nature. In these terms, Evans’s focus on ‘antiques’ could be read as somehow regressive, as somehow conforming to Baudrillard’s model in which the act of collecting is a mode of weighing things down rather than liberating them. According to Baudrillard, ‘antiques partake of “legend”, because they are defined first and foremost by their mythical quality, by their coefficient of authenticity’.26 For Baudrillard this search for authenticity is a remnant of an obsolete romanticism, a romanticism that he finds problematic politically because it encourages nostalgia rather than change. This romanticism is nonetheless something that I would argue Evans embraces. In these terms, the Romantic model is appropriate to Evans not because it allows him to retain the concept of authenticity within photography as a sentimental gesture but because it allows him to take things of seemingly little value and confer upon them that ‘coefficient of authenticity’ that photography always struggles to retain. In terms of the polaroid, in particular, the notion of authenticity and value – if we follow Baudrillard – is not about proof and foreclosure, so much as it is about accepting the polaroid’s ability to render things distinct and unique, no matter their financial value. In many ways,

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this seems even more pertinent to the photograph as object itself. The fact that the Polaroid SX-70 can only print one image at a time and never duplicate it means theoretically that its value exceeds that of a standard print. The fact that its uniqueness is guaranteed by the chemical process that has created it in the first place is, in a sense, what makes it valuable. There is, of course, much to be said about how the photographing of objects relates to the malleable nature of both photographs themselves as commodities and of photographs of commodities. In fact, one might argue that what runs through Evans’s earlier as well as later work is an attempt to prove that photography applies value, rather than divests things of their transient value. In other words, photography is always and inevitably determining what remains an exchangeable commodity, because it is always engaged in making things iconic, or as Evans puts it, adding a ‘penetrating validity’ to its subject matter. Therefore, while Evans’s polaroids relate in subject matter to the 1930s monochrome object photographs, they are emblematic of something beyond the more obvious social and ethnographic ramifications of the ‘original’ images. This does not mean that the two cannot coexist. While Weber, paraphrasing Schlegel, defined the fragment in terms of intimation and suggestion, he also saw it as proof of what Schlegel called ‘an unconditionally social spirit’.27 Perhaps Evans’s fragments, similarly, gesture towards a space for objects that have visibly fallen in value, that, even though they are outside of the commodity system, deserve a safe haven of sorts for the discarded and used. Evans’s desire to eventually create an alphabet of twenty-six fragments may seem merely the continuation of documentary photography as an indexical effort above all, an effort that in this respect counters the notion of the polaroids as a successful attempt at fragmentation in an aesthetic sense. However, the indexical effort does not necessarily counter the Romantic turn that I have attempted to apply here. Instead, the Romantic turn may signal Evans’s desire for a photographic intimacy that is hard to achieve within the remit of documentary work. Is it then possible to argue for an emotional impetus behind the use of the fragment? Is the idea of the Romantic simply another way to identify an increasingly introverted practice for Evans, a practice that became more paramount as he aged? So far I have argued that the notion of the fragment plays a key role in understanding how Evans’s polaroids return to and reconstitute his earlier still-life images, but how do they illuminate Evans’s real and acute desire to get as close to the world around him as possible? If we consider Evans as a quintessentially American Romantic – that is to say one whose practice comes out of a nineteenth-century desire to prove the value of a transcendent and mediated world – his practice begins to make sense. William Carlos Williams, writing on Evans’s American Photographs in 1938, saw the images as representing ‘ourselves lifted from a parochial setting’, proof that ‘what the artist does applies to everything, every day, everywhere to quicken and elucidate, to fortify and enlarge the life about him and make it eloquent – to make it scream, as Evans does at times, or gurgle, laugh and speak masterfully when the occasion offers’.28 For Williams, Evans’s photography



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was an indicator of the democratic everyday, but an everyday with which a sense of transcendence could coexist, everywhere. In a genuinely Emersonian vein, Williams saw the objective world as there for the artist to capture and, through it, to construct a vantage point from which to see the world as mediated. The issue for Williams, as for Emerson, was not to determine what nature’s order or meaning was precisely, but of what use it could be in overcoming our sense of alienation from the world and, in turn, to create an art form that could reflect this. Evans, too, believed photography was able to transcend its realist parameters, not by abstraction but by making the real and the ideal as one, which meant looking as closely and accurately at things as possible. In other words, the fragmented, dilapidated, used nature of objects becomes precisely that which renders them beautiful, which, in effect, enables them to transcend their origins and usage and become something valuable. If the utilitarian aspect of the objects speaks of toil and labour, their ‘social spirit’ and political context, it is their ability to gesture beyond the everyday, to transcend their utilitarian value, that enables them to become the building blocks for something like Evans’s alternate alphabet. The difficulty, in this context, is how to combine photography’s artistic aspiration, its ability to transcend its everyday parameters, with the ability to stay simultaneously true to what Williams calls the ‘everyday and everything’. If art, according to Emerson, should make ‘the axis of vision coincide with the axis of things’, could we then re-read Evans’s polaroids as intent on creating a fundamental alliance between transcendent vision and neutral observation?29 One indication that Evans saw objects as able to transcend their origins and everyday context lies in the fact that by the time he started the polaroids, the objects he photographed were no longer necessarily rendered in situ, but were often taken away from their original context. According to Thompson, by 1972 ‘Evans was regularly collecting or commissioning the collecting of roadside and other kinds of signs … He was still photographing them in situ, but was also photographing them … at home, often in the yard or nailed to the side of the house.’30 According to Thompson, Evans’s photographs of signs before the 1960s were often ‘permanently attached to their settings, painted directly onto the bricks or boards of the buildings they embellished’, whereas by the 1970s, the ‘signs were often less referential, more self-contained, less dependent on context’.31 Nonetheless, while the signs may be less ‘referential’ in terms of their original placement and meaning, another form of referentiality is created. In the 1972 exhibition at Yale Art Gallery, Evans installed some of his own collection of actual used signs, framed, next to his photographs of signs. As Evans notes in his writing for the exhibit’s wall panel The installation, here, of actual graphic ‘found objects’ may need little or no interpretation via the written words. Assuredly, these objects may be felt – e­ xperienced – in this gallery, by anyone, just as the photographer felt them in the field, on location. … A distinct point, though, is made in the lifting of these objects from their original settings. The point is that lifting is, in the raw, exactly what the photographer is doing with his machine, the camera, anyway, always.32

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Thompson is adamant that Evans ‘wasn’t thinking about his earlier pictures when he wrote this statement, nor would his temperament … lead him to compare recent pictures with earlier photographs of similar subjects’.33 However, in the light of Evans’s own points about the camera, as ‘lifting objects from their original settings … anyway, always’, Thompson’s statement seems somewhat simplistic. In fact, Evans’s statement actually stresses a desire for photography to mediate the division, if not between the spiritual and the material, then between the physical things themselves. And once again, it is in the fragments of material life, in his private collection where he obsessively hoarded bottle caps, old tools, signs and other debris, that crucial clues emerge. By saving those things that seemed to actively resist the vagaries of time, by collecting and sorting them, Evans believed that he might, indeed, render them meaningful fragments of the future. The connection between the impulse to collect and the photographer’s ‘claim for his act of seeing in the first place’, re-establishes the artist as the centre from which both vision and intuition emanates. The idea, in a modernist sense, was firmly situated by Benjamin in the aphoristic impulse, the focus on extracts, concise and yet always pointing in other directions, that he had discerned in Schlegel. For Evans, as a photographer, the polaroid camera with its combination of neutrality and subjectivity was the perfect medium with which to create photographic aphorisms, the ability to give a shorthand version of the more expansive and inclusive visions that he had produced earlier. The polaroids are unique in this sense, not just because their chemical properties guarantee the singularity of the completed print, but also because they confront the issue of individualism and duplication, fragmentation and coherency. Much more can be said, in this context, about the philosophical implications of moving from a camera where the process of negotiating the shot is infinitely more complicated, but the print can be duplicated endlessly, to a process where the taking of the photograph is ‘easier’, but it cannot be reproduced. The fact that the polaroid – as a result of the film and nature of the camera itself – cannot be duplicated, that it by necessity remains a ‘one-off’, must have appealed to Evans’s sense of the photograph as an objet d’art, although by several accounts he very freely gave his polaroids away as presents. On the other hand, the polaroids of old weathered signs, fragments of flattened coke cans and other disposable items are also Evans’s tongue-in-cheek versions of an American vernacular situated in the gutter as well as the living room. Filtered through Evans’s knowledge that the polaroid represented the most accessible of media with which to view the nation, it could operate both as a cipher for the quotidian and a comment on photography’s tendency to universalise and classify the everyday, an interrogation made all the more poignant by the polaroid’s status as a camera apparatus marketed for the everyman. To conclude, the polaroid SX-70 facilitated Evans’s fascination with both personal and public artefacts, and it enabled him to continue his questioning of what actually constitutes a photographic language. This search, however, was not



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about the incomprehensibility of meaning in a postmodern sense but about the ongoing currency of the Romantic fragment as proof of photography’s intuitive powers. Evans’s polaroids of singular letters and other fragments provide us with an insight into the desire for photography as essentially about communicability. In this respect, the letters and signage that we see are ciphers that communicate, in just as valuable a format as Evans’s earlier documentary work, the origins of a vernacular language. In the end, Evans’s primary goal was not to prove that photography should be read as a superior form of language, but to prove that it too participates in a very human endeavour: namely, to create an alternative space where the past, rather than being archived for posterity, would continue to live.

Notes   1 Friedrich Schlegel, Athenaeums Fragmente / Philosophical Fragments (1799), trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. 22.  2 Samuel Weber, Benjamin’s – abilities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 62.   3 John Szarkowski, Walker Evans (New York: MoMA, 1971), p. 10.  4 Ibid.   5 Winfried Menninghaus, ‘Walter Benjamin’s Exposition of the Romantic Theory of Reflection’, in Peter Osborne (ed.), Walter Benjamin: Philosophy (London: Taylor and Francis, 2005), p. 25.  6 Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, p. 21.   7 On the link between fragmentation and romanticism, see Alexander Regier, Fracture and Fragmentation in British Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).   8 Christopher Bonas, Instant: The Story of Polaroid (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2012), p. 102.   9 Ibid., p. 101. 10 Walker Evans, Walker Evans at Work (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994), p. 229. 11 Weber, Benjamin’s – abilities, p. 29. 12 Jeff L. Rosenheim, ‘Intro – Walker Evans: Polaroids’, in Walker Evans: Polaroids (New York: Scalo, 2002), p. 8. 13 Evans, Walker Evans at Work, p. 220. 14 Weber, Benjamin’s – abilities, p. 16. 15 John Tagg, ‘Melancholy Realism: Walker Evans’s Resistance to Meaning’, in Tagg, The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), p. 155. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., p. 171. 18 Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘The American Scholar’ (1837), in The Portable Emerson, ed. Carl Bode (London: Penguin, 1946), p. 65. 19 Paul Hamilton, ‘Leopardi and the Logic of the Romantic Fragment’, in Hamilton, Realpolitik: European Romanticism and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 206. 20 David Campany, Walker Evans: The Magazine Work (Göttingen: Steidl, 2014).


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Mixed messages 21 Rodolphe Gasché, ‘Foreword’, in Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, p. xxx. 22 Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, p. 72. 23 Andrei Codrescu, ‘Introduction’, in Walker Evans: SIGNS (London: Thames and Hudson, 1998), p. 6. 24 Ibid. 25 According to Jeff Rosenheim in Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Walker Evans Archive includes over 9,000 cards collected by Evans. 26 Jean Baudrillard, ‘The Non-Functional System or Subjective Discourse: Marginal Objects: Antiques’, in Baudrillard, Le Système des objets / The System of Objects (London: Verso, 2005 [1968]), p. 10. 27 Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, p. 22. 28 William Carlos Williams, ‘Sermon with a Camera’, New Republic (October 1938), 282.
 29 Emerson, ‘Nature’ (1836), in Bode (ed.), The Portable Emerson, p. 48. 30 Jerry L. Thompson, The Last Years of Walker Evans (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997), p. 20. 31 Ibid., p. 21. 32 Quoted in ibid., p. 52. 33 Ibid.

Cartooning the marvelous: word and image in Chicago Surrealism Joanna Pawlik

In December 1965 Franklin Rosemont and his wife Penelope travelled to Paris to meet André Breton and the Parisian group of Surrealists. The young Americans from the mid-West stayed for five months, participating in the daily meetings of the circle, which were held between six and eight at the café on Promenade de Vénus.1 The visit testified to the Rosemonts’ burgeoning interest in Surrealism and they returned to Chicago with Breton’s blessing to start the first organised group of American Surrealists, some forty-two years after the movement was initiated in 1924. To make Surrealism function as they wished, continuing the movement’s long-standing commitment to the reconciliation of the ‘marvelous’ and political praxis, they needed to redress what they saw as fundamental misunderstandings of the movement, which assumed that Surrealism was a European interwar avantgarde, consigned to appear only in commercialised or institutionalised forms in post-war America.2 As part of this process, the Chicago group formulated innovative, though idiosyncratic, interpretations of word-image combinations, many drawn from ‘the majestic and fertile river of popular culture’ at which, Rosemont argued, Surrealism ‘renewed itself’ throughout the twentieth century.3 Proclaiming that Surrealism was not only still alive but fully combative involved, paradoxically, looking backwards over American cultural history. As Breton had listed precursors to Surrealism in the ‘First Manifesto’ (1924), identifying, among others, the Marquis de Sade, Charles Baudelaire and Victor Hugo as posthumous allies of the group, Franklin Rosemont also set about identifying ‘the emergence of a specifically presurrealist current’ in America.4 These ‘islands of the Marvelous’, Rosemont wrote in 1970, ‘began to appear not as a succession of historical curiosities, but as moments of rapturous anticipation of a future, the possibilities of which we were beginning to perceive more and more clearly’.5 This exercise in cultural historiography was coterminous with the group’s process of self-definition and legitimation which relied upon dispelling the idea that American Surrealism was dependent on, or even derivative of, its French forebears. Insisting that in the twentieth century, ‘American poetry … has lived primarily outside the poem’, Rosemont suggests that popular culture proved to be one of its most hospitable refuges.6 The group’s research into popular culture

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encompassed jazz, dance, B-movies, the blues, radio, pulp fiction and television, yet of all its popular accomplices, comics seemed to make the most palpable contribution to the group’s identity and purpose; without them, wrote Rosemont, ‘Surrealism would be very different from what it is in the US today’.7 The recalcitrant, workshy Bugs Bunny became the veritable mascot of their group. His importance to the international Surrealist movement, according to Rosemont, inhered in his confirmation ‘that some day the Fudds will be vanquished – that some day all the carrots in the world will be ours’.8 The group’s particular interest in comics can, in part, be explained by the medium’s humour, a long-standing locus of Surrealist research, as well as to the Chicago group’s innovative approach to Surrealist historiography.9 This essay, however, explores the group’s discussion of word-image relations in comics, described by Rosemont as ‘a new kind of ‘“hieroglyphic” poetry’ or ‘hysterical hieroglyphic’.10 These hieroglyphs often reflexively interrogate pictorial, as well as verbal, representation and some might be more familiarly described, following W. J. T. Mitchell, as metapictures.11 And yet the Chicago group were not only, or exclusively, iconologists. As Surrealists, their hermeneutic for interpreting poetic or hysterical hieroglyphs drew on psychoanalysis and historical materialism in order to position comics, and demarcate their role, within an as yet unfinished trajectory towards personal and collective liberation from repression and alienation. They addressed the commodity form of comics, yet never permitted the medium to be reducible to it, and emphasised an embodied form of reading that was contingent upon a realisation and politicisation of the pleasure principle. Elaboration of a hermeneutic for reading word and image combinations in comics was, then, central to the group’s redefinition of Surrealist thought and praxis, as well as to their modelling of Surrealism’s role in future social transformation. Rosemont writes approvingly of the medium’s exploitation of both visual and verbal modes, noting that ‘men who admire drawing and enjoy reading strangely balk when the two are combined, as in comics’.12 Despite its long-standing hostility to the specialisation of art and literature, and the concomitant hierarchies that dismissed the multi-modality of popular culture as banal or infantile, Surrealism was often split along these lines by cultural and educational institutions – presented as either a literary or artistic avant-garde. To the Chicago Surrealists, such distinctions between poetry and painting, or high and low culture, were specious; they had no explanatory purchase on Surrealism’s form or function. They took a stance towards popular culture, then, which contrasted with dominant discourses of the time that tended either to pessimistically dismiss the popular as the site of ideological conformity or promote it as the (lucrative) cultural corollary to political liberalism. The Chicago group insisted on their own dialectical approach that refused, as Rosemont argued, to see ‘the working class’ as ‘happily “integrated” into the machinery that extracts glue from its bones’.13 The secrets of the poetic and hysterical hieroglyphs in comics invited disclosure; in their commodity form, they might depreciate reality by promoting the



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circulation of capital but they could also encode and exalt alternatives. Popular culture, when treated dialectically, could reveal the contradictions of capitalist reality, usually hidden from view, that seemed to offer a carrot in one hand that obscured the stick in the other. Although the Chicago Surrealists were certainly prodigiously productive, one of the significant features of the group is their emphasis on interpretation: on innovative methods of reception, and not just production, of cultural forms. European Surrealism was perhaps better known for its production of works that pursued congruency with the artist’s unconscious as opposed to artistic convention, in ways that seem to invite autobiographical or symptomatic readings. This is not to say that Parisian Surrealism was uninterested in interpretation: indeed, during the 1930s, when Breton renounced the movement’s ‘idealist’ phase of the 1920s, Surrealism turned its eye more towards deciphering the subject’s encounter with his external environment as part of its difficult task of reconciling Freudian psychoanalysis with the historical materialism of Marx and Engels. This seems to be the moment in Parisian Surrealism in which the Chicago group were most invested. However, as in works such as Breton’s Mad Love (1937) or Communicating Vessels (1932), the encounter with the everyday was usually mediated through an individual psyche. Chicago Surrealism tended to de-emphasise the discrete unconscious of the individual producer or consumer, and invested instead in a generalised economy of the pleasure principle, which was shared by the producer and anonymous consumer of, or even character in, popular cultural forms. This difference, however, is not usually acknowledged or codified as such and Chicago Surrealism tends to present itself as continuous with, rather than a corrective of, its Parisian forebears. As it reached America, Surrealism had never seemed very far away from popular culture, and from comics or cartoons in particular. Nancy Cunard’s encyclopaedic Negro Anthology (1934), dedicated to documenting African and Afro-diasporic experience in the circum-Atlantic world, served as an early conduit of Surrealism to Anglophone Americans. Alongside other texts and images from Parisian Surrealists, it included analysis by Georges Sadoual of colonial discourse in French comic strips.14 In a completely different vein, an image of Superman with Lois Lane in his arms was included as an example of ‘The Survival of Certain Myths and Some Other Myths in Growth or Formation’ in the catalogue for the ‘First Papers of Surrealism’ exhibition in 1942. Aside from self-authored examples such as these, promoters of the movement had often connected Surrealism’s appeals to fantasy with their new-world cousins in America, many drawn from popular culture.15 Alfred Barr’s exhibition ‘Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism’ at MoMA in 1936 exhibited Surrealist works alongside stills from Disney’s The Three Little Wolves, and Salvador Dalí, then excommunicated from the group, had collaborated with Disney on the animated film Destino (1946). The Chicago group never tired of castigating commercially minded ventures such as these which misrepresented the movement by downplaying its politics and promoting facile or erroneous substitutes for financial gain. Comics, then, had served a complicated

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and complicating role in the reception of Surrealism in America, and the Chicago group’s continued efforts to elaborate a hermeneutic for reading them constituted an attempt to systematise the medium’s significance to the movement. Chicago Surrealism was born from a cultural, political and economic context quite different from that of interwar Europe. The movement’s insistence on the intersection of psychic and material realities that had seen it fall foul of the Communist Party during the 1920s and 1930s and had promoted a putatively reactionary move, in Susan Rubin Suleiman’s metonymic formation, from the street to the salon, now secured it new allies in post-war America.16 Emerging from the crucible of 1960s cultural and political radicalism, the group’s demands for the abolition of capitalism, whiteness, patriarchy and militarism harmonised with  the varied idioms and modes of protest of adjacent oppositional groups. The New Left, the counterculture, second wave feminism, Black Nationalism and the  anti-war movement were, broadly speaking, like the Chicago group, revising the orthodox Left’s neglect of the embodied individual, the psyche and pleasure, and placing these firmly at the heart of a radical politics. Yet whatever similarities the group discerned between Surrealism and other forms of protest, they were keen to preserve their distance from some of the excesses of the counterculture, taking exception to its white, middle-class complexion and its arrogation of too much importance to personal liberation at the expense of the (blue-collar) collective. Rather than in the counterculture, Chicago Surrealism had its origins in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) – the Wobblies – whom Franklin Rosemont had joined in 1962 and Penelope soon after. They later established the Roosevelt University branch of the movement in 1964.17 Chicago Surrealism’s conception of culture as a site of both struggle and subversion stems in part from its affiliation with the IWW. Although the IWW was better known for its point of production organisation and direct action, it also waged class warfare on a cultural front. Wobblies such as Joe Hill and Ralph Chaplin were lyricists and poets, as well as self-taught artists and cartoonists, and their contributions to graphic art were celebrated and influential inclusions in IWW publications such as One Big Union Monthly and Solidarity.18 Ernest Riebe’s serialised cartoon strip ‘Mr Block’ debuted in the Industrial Worker in 1912, running continuously for three years and sporadically into the 1920s. It was published in book form by Walker K. Smith in 1913, a volume ranking, according to Michael Cohen, ‘as the first radical comic book in American history’.19 What separated Wobbly visual culture from other putative revolutionary practices, such as socialist realism or narrow definitions of proletarian culture, was its satirical humour, and this rendered it, according to Rosemont, ‘a strong undercurrent of vernacular surrealism’.20 The convergence was acknowledged in the Chicago group’s publications: the Rosemonts’ IWW magazine Rebel Worker featured Wobbly cartoons alongside translations of Surrealist texts, and the Chicago Surrealist mouthpiece Arsenal included a frame from Mr Block.21 The Chicago group’s affiliations with the revived IWW, the New Left and Black Power movements affords a different perspective on Surrealism’s involvement with grassroots politics (often a source



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of embarrassment for Breton, who had written in the ‘Second Manifesto’ of his frustration at being asked to work alongside the ‘gas cell’ in Italy).22 Surrealism was not confined to the salon or the gallery in Chicago, but was instead taking its place on the picket line and at rallies, and forming productive alliances with the Students for a Democratic Society, whose journal Radical America lent its pages to a Surrealist special issue in 1970.23 The ‘hieroglyph’, as such, is not employed by the Bretonian Surrealists in their varied theorisations of the Surrealist image, whether visual, or verbal, or both.24 Its function within Chicago Surrealism, however, certainly resonates with Breton’s efforts during the 1930s to reconcile Marxist materialism with Freudian idealism, both of which make recourse to the concept. In a much-reproduced phrase, Marx states that abstract formulations of ‘value … transform every product of labour into a social hieroglyphic’, into a fetishised commodity that obscures the labour expended to produce it by mysteriously appearing as valuable in itself.25 Freud also uses the term in 1913 to describe the rhetoric of the dream, stating that ‘in fact the interpretation of dreams is completely analogous to the decipherment of an ancient pictographic script such as Egyptian hieroglyphs’.26 Psychoanalysis seeks to unlock the latent content of the dream which has been dissimulated at the manifest level through the processes of primary and secondary revision. In both these formulations the hermeneutic activity required to unlock the secret of the hieroglyphs, to decipher the codes through which the raw material – whether alienated labour or the unconscious – is given form, is connected with a form of praxis; psychoanalysis in its therapeutic mode makes a claim to cure the analysand, and for Marx, material effects will follow from the coming to class consciousness of the proletariat. Breton’s research during the 1930s put these two accounts in dialogue with one another, and in Communicating Vessels (1932) in particular, a text frequently excerpted and reproduced by the Chicago group, he explored the interface between the psyche and material reality and its potential for a politics of social transformation.27 In a most pointed rejection of socialist realism, the official cultural policy of the Communist Party since 1934, he declared that Surrealists ‘expressly oppose the view that it is possible to create a work of art or even, properly conserved, any useful work by expressing only the manifest content of an age. On the contrary, surrealism proposes to express its latent content.’28 Penelope Rosemont echoed these ambitions in 1981, pledging the Chicago group to ‘the realization of the latent emancipatory implications of popular culture’.29 In restricting the artist to ‘describing proletarian misery’, socialist realism only gives form to the manifest reality of an age. Pursuing the latent content casts Surrealism in an interpretive mode, deriving from a belief that desire or the dream are knowable, or become socially significant, only through the interpretation of their legible forms, through their encounter with the material world.30 This approach to interpretation departed from a Marxist account of the social hieroglyph, insofar as latent value is defined slightly differently. As Peter Nicholls writes, it ‘is less a matter of the effacement of labour as such, than of a subtle convergence in which

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interpretation reveals desire as the will to social transformation; not work as such, then, but the work of the mind is the crucial index of value’.31 Theodor Adorno’s particular combination of Marx and Freud showed him to be less sanguine about the possibility for critical interpretation of the commodification and mystification endemic in the cultural sphere at mid-century. His ‘Schema of Mass Culture’ states: In the dreams of those in charge of mummifying the world mass culture represents a priestly hieroglyphic script … But the secret doctrine which is communicated here is the message of capital. It must be secret because total domination likes to keep itself hidden.32

In this formulation, the hieroglyphs of mass cultural production such as film and television work through an authoritarian mimesis that issues an imperative to the viewer ‘to be like her’, compelling them to identify with the images onscreen and to use them as a script for navigating life under capitalism, regardless of the manifest level of the text.33 The priestly hieroglyphs deny that there is any code to be deciphered – they are already ‘pre-digested’, Adorno writes.34 Or to put it another way, as ‘a system of signals that signals itself’ the cultural sphere makes the code all too freely available, appealing to the ersatz curiosity to know and understand of the reified consumers, who then paradoxically see themselves as active participants in decoding mass culture.35 The poetic hieroglyph in Chicago Surrealism functions quite differently to the priestly hieroglyph. It recalls Breton’s imperative in Communicating Vessels ‘to transform the world radically and to interpret it as completely as possible’.36 If the germ of future transformation was internal to the social division of labour then, according to Chicago Surrealism, it was also internal to culture that was, by then, equally socialised (which is not synonymous with reified). To identify only the manifest content of a fully instrumentalised mass culture was an impoverished and unhelpful hermeneutic. In its commodified forms, mass culture could be in the service of capital but it also functioned as the theatre of the unconscious, which did not have to appear in a syntax pre-approved by capital. As W. J. T. Mitchell observes of the dialectical image, it functions as a ‘mirror of history and a window beyond it’, a description that pertains to the Chicago group’s dialectical approach to popular culture.37 The poetic hieroglyph owed both its existence and its critical function to its partial identity with the commodity, the logic of which, insofar the hieroglyph was also a materialisation of the poetic, it could also partially expose. Acknowledging his debt to Tristan Tzara’s ‘Essay on the Situation of Poetry’ (1931), Franklin Rosemont declared in 1973 that surrealism is preparing the transition, in the sphere of poetry, from quality to quantity … Just as modern capitalism has continued to extend and multiply its contradictions, surrealism must extend and multiply its acts of subversion … the surrealist leap implies the death of all the alienated forms in which poetry has dwelt in the past, it simultaneously heralds the birth of a new civilization in which poetry (and philosophy) will be realized in everyday life.38



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Surrealism envisages a time when the poetic will no longer appear hieroglyphically, that is to say, in commodified forms, but will be the generalised condition of everyday life. Adorno reserved a critical function for the aesthetic only by virtue of its nonidentity with a degraded reality; to the Chicago group this appeared elitist and also ineffectual. If the poetic hieroglyph is to be recognisable as such, to have any purchase, it will only be so to those who can respond to the discrepancy between its poetic and commodity form, which functioned as an index of both alienation and its alternative. Its rightful audience was the workers and their allies, whose alienated labour did not preclude, indeed was the condition of, non-alienated consumption of the product. These issues were raised in relief in the group’s correspondence with Herbert Marcuse, published in Arsenal and lavishly illustrated with frames from comics and cartoons drawn from popular and middlebrow sources. A strange temporal and spatial logic informs the compilation of this collaged text: it is co-written with someone most familiar as a guru of 1960s radicalism, featuring letters exchanged during the 1970s, published at the height of the social and political conservatism of the Reagan era in the late 1980s, and illustrated by comics and cartoons from Britain and America across the twentieth century. The collapse of time and space in this heteroglossic, bathetic text is characteristic of Chicago Surrealism, and in this instance emphasises interpretive autonomy and de-emphasises the immediate conditions of the text’s production. The comics themselves receive no direct commentary; Marcuse and Rosemont’s exchange functions as a primer in how (or how not) to interpret popular culture, lessons which the readers are left to apply themselves. If Walter Benjamin and Adorno had been influential though not uncritical interpreters of Parisian Surrealism, the presentation of this exchange constitutes an interesting update of Surrealism’s dialogues with the Frankfurt School and isolates some of the most distinctive features of Chicago Surrealism.39 Of all Surrealism’s interlocutors from the Frankfurt School, Marcuse was perhaps the most receptive.40 Introducing the correspondence, Rosemont asserts the apparent indebtedness of Marcuse’s thought to Surrealism, a convergence underwritten by a shared commitment to the dialectical interplay between the mind and the material, and their future resolution through the work of the imagination, which ‘becomes “productive” as it becomes practical: a guiding force in the reconstruction of reality’.41 They disagree over Marcuse’s argument, advanced most forcefully in One Dimensional Man (1961), that as a consequence of the increasing mechanisation of labour and the replacement of manual blue-collar work with white-collar alternatives, the working class was fully integrated into the capitalist machinery, that it was no longer the, or even an, agent of revolution.42 Rosemont is keen to suggest that outside of the Ivory Tower this position was untenable and that in the company of ‘rank-and-file workers, wildcat strikers, marijuanasmoking blues singers or comicbook-reading unemployed youth’ the situation ‘was just the opposite’.43 Countering Marcuse’s suggestion that it is only the aesthetic dimension that can contradict established reality, Rosemont restates the

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familiar Chicago Surrealist line that ‘we ourselves focused on other and opposed tendencies – not only at the point of production and in the streets, but also, and above all, in the whole field of popular culture, a central component of our own revolutionary perspectives from the start’.44 Rosemont notes in his preface to the letters that Marcuse had accused them of being humourless, a charge he seems intent on disproving through the selection and combination of comics. There is more at work here, however, than simply using the comic strips to highlight what Marcuse omits from his theory of aesthetic negation, namely the subversive and critical potential of mass culture. Many of the strips highlight precisely what Marcuse cautions against, the affirmative function of popular culture. One cartoon, for instance, by Charles Addams in the New Yorker, depicts a librarian pausing at the shelves devoted to Surrealism in the modern art section, on which appear degraded, clichéd signifiers of the movement: dripping clocks, deserted landscapes, unending horizons and female nudes. Such codification and banalisation of Surrealism recurs in other cartoons in the text, such as the example from Punch (1936) entitled ‘The Post-Surrealist’, which depicts a blindfolded artist atop a ladder filling a huge canvas with flying fishes, mountain ranges, elephants, a flapper woman, fragments of wallpaper and financial documents, while being liberally sprayed with laughing gas by two assistants. An altogether different parody of Surrealism appears in the strip from Jack Kent’s King Aroo, a long-time favourite of the Chicago group which, interspersed throughout the nine pages of letters from Marcuse, seems to assume priority over the other comics and cartoons. As Marcuse’s letters address the history of the avant-garde, discrediting everything from Duchamp’s urinal to Warhol’s soup cans as constituting a false sublation of art with life, the strip also displays its familiarity with and reservations about developments in modern art. The strip tells of an elephant that falls asleep and awakens to find that paintings have mysteriously appeared on an easel in front him. He surmises that he must have inadvertently painted them himself. ‘Amazing! surrealists try to paint without thinking but this’, declares Professor Yorgle, ‘this is painting without painting! He has achieved “pure” art!’, adding later ‘We’ve had “impressionism” and “surrealism” and now we have somnambulism.’45 It transpires that a doodlebug, true to its name, has been filling the canvases, much to the disappointment of the elephant, who was dreaming of fame and fortune, though he promptly forgets. Mocking modernism’s (lucrative) de-skilling of the artist and ridiculing the far-fetched substitutes that had been found for the artwork was hardly unique to this strip; these had been mainstays of the reception of avant-gardism in America, and versions of this discourse are rehearsed in Marcuse’s letters and in other strips reproduced in the text. However, it is possible to infer that this comic strip appealed to Rosemont on account of its slightly different challenge to modernist authorship. The bug makes no claim to be an artist or even to impersonate one (and the amnesiac elephant forgets he might ever have been one). The bug’s spontaneous creativity is part of its identity as a doodlebug; the creativity occurs regardless of discourses about, or contrived challenges to, art.



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The text makes clear that Chicago Surrealists read comics but comics can also (mis)read Surrealism. What comics often misunderstand about Surrealism is that the movement was never about making ‘art’ (or literature) or mounting a response to debates internal to art history. Like the doodlebug that creates in response to no calling other than its own species-being, Surrealism, Rosemont implies, proposes exactly this kind of unbridled, uncontainable creativity. This is the common denominator of the poetic, which exceeds any medium- or genre-specific taxonomies: poetry might be verbal or visual or both, so long as it is indifferent to anything other than itself, as an embodied, pleasurable practice. Any other modelling of creative labour deserves all the ridicule it invariably gets. Creativity is not a hollow and cynical scam but neither is it, in Marcuse’s formulation, functional only in abstract forms in the aesthetic dimension. Neither the commercial nor the aesthetic domain can give an adequate account of it. All the comics in the text might be described as metapictures – pictures about pictures – which according to Mitchell are a recalcitrant and enigmatic genre of images, although, as Rosemont makes clear, they can also function affirmatively. The King Aroo strip serves as a hypericon, an image which ‘encapsulates … a theory of knowledge’: it advances the Chicago group’s investment in a non-medium-specific model of poetic creativity that insists on the movement’s non-specialisation of art and literature, but also that of the movement itself.46 The comics and cartoons included in the Marcuse text are examples of what Mitchell terms generic metapictures, insofar as they are pictures about a particular group of images, in this instance visual modernism, that are clearly external to the comic or cartoon. Other poetic and hysterical hieroglyphs celebrated by the group might be described as formal metapictures that comment less on a specific class of images than on the process of picture-making itself. Examples of these appeared in ‘Surrealism and its Popular Accomplices’, a special issue of Cultural Correspondence (1979), which was begun by Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner in 1975 to build on the New Left’s politicisation of the cultural sphere but to redress its neglect of blue-collar activism. It saw itself as forming a new cultural front in America, and claimed to have found Surrealism a natural ally in this project.47 Although other Chicago Surrealists tackle the medium of comics in the issue – notably Penelope Rosemont and Philip Lamantia – it is Franklin Rosemont’s seventeen-page ‘Surrealism in the Comics’ that dominates the issue.48 He discusses a range of strips, including Popeye, Dick Tracey and Uncle Scrooge, subjecting these to more familiar kinds of analysis insofar as he identifies at the level of content representations of labour versus capital, of disobedience and order. The majority of the article, however, explores George Herriman’s Krazy Kat. The long-running strip depicts the amorous and sometimes violent struggles between the three central characters, Ignatz the mouse, Officer Pupp and Krazy Kat, who are engaged in an ongoing quasi-love triangle. A strip appears above the article which invites and repays a close reading of its poetic hieroglyphics (figure 4.1). Ignatz is drawing a (partially completed) tree while explaining ‘I draw a tree.’ In the next frame he says: ‘And on the tree I draw, I draw me’, and sure enough the tree features a picture of an identical mouse. Along comes Officer

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4.1  Krazy Kat (n.d.). Reproduced from ‘Surrealism in the Comics’, Cultural Correspondence, 10/11, special issue ‘Surrealism and its Popular Accomplices’ (1979), 58.



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Pupp who realises the mouse’s ruse and hides behind, as he declares, ‘the drawing of a rock’, unbeknown to the mouse, whose plan has failed. This highly reflexive sequence reflects on the conditions of its production and reception. Characters become authors as well as readers of the visual and verbal signs in the strip. There seem to be no limits in this drawn world, which can be endlessly added to and recreated sui generis. Rosemont describes Krazy Kat as ‘one of the triumphs of pure psychic automatism’, noting that Herriman suggested it ‘jes grew’.49 If Surrealism had been preoccupied in its formative years with debating the relative merits of visual or verbal modes of representing the unconscious, in this strip – a formal, third order metapicture par excellence – the two promiscuously combine to provide a dazzling excursus on what Mitchell has termed the ‘double relation between language and visual experience’.50 While it may seem that verbal discourse is required to explain what is being depicted visually – for instance, the mouse’s ‘I draw a tree’ is needed to designate as a tree what otherwise looks like a non-specific column – the drawings tacitly undermine the explanatory authority of the verbal. They silently correct the mouse’s statement, which perhaps ought to have said ‘I draw a drawing of a tree’, or even ‘I, a drawing, draw a drawing of a tree’, or even still ‘I, a drawing, a drawing who speaks, draw a drawing of a tree’. Writing of René Magritte’s This is not a Pipe, Mitchell notes that ‘It isn’t simply that the words contradict the image, and vice-versa, but that the very identities of words and images, the sayable and the seeable, begin to shimmer and shift in the composition’, a description that, bathetically perhaps, pertains to Herriman’s exploration of the noncongruency between the visual and the verbal, of the challenge that each issues the other and to which neither can adequately respond.51 The strip focuses not so much on the limits of the sayable and the seeable per se, but rather their inexhaustible inter­ relationship, which seems so suggestive of promise and possibility to Rosemont. This is not, then, just a ‘social’ hieroglyph. It is not solely a fetishised commodity, an inert reproducible unit of abstract exchange that conceals the labour that produced it. Creative labour and its consumption are figured in the strip less as alienated than as something which can proliferate and be redistributed. Nor is it a priestly hieroglyph that appeals to a ‘mummified’ consumer of mass culture. Rosemont stresses that Krazy Kat ‘owes much to its graphic interpretation of the primordial urge to dance’ and in this sense reminds us that ‘it is our whole bodies that read’.52 Krazy Kat has an affective impact on an embodied reader, who in the depiction of a space in which relationships are not mediated by things, but conducted through dance, play, love and music, responds to its ‘continual questioning’ and becomes, according to Rosemont, attuned to ‘our destiny as individuals as well as the collective destiny of humankind’.53 The laughing reader, who moves and makes sounds, is not solitary; he or she participates in the same dynamic universe as the characters, which presents reading and viewing as a prompt to further authorship and creation. Inscribed in this account of embodied consumption of metapictures is a political praxis of sorts, which isolates pleasure and affect as not only diagnostic of, but correctives for, the alienation and repression in contemporary capitalism.

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Rosemont finds evidence of a slightly different hieroglyphic – the hysterical – in Bill Holman’s Smokey Stover, a popular strip that ran during the 1930s. This functions like the poetic hieroglyph insofar as derives from both subjective and material determinants, but it manifests a particular mental state and, in the case of Smokey Stover, in a specific way. Rosemont had already made a connection between hysteria and popular culture in the ‘Surrealism in 1978’ exhibition. This exhibition was devoted to the ‘100th Anniversary of Hysteria’, referring to and updating Breton and Louis Aragon’s text ‘The 50th Anniversary of Hysteria’, published in La Révolution surréaliste in 1928. Rejecting the condition’s varied diagnoses since its initial ‘discovery’ by Jean Charcot in c. 1874, Breton and Aragon discredit hysteria as a pathological condition and redefine it as ‘the greatest poetic discovery of the nineteenth century … a supreme means of expression’.54 The text was illustrated with images of a fifteen-year-old hysterical patient at the Salpetrière, captioned ‘Attitudes Passionelle.’ The deeply problematic move of appropriating and eroticising the image and suffering of a hysterical woman is not mentioned by Rosemont, but the text is instead praised in his catalogue for the exhibition as evidence of ‘how little surrealism owed to the categories of traditional aesthetics for its theory of creative expression’.55 On the ‘100th Anniversary of Hysteria’ he raises his glass to ‘beautiful’ Augustine but also toasts her American equivalent, declaring ‘Everlasting glory to Smokey Stover!’56 Set in a fire station, the strip depicts the activities of the hapless Smokey Stover, his chief and colleagues and their usually unsuccessful efforts at fire-fighting. Its most distinctive feature is the ubiquity of visual and verbal puns and the destabilisation of depicted space. In one of the frames illustrating Rosemont’s text, two pictures hang on the wall behind the central figure, one slightly above the other. The top picture appears as though it could be a portrait or a window, insofar as it contains a man who, rather than staring out at the viewer, is drinking, through a long straw, a glass of iced tea featured in the picture below, depicted as a glass with a capital T in it. Like Krazy Kat, Smokey Stover is a highly reflexive and recursive comic strip. As Rosemont suggests, ‘figures in … portraits lead adventures of their own’, challenging distinctions between ‘real’ characters and their material surroundings.57 Nothing is inert in the strip; it seems to contain a multitude of different realities in which the limits of possibility are never defined. The viewer must confront the conventions of the depiction of three-dimensional space and is invited to see through them to other dimensions intimated within or beyond. David Lomas argues that the appeal of mental illness to the Surrealists lay in its challenge to the patriarchal symbolic order, through its disruption of syntactic and semantic conventions.58 Hysteria is figured in Smokey Stover in similar though not entirely congruent ways, insofar as the abundance of visual and verbal puns undermines the autonomy of either mode of signification. Insisting on the materiality of words and letters and the intelligibility of the pictorial image through verbal language, the strip requires a new kind of visual-verbal literacy to decipher the hysterical disruption of conventional semiotic relations. Words and images combine, and Holman ‘does exactly what the surrealist painter



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4.2  Smokey Stover (n.d.). Copyright © Tribune Content Agency/Smokey Stover LLC. All rights reserved. Reproduced from ‘Surrealism in the Comics’, Cultural Correspondence, 10/11, special issue ‘Surrealism and its Popular Accomplices’ (1979), 66.

does’, argues Rosemont, which is ‘concretize the irrational’.59 The strip concretises but also normalises the irrational and renders what passes unremarked in the everyday as exceptional, in a way that politicises the hysterical (figure 4.2). In the second frame used to illustrate Rosemont’s text, Stover complains ‘How d’ya lacquer that – every paint shop I’ve phoned wants 150 bucks to repaint the fire buggy.’ Further punning on ‘lacquer’, his colleague suggests that they are trying to ‘shellack’ him. The strip is rife with visual and verbal puns and endless substitutes are found at the level of the signifier or signified. For instance, ‘rung number’ written on a label attached to a ladder plays on the homophonic equivalency between ‘wrong’/‘rung’, as well as establishing an equivalency between the visual and verbal signifiers of rung. ‘Rung’ (or ‘wrong’) could also refer to Smokey’s series of fruitless phone calls with paint shops, equating the label on the ladder with a speech bubble and rendering what is spoken and what is written indeterminate. What provokes consternation in the strip, however, is not the excess of signification but the excessive cost of paint. The equivalency established between a commodity and its abstract exchange value is what is singled out as exceptional; the economy of capital, rather than signification, is the site of corruption. Hysterical hieroglyphs, like poetic ones, then, performatively raise in relief the law of the commodity, even as they owe their very existence to it as a mass-produced, popular cultural form. Hysteria is also deployed by Rosemont as a way of explaining and staging the Chicago group’s relationship with popular culture. According to Lomas, part of the subversive attraction of hysteria to Parisian Surrealists as a critique of

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­ atriarchy arose from its condition of being ‘founded on the need for a reciprocal p seduction’ between the hysteric and the clinician.60 Parisian Surrealist production is littered with representations of or allusions to this subversive encounter, which in Lomas’s reading of the trope wilfully (though deeply problematically) blurred the distinctions regarding who is seducing whom. In works such as Max Ernst’s collage novel Dream of a Little Girl who wanted to enter the Carmelite order (1934), ‘the scene of seduction’, Lomas writes, ‘is a space of indeterminacy in which a productive confusion as regards masculine and feminine subject position arises, and where the identities of male artist and female hysteric are liable to merge and exchange’.61 Though not manifestly engaging with the hysteric’s repressed primal fantasies of seducing the father, as Freud had alleged and the Parisian Surrealists had embellished, Rosemont’s reading of the hieroglyphs in popular culture certainly engages with the erotics of hysteria. As Andreas Huyssen has shown, popular culture had been consistently feminised since the nineteenth century, conceived as modernism’s inferior, inauthentic other; within Chicago Surrealism, insofar as popular culture testifies to a corruption of conventional semiotic relations and a surfeit of forbidden pleasures, it is hystericised.62 Rosemont suggested in the ‘100th Anniversary of Hysteria’ that ‘qualified defenders of the poetic spirit staged, right in the middle of American popular culture, nothing less than their own celebration of hysteria’, and in the same text he stages Surrealism’s own celebration of popular culture as one of mutual attraction, alluding to a convivial, suggestive scene in which he raises a glass to ‘beautiful’ Augustine and Smokey Stover.63 Under the trope of hysteria, he casts Surrealism’s relationship with popular culture as a reciprocal seduction, presenting the encounter as one in which the separate spheres of culture – so-called Surrealist modernism and the popular – are dissolved and shown instead to be mutually informing and interdependent. Comics in Surrealism, Surrealism in Comics; a reversible formulation that strategically abnegates the need to pose the relationship in causal, chronological terms – to ask, for instance, whether Holman had ever heard of hysteria or Surrealism – because the seductive encounter elides questions of intentionality or responsibility, of origin or copy. By 1966 when the Chicago group was founded, Surrealism had been all but written out of post-war American art history. Clement Greenberg had infamously rejected its psychoanalytically informed, figural production as antithetical to the medium specificity of formalist modernism, and the challenges mounted to formalism by the post-war neo-avant-garde were more often attributed to a revival of Dada than Surrealism.64 More recent scholarship has delineated Surrealism’s relevance to contemporary concerns in terms of its proto-deconstructivist approach to representation, most notably in its theorisations of photography, or else its uncanny prefiguration of theories of gender performativity, as in the work of photographer Claude Cahun.65 Chicago Surrealism compels a different approach to identifying and evaluating Surrealism’s traction on the contemporary cultural landscape and its contribution to intellectual history.



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The Chicago group’s innovative hermeneutic for analysing the hieroglyphs of popular culture revisits and recasts Parisian Surrealism’s investment in psychoanalysis and historical materialism. When subjected to the group’s idiosyncratic but not entirely unfamiliar hermeneutic, the carrot fields, fire stations and desertscapes of early twentieth-century comics functioned as the St Ouen fleamarket and Arcades did for the Parisian group: as sites of Surrealist research into the everyday. The Chicago group’s rejection of the institution’s claims to know and understand Surrealism did not mean that they had no allies or corollaries in the academy; their dialectical approach to popular culture brings them close to, though not congruent with, other projects that were rethinking the economic determinism of the base-superstructure model, such as the late Frankfurt School or British cultural studies. Their occasionally rather ahistorical assertions of latent correspondences between popular culture and Surrealism set them apart from these other attempts to explore culture as a potential site of contradiction, not just conformity, but nonetheless betoken a convergence between Surrealism and critical and cultural theory that constitutes one of (American) Surrealism’s most remarkable though unremarked contributions to the post-war cultural context. In this, Chicago Surrealism constitutes a form of modernist cultural studies, or even iconology, albeit with Surrealism as both the subject and object of study. I would like to thank the Leverhulme Trust for its generous support of my research which enabled the completion of this essay, and Penelope Rosemont for her kind permission to reproduce images from the Chicago group’s publications.

Notes  1 An account of these meetings can be found in Penelope Rosemont’s Dreams and Everyday Life: André Breton, Surrealism, Rebel Worker, SDS and the Seven Cities of Cibola (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 2008).   2 Scholarship on Surrealism has all but overlooked the Chicago group. In a footnote that is characteristic of the general tone of condescension towards them, Susan Rubin Suleiman notes: ‘It is almost touching to note that there exists, in 1978, a Surrealist Group in Chicago that publishes collective declarations.’ See ‘A Double Margin: Reflections on Women Writers and the Avant-Garde in France’, Yale French Studies, 75 (1988), 168.  3 Franklin Rosemont, ‘Humor: Here Today & Everywhere Tomorrow’, Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion 4 (Chicago: Black Swan Press, 1989), p. 83.   4 André Breton, ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’, in Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1969), pp. 26–7; Franklin Rosemont, ‘Manifesto on the Position and Direction of Surrealism in the United States’, in Surrealist Subversions: Rants, Writings & Images by the Surrealist Movement in the United States, ed. Ron Sakolsky (New York: Autonomedia, 2002), p. 170.   5 Franklin Rosemont, ‘Manifesto on the Position and Direction of Surrealism’, pp. 170–1.

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Mixed messages In English translations of Surrealist texts, the French ‘merveilleux’ is usually spelled ‘marvelous’. This is how it appears in Chicago Surrealist publications and this is the spelling adopted in this essay.  6 Franklin Rosemont, ‘Surrealism in the Comics’, Cultural Correspondence, 10/11, special issue ‘Surrealism and its Popular Accomplices’ (1979), 60. Emphasis in original.   7 Ibid., 72.  8 Franklin Rosemont, ‘Bugs Bunny and Dialectics’, in Sakolsky (ed.), Surrealist Subversions, p. 590. The group’s Gallery Bugs Bunny opened in 1968 and one of the eleven domains in the 1976 World Surrealist exhibition held in Chicago was devoted to Bugs Bunny, featuring a six-foot-long carrot. See Bernard Marszalek, ‘Bugs Bunny’s Surrealist Revenge’, in Sakolsky (ed.), Surrealist Subversions, p. 162, and Penelope Rosemont, ‘Humor or Not or Less or Else!’, Rebel Worker, 6 (May Day 1966).   9 See my ‘The Comic Book Conditions of Chicago Surrealism’, in Gavin Parkinson (ed.), Surrealism, Science Fiction and Comics (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015), for an exploration of humour and historiography in Chicago Surrealism. 10 Franklin Rosemont, ‘Surrealism in the Comics’, 57, 66. 11 See W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 35–82. 12 Franklin Rosemont, ‘Surrealism in the Comics’, 57. 13 Franklin Rosemont, ‘1976: End of the “American Way of Life”’, Arsenal, 3 (1976), 3. 14 Georges Sadoual, ‘Sambo without Tears’, in Nancy Cunard (ed.), Negro Anthology (London: Wishart, 1934), pp. 348–51. 15 See Keith L. Eggener, ‘“An Amusing Lack of Logic”: Surrealism and Popular Entertainment’, American Art, 7.4 (1993), 30–45; Sandra Zalman, ‘The Vernacular as Vanguard: Alfred Barr, Salvador Dali and the U.S. Reception of Surrealism in the 1930s’, Journal of Surrealism and the Americas, 1 (2007), 44–67. 16 Susan Suleiman, ‘Between the Street and the Salon: The Dilemma of Surrealist Politics in the 1930s’, Visual Anthropology Review, 7.1 (1991), 39–50. See Robert Short, ‘The Politics of Surrealism: 1924–1936’, The Journal of Contemporary History, 1.2 (1966), 3–25, and Steven Harris, Surrealist Art and Thought in the 1930s: Art, Politics, and the Psyche (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), for accounts of the movement’s difficult relationship with the French Communist Party. 17 See Franklin Rosemont, ‘To Be Revolutionary in Everything: The Rebel Worker Story, 1964–1968’, in Franklin Rosemont and Charles Radcliffe (eds), Dancin’ in the Streets! Anarchists, IWWs, Surrealists, Situationists and Provos in the 1960s (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 2005), and Penelope Rosemont’s Dreams and Everyday Life for more detailed accounts of this period. 18 Examples can be found in Joyce Kornbluh, Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 1998). See also Paul Buhle, ‘Toward the Understanding of the Visual Vernacular: Radicalism in Comics and Cartoons’, Rethinking Marxism, 18.3 (2006), 367–81, and ‘Commentary: Wobbly Inspiration’, Working USA: The Journal of Labor and Society, 8 (September 2005), 635–41, for discussions of the legacy of Wobbly cartooning to later radical graphic art and other social and political protest movements more broadly. 19 Michael Cohen, ‘“Cartooning Capitalism”: Radical Cartooning and the Making of American Popular Radicalism in the Early Twentieth Century’, International Review of Social History, 52 (2007), 55.



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20 Franklin Rosemont, ‘Surrealism, Wobbly Style’, in Rosemont, Joe Hill: The IWW and the Making of a Revolutionary Workingclass Counterculture (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 2003), p. 523. 21 See ‘Meese’s Little Helper’, Arsenal, 4 (1989), 214. 22 He was asked to ‘make a report … [that] was to stick strictly to the statistical facts (steel production, etc.)… I couldn’t do it’. André Breton, ‘Second Manifesto of Surrealism’, in Manifestoes of Surrealism, p. 143. 23 See the special issue ‘Surrealism in the Service of the Revolution’ of Radical America (1970). The full run of Radical America has been digitised and is available at http:// library.brown.edu/cds/radicalamerica/ (accessed 25 February 2014). 24 The exception is Antonin Artaud, who makes frequent use of the ‘hieroglyph’ in The Theatre and its Double (New York: Grove Press, 1958). 25 Karl Marx, ‘Capital: Vol. 1’, in Marx: Selected Writings, ed. Lawrence H. Simon (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), p. 234. 26 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Claims of Psycho-analysis to Scientific Interest’, in The Standard Edition of the Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, vol. 13 (London: Hogarth Press, 1975), p. 177. 27 See André Breton, Communicating Vessels (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1990) and Mad Love (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1987) for examples of his ruminations on the passage between interior and exterior, via the dream’s interaction with extant reality, or via objective chance, an event born of both subjective and material determinants. 28 André Breton, ‘Limits not Frontiers of Surrealism’, in André Breton: What is Surrealism? Selected Writings, ed. Franklin Rosemont (London: Pluto Press, 1978), p. 155. 29 Penelope Rosemont, ‘Response to Symposium on Surrealism’, Cultural Correspondence 12–14 (1981), 79. Emphasis in original. 30 Breton, ‘Limits not Frontiers of Surrealism’, p. 155. 31 Peter Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), p. 289. 32 Theodor Adorno, ‘The Schema of Mass Culture’, in Selected Essays on the Culture Industry, ed. J. M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 93–4. 33 Ibid., p. 67. 34 Ibid., p. 82. 35 Ibid., p. 67. 36 Breton, Communicating Vessels, p. 127. 37 W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), p. 205. 38 Franklin Rosemont, ‘The Crisis of the Imagination’, Arsenal, 2 (1973), 15. 39 For examples of the long-running dialogues between Surrealism and the Frankfurt School, see Walter Benjamin, ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia’ (1929), in One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: Verso, 1997), and Theodor Adorno, ‘Looking Back on Surrealism’, in Notes to Literature. Volume One, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). Both express interest in, but deep reservations about, the movement. 40 The French Surrealist publication L’Archibras published an interview with Marcuse in 1966.

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Mixed messages 41 Franklin Rosemont, ‘Herbert Marcuse and the Surrealist Revolution’, Arsenal, 4 (1989), 31. 42 Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (London: Routledge, 2002). 43 Franklin Rosemont, ‘Herbert Marcuse and the Surrealist Revolution’, 37. 44 Marcuse fails to acknowledge their diverse portfolio of interests, strategies and toolkit, in part, Rosemont suggests, because he was familiar with only a narrow range of Surrealist texts. 45 Franklin Rosemont, ‘Herbert Marcuse and the Surrealist Revolution’, 40–1. Emphasis in the comic strip. 46 Mitchell, Picture Theory, p. 49. 47 See Paul Buhle, ‘Some Notes on Strategic Perspectives’, Cultural Correspondence, 1 (1975), 2–5. http://library.brown.edu/cds/cultural_correspondence/ (accessed 25 February 2014). 48 Franklin Rosemont, ‘Surrealism in the Comics’, 57–72. See Philip Lamantia, ‘Radio Voices: A Child’s Bed of Sirens’, and Penelope Rosemont, ‘Poetry in the Comics – Walt Kelly’s Churchy La Femme Songs’, both in Cultural Correspondence, 10/11, special issue ‘Surrealism and its Popular Accomplices’ (1979), 25–31 and 74, respectively. 49 Franklin Rosemont, ‘Surrealism in the Comics’, 61. 50 Mitchell, Picture Theory, p. 68. 51 Ibid. 52 Franklin Rosemont, ‘Surrealism in the Comics’, 61, 62. 53 Ibid., 60. 54 Breton and Louis Aragon, ‘50th Anniversary of Hysteria’, in Michael Richardson and Krzysztof Fijalkowski (eds), Surrealism Against the Current: Tracts and Declarations (London: Pluto Press, 2001), pp. 144–5. For analysis of the Surrealists’ reception of hysteria, see David Lomas, ‘The Seductions of Hysteria’, in Lomas, The Haunted Self (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 53–94. 55 Franklin Rosemont, ‘The 100th Anniversary of Hysteria’, in Surrealism in 1978, exh. cat. (Chicago: Black Swan Press, 1978), p. 4. See Susan Rubin Suleiman, ‘Love Stories: Women, Madness, and Narrative’, in Suleiman, Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 88–118, for a feminist critique of the Surrealists’ handling of hysteria. 56 Franklin Rosemont, ‘The 100th Anniversary of Hysteria’, p. 6. 57 Franklin Rosemont, ‘Surrealism in the Comics’, 66. 58 See Lomas, ‘The Seductions of Hysteria’. 59 Franklin Rosemont, ‘Surrealism in the Comics’, 66. 60 Breton and Aragon, ‘50th Anniversary of Hysteria’, p. 145. 61 Lomas, ‘The Seductions of Hysteria’, p. 56. 62 See Andreas Huyssen, ‘Mass Culture as Woman, Modernism’s Other’, in Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture and Postmodernism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), pp. 44–64. 63 Franklin Rosemont, ‘The 100th Anniversary of Hysteria’, p. 5. 64 See Clement Greenberg, ‘Surrealist Painting’, in Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume I, Perceptions and Judgments 1939–1944, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 225–31. 65 See Rosalind Krauss, ‘The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism’, October, 19 (1981), 3–34, and on Cahun, Natalya Lusty, Surrealism, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (Farnham: Ashgate, 2007).

‘Twenty-six things at once’: pragmatic perspectives on Frank O’Hara and Norman Bluhm’s Poem-Paintings Catherine Gander This essay attends to the creative collaboration between the poet Frank O’Hara and the painter Norman Bluhm in the autumn of 1960 that resulted in the set of artworks entitled Poem-Paintings. By exploring these multivalent works through  an equally pluralistic and interdisciplinary approach, it argues their importance as experiments in an American tradition of innovation and aesthetic experience. Mapping a critical path that moves across areas of development in pragmatic thought, I suggest a new vocabulary of criticism and response to abstract intermediality that draws on the classical pragmatism of John Dewey and William James, as well as related philosophical and psychological enquiries. The Poem-Paintings are in several ways a product of their urban, artistic and intellectual environment: the vibrant and cross-pollinating ‘tradition of the new’ of the Abstract Expressionist movement of New York.1 Bluhm, O’Hara maintained, worked in a ‘spirit’ closest to the movement’s progenitor and master, Jackson Pollock,2 and like the majority of the Abstract Expressionists he had read John Dewey’s Art as Experience (1934).3 Indeed, the book served as a sort of textbook for most of the group, who shared Dewey’s uncomfortableness with the elitist institutionalisation of art, and connected with his key aesthetic principles. These were, chiefly: that an artistic experience is a developmental process embodied in the dynamic interaction between artist and environment; that this experience uncovers, expresses and evokes the emotion involved in the artist’s attendant dramatic struggle between inspiration and creation; that this emotion is felt and expressed through perceptual engagement of the whole body with the objects in the world; that this engagement’s emphasis is always on process rather than completion; and that this process contains spontaneity in order for its absorption in the new.4 Despite Dewey’s influence on the art and aesthetics of the period, scholarship on the subject has been markedly scant,5 although more recently Martin Jay, after Richard Shusterman, has made important connections between Dewey’s ‘somaesthetics’ and the historical mission of the avant-garde to infuse ‘life with the redemptive power of art’.6 The link between American poetry and pragmatism was first comprehensively made by Richard Poirier in his excellent Poetry and Pragmatism (1992). Poirier’s

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delineation of influence from Ralph Waldo Emerson through William James to Wallace Stevens laid the foundation for Andrew Epstein’s Beautiful Enemies (2006) and Michael Magee’s Emancipating Pragmatism (2004), both of which persuasively trace the pragmatic strain of the ‘American avant-garde poetry of the 1950s and 1960s’, from Emerson’s ‘hostility toward “essentialist” identity logic’ and ‘scepticism of absolutes’7 to James’s ‘“reinstatement of the vague” … designed to make signification flexible’.8 O’Hara’s semiotic non-conformity and pluralist perspectives on his own being-in-the-world are evident in his being-with-others, particularly his collaborative work with Bluhm.

The Poem-Paintings as a conversation among social selves Produced over a couple of Sunday mornings in Bluhm’s studio on Park Avenue South,9 the works number twenty-six, mostly measuring 19¼ by 14 inches, and consisting of black and white gouache on brown butcher’s paper. Bluhm’s painterly splashes, daubs and drips of paint combine with, overlap and are overwritten by O’Hara’s calligraphic handwriting; the works convey the exuberance of the relationship of painter, poet and their respective modes of expression. Close friends and members of the same New York artistic and social circle, Bluhm and O’Hara created these pieces in an energetic and extended moment both of playful gesture and intellectual dialogue. Bluhm comments: Frank and I were sitting around in the studio, talking, and I believe Prokofiev’s ‘Piano Sonata for Left Hand’ was on the radio. We were talking about music. … I don’t remember what I said, but to illustrate my point I took a brush and went up to the paper and made a gesture. And just like that, Frank got up and wrote something, ‘Bust’, or something like that. He was open and quick, and we were talking, and what we did was part of our conversation. Right away, we decided to do some more. I drew a hand; he wrote something.10

Bluhm’s admission that the artworks display the mechanics of a private conversation supports one’s notion, when confronted with the Poem-Paintings, that they express a collaborative artistic exchange while at the same time confounding one’s full understanding of it. Adding to their apparent opacity, the works are littered with references to encounters with mutual friends (Kenneth Koch, for example), with personal gripes, musings, exclamations of joy, with allusions to moments and events previously experienced privately, or among members of the New York School. The coterie aesthetic of O’Hara’s poetry is amplified and fragmented in the Poem-Paintings; however, as Lytle Shaw has remarked, this is a conversation designed to be ‘overheard’.11 The Poem-Paintings embody and convey snippets of thought processes, declarative statements without obvious context, simple nouns in lists or isolation, ‘gestures’ (to use Bluhm’s word) towards meaning and detours away from it. Such gestures are interpersonal, multi-perspectival elements of the perception of everyday life, and in their simultaneously mundane and innovative



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nature they correspond to pragmatism’s key concepts that human cognitive and perceptual experience on an everyday level is all at once pluralistically diverse, subjective, dynamic, concrete and social.12 Returning to Dewey, we are further able to read the Poem-Paintings not simply as the ‘interlocking energy of words and art’,13 but as the product and process of art itself. To fully appreciate the works we must approach them in a similar manner to that in which they were created, entering into a relationship with them on the level of everyday experience and intersubjective conversation. Opposing the Kantian notion that disinterestedness is the certification of aesthetic truth, Dewey advocates an ‘aesthetic theory’ that does not ‘disconnect’ art from ‘other modes of experiencing’, but recovers ‘the continuity of aesthetic experience with normal processes of living’.14 The way to achieve this is to look for answers to the problem of disconnection in experiences that we do not usually consider ‘aesthetic’. O’Hara and Bluhm’s impulsive decision to extend their ‘conversation’ on to paper with bodily gestures of shape, line and word appears to be an example of this, referring to events or objects in everyday life (going ‘to bed with’ someone, ‘parties’, ‘buses’, ‘apples’), immersing their production and reception in interpersonal and embodied subjectivity. Pragmatism, as James reminds us in his book of the same title, is not a new philosophy in itself, but a different philosophical attitude – a new, practical way of approaching old, metaphysical problems of the self’s encounter with the world. O’Hara and Bluhm’s creations are the artistic objects of this encounter; things in unfinished and constant conversation with each other, with themselves, and with whomever stands in front of them. They are, in this way, vitally expressive of creative process, examples of James’s belief that ‘what really exists is not things made, but things in the making’.15 The quality of immediacy and intersociality evoked by the Poem-Paintings is rooted in their method of creation: We worked separately and together. The spontaneity of Frank and I doing 26 things at once meant that we would have different connections with different poem paintings. Each one was different. Frank would write something on a sheet of paper while I was in another part of the studio, making a gesture on the paper. It was all instantaneous, like a conversation between friends. You know, going back and forth. Quick and playful.16

The foregrounding of pluralism and difference in the Poem-Paintings is characteristic of O’Hara’s poetry, and connects both endeavours strongly with a Jamesian pragmatism. As John Stuhr has argued, pragmatism’s opposition to metaphysics rests in the understanding that ‘there is nothing mystical, otherworldly, abstract, or esoteric about truth’.17 Championing ‘change, vagueness, particularity, individuality, difference and plurality’, James ‘declared himself a friend of the concrete, the incomplete, the imperfect, and the messy … of real experiences and real lives’.18 James’s pragmatism entails the necessity of making room ‘for the real differences among individuals’, because, he declared, ‘our account of truth is an account of truths in the plural’.19 The Poem-Paintings, in

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their messy imperfection and enactment of ‘real experiences and real lives’, represent this celebration of difference and connection; created in and as ‘conversation’, they enact a ‘back and forth’ between the verbal and the visual, between the multiple perspectives of the poet, the painter, the artwork and the viewer that is both ‘playful’ and meaningful, eliminating the struggle for dominance of communication between words and images by grounding both in concrete contiguity. Difference is celebrated as the source of creative growth, a site of shifting signification and the acknowledgement of multiple subjectivities that James and Dewey held as central to any philosophical approach to the world. This dynamic dialogue corresponds to the conversation O’Hara asserts as the root of his statement on poetics, ‘Personism: A Manifesto’ (1961). Apparently the result of a discussion over lunch with Leroi Jones on 27 August 1959, Personism is, like pragmatism, not a ‘philosophy’, according to O’Hara, because ‘there’s nothing metaphysical about it’.20 Rather, it is an attitude and a practice of concrete reality and immediacy, ‘a vital movement’ (in both senses) that ‘puts the poem … at last between two persons instead of two pages’. In other words, Personism places the poem in the real world of sensual, bodily experience. Magee has noted that O’Hara’s choice of the word ‘between’ alludes to a space of intermediate liminality and an atmosphere of intimate disclosure.21 However, O’Hara is careful to rule out ‘intimacy’ as a feature of Personism, and although he signals that his ‘movement’ entails the meaningful communication of the poet with ‘one person’ via the poem, he also indicates the variety of this other person. That is, the reader may be numerous, but the act of encounter – despite the plurality of perspectives it calls for – can only be experienced by the self singularly. This experience is complicated and underlined repeatedly in the PoemPaintings, which extend the notion of multiplicity to the subjective self, or selves, declared in variants of a direct ‘you’ and a lyrically vernacular ‘I’ across the majority of the panels. The self of ‘there I was…’, occurring in two of the poem-­ paintings, is, for example, a different self from the one exclaiming ‘Help! I am alive!’, or stating ‘I am so tired from all the parties’, or admonishing an unknown ‘you’ in ‘why didn’t you sell me a ticket, you prick?’ Likewise, the scolded ‘you’ of this last Poem-Painting is different again from the ‘you’ addressed in ‘Meet me in the park if you love me’, or ‘What do you care?’ O’Hara’s reputation as a ‘social’ poet does not need glossing here, but the polyphony of multiple selves across the Poem-Paintings corresponds with what pragmatists William James and George Mead term the self’s incorporation of ‘social selves’; the multiple divergences of the constituent self to address various social groups, individuals and situations.22 This dialogical concept of the self, traced from the (‘I-Thou’) European ethical philosophies of Hegel and Buber, and first voiced in American poetics by Walt Whitman (whom O’Hara celebrated as his ‘great predecessor’),23 denies an atomistic or monological understanding of selfhood, and calls on the reading/ viewing self of the Poem-Paintings to respond in a similarly pliant fashion. It also, in a manner extending from Whitman, casts the various and pluralistic  PoemPaintings in a shared democratic glow with the rest of O’Hara’s poetry.



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O’Hara writes in ‘Personism’: ‘Abstraction (in poetry, not painting) involves personal removal by the poet … Personism … interests me a great deal, being so totally opposed to this kind of abstract removal.’24 O’Hara’s multiple selves in the Poem-Paintings are caught, however, in a push-pull relationship with abstraction. On the one hand, their concrete utterance of first-person variants (‘I’, ‘me’, ‘my’) denote the repeated and extended presence of the poet. In this sense, O’Hara’s presence within and beyond the works agrees with his eschewal in ‘Personism’ of the poetic ‘abstract removal’ of the ‘personal’. On the other hand, by voicing his multiple selves within the field of gestural, expressionist artworks, O’Hara complicates their relationship to the abstract. Capturing the self in a particular context within a poem such as ‘The Day Lady Died’ – to take one out of numerous examples – O’Hara is able to relive the vitality of the present moment by attending to its particular aesthetic details, at the same time as isolating it in history (‘It is 12:20 in New York a Friday’ is the poem’s first line). The poet’s concern with the delicacy of life is evident in several of his poems, not least ‘A Step Away from Them’, whose very title connotes the closeness of the fate that had already befallen his friends: ‘First / Bunny died, then John LaTouche, / then Jackson Pollock. But is the / earth as full as life was full, of them?’25 However, in the Poem-Paintings, O’Hara’s poetic voice is removed from its context, or at least recontextualised visually. The landscape of clock-time and urban environment so common to O’Hara’s colloquial, ‘I do this, I do that’ poems is missing from these works, and the poet, to reassert his social selves, must seek a new background. This seeking of new contextual qualification is complicated further by the fact that Bluhm’s and O’Hara’s contributions to their artistic ‘conversation’ often collapse traditional figure/ground distinctions. In several of the Poem-Paintings, the black and white linguistic and imagistic gestures of their ‘back and forth’ correspond and overlap, alternating between figure and ground but never fixing as one or the other, and allowing meaning to remain fluid, interactive and relational. The poet’s voice is thus caught in a flux, its vitality bound up with the energy of the  painting. Marjorie Perloff argues for the equivalence between the dynamics of the Abstract Expressionist painting’s surface tensions of line and colour and O’Hara’s syntactic experimentation in his poetry: Like the ‘all-over’ painting, an O’Hara lyric often seems intentionally deprived of a beginning, middle and end; it is an instantaneous performance. Syntactic energy is thus equivalent to the painter’s ‘push-pull’ – the spatial tensions that keep a surface alive and moving. The rapid cuts from one spatial or temporal zone to another, moreover, give the poetry its peculiar sense of immediacy. Everything is absorbed into the NOW.26

I am cautious of the restrictions a reading of direct equivalence imposes; however, Perloff’s point regarding the movement and life of the artwork’s surface is relevant here, not least because it provides, for the first time in the Poem-Paintings, physical context for O’Hara’s poetic line. His reassertion of his

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own vitality then suffers something of a crisis of consciousness as it becomes the verbal poem in its entirety (figure 5.1): Help! I am alive! I was having such a good sleep no I was awake.

Bluhm’s explosions of black and white paint under and over O’Hara’s writing help to communicate the messy and confusing aspects of being-in-the-world with which the poet’s voice struggles. The paint spatters further isolate the word ‘no’ in the centre of the field; a word here connoting, thanks to its verbal-visual context, as well as the ‘thinking space’ around it, not direct negation of an expression, but rather the need to reconfigure it. Each responding to the concrete, phenomenological expression of the other, O’Hara’s and Bluhm’s contributions (re-)construct, out of the relational roles of private and shared consciousness, new ways of seeing life artistically and pluralistically. As such, each Poem-Painting emerges as a social object, for as Mead asserts, ‘sociality … the capacity of being several things at once’27 is present in objects whose character is shaped by more than one perspective.28 In their newness of method, each of the Poem-Paintings is an ‘emergent object, [which] belongs to different systems in its passage from the old to the new … and possesses the characters it has because of its membership in these different systems’.29 The works are thus the emergent, phenomenological ‘things’ towards which it is our duty, as O’Hara famously points out in ‘Meditations in an Emergency’, to be attentive, because they engage us in a reciprocal relationship of human need (‘it’s my duty to be attentive, I am needed by things’).30 Perloff astutely terms this O’Hara’s ‘aesthetic of attention’ to a world of process, his mode of defamiliarising everyday objects in order to see and present them anew.31 What she doesn’t note is how essentially pragmatic this aesthetic is. By constantly seeking new relations with things and people, O’Hara declares his poetic task to put these relations to use, socially and subjectively. His poetry is not the Romantic sort of still contemplation, but the urban sort of movement and diversity: ‘I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life’, he writes in the same poem.32 Throughout all his work, O’Hara rejects notions of fixed essences and dualisms in favour of inquiry into the behaviours, functions, performances and roles that subjects, objects and experiences play ‘in the concrete processes from which they are abstracted’.33 Plurality is thus always a central theme for O’Hara, who, in ‘In Memory of My Feelings’, worries over the loss of ‘what is always and everywhere / present, the scene of my selves’, and wishes for ‘Grace / to be born and live as variously as possible’.34 This is the poet’s – the artist’s – sensibility, put to practical, pragmatic use.



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5.1  Norman Bluhm and Frank O’Hara, Help! I am Alive, 1960. Gouache on paper, 48.9 × 35.6 cm (19 1/4 × 14 in.). Grey Art Gallery, New York University Art Collection.

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The Poem-Paintings as a field of action When O’Hara states that Personism is so opposed to abstract self-removal that it is paradoxically ‘verging on a true abstraction’, he aligns it with abstraction in American action painting, in which the creative process is famously described by Harold Rosenberg as so personal as to render the canvas ‘an event’, ‘an arena in which to act’, and the finished artwork ‘inseparable from the biography of the artist’.35 Well-known for the physicality of their creative practices, painters such as Bluhm and Pollock eschewed the personal removal that artistic mimesis entails. O’Hara’s profound connections with the mid-century American art world by now are well known; working first on the front desk and then as an assistant curator at the New York Museum of Modern Art, O’Hara wrote some of the most enthralling, astute art criticism ever produced on Abstract Expressionism.36 Familiar with Rosenberg’s characterisation of the movement, O’Hara shared his view that it had ‘broken down every distinction between art and life’, embodying a personal expressive experience to which ‘everything is relevant’.37 Pollock’s corporeal aesthetics appealed to O’Hara in their collapsing of the mind-body/spiritual-physical dualism so prevalent in previous aesthetic practice and discourse. He celebrated ‘the physical reality of the artist and his activity of expressing it, united to the spiritual reality of the artist in a oneness which has no need for the mediation of metaphor or symbol’.38 The PoemPaintings enable O’Hara to participate in such ‘true abstraction’, challenging the traditional divide between words and images by treating the paper – and by extension, the poem – as a field of action in a manner that follows literally from William Carlos Williams’s edict to do the same. If, for O’Hara, ‘only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the American poets, are better than the movies’,39 the collaborative Poem-Paintings are a bridge between the two, connecting the poet’s enthusiasm for moving images to Williams’s appeal to relax the ‘rigidity of the poetic foot’ in the ‘back and forth’ of what reviewer John Perreault described as ‘footprints of a wild ballet’.40 Embodying an active process, then, the Poem-Paintings present a pragmatic look at a previous aesthetic dualism through the layering of somatic experience. James and Dewey realigned the empiricist question of what experience must be like if it is to serve as the basis for knowledge, instead inquiring after the actual process of experiencing. In so doing, they addressed two key facts: ‘that the experiencing subject is active in encountering the world through selective attention’ and ‘that experience is cumulative and enables us to … acquire practical skills that mean knowing how to do a great many things’.41 Knowing the method in which the Poem-Paintings were created helps us to read them not as illustrations or written captions to verbal or visual gestures (i.e., as closed systems of labelling what the writer’s or artist’s experiences are like), but as emerging, cumulative responses to each other. This is most obvious in the overlapping interplay of the monochromatic media of the Poem-Paintings; Bluhm’s splodges, splashes, drips and arcs find relation not only with each other across the artworks, but with



‘Twenty-six things at once’

O’Hara’s similarly arching, dipping and dripping lettering. Despite their seemingly abstracted removal from context, O’Hara’s words connect across the pieces via a series of cohesive lexical bridges and sound patterns: ‘Bust’, ‘business’ and ‘buses’, for example; the directive to ‘meet me in the park if you love me’ echoes the brag in a similar imperative, ‘wait till you see me in my parka’. The inclusive ‘all’ rolls through the panels in the noun ‘ball’ and the adverbial ‘always’, while the dialogic patience involved in the Poem-Paintings’ production rests in at least four occurrences of the word ‘wait’ and at least three occurrences of the word ‘see’.42 This creative conversation enacts what Dewey termed ‘communication’, understanding the word not to mean the method of transmitting a certain message to a singled-out audience, but of encapsulating expression in a way that opens access to an aesthetics of human life. Arguing that our tendency to separate the experience of everyday human existence from the discourse of aesthetic experience creates a dangerous isolationism that disables us from treating life artistically, Dewey celebrated art as a way of throwing ‘off the covers that hide the expressiveness of experienced things’:43 the process of living … is an everlastingly renewed process of acting upon the environment and being acted upon by it together with institution of relations between what is done and what is undergone. Hence experience is necessarily cumulative and its subject matter gains expressiveness because of cumulative continuity.44

A continuity builds through the Poem-Paintings of the type of expressive communication Dewey intends, individually as well as in total. ‘Let’s wait and see what happens’, O’Hara writes at the top of one of them (figure 5.2), leaving a space for Bluhm to provide his own expressive mark: a splodge and c-shaped swirl of white paint encircling O’Hara’s central written phrase that hints at both ambiguity and infinite possibility: ‘it could be’. The words ‘a golf ball’ sit in the bottom right corner, indicating that the abstract shape might be read as such an everyday object, while highlighting the obvious fact that it is no such thing. The words drip and run; the paint from the swirl runs into them and distorts their shape. In this interplay of perspective, a dualistic interpretation of signs is highly unstable; this Poem-Painting, and others like it, questions the structures of meaning upon which we rely to order the world in a manner that both draws on the pragmatic notion of cumulative and interactive experience of objects, and extends from Magritte’s infamous ‘The Treachery of Images’ (Ceci n’est pas une pipe). The merging of past experience with present action is, according to Dewey, imperative in the understanding of art as accessible event: ‘Art celebrates with peculiar intensity the moments in which the past reinforces the present and in which the future is a quickening of what now is.’45 ‘In every integral experience,’ argues Dewey, ‘there is form because there is dynamic organisation.’46 If we read the ‘integration of the parts’ to be the embodied marks and gestures of verbal and visual expressions in the Poem-Paintings, we turn away from the wrestling of ‘different’ sign systems for communicative dominance, and experience both

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5.2  Norman Bluhm and Frank O’Hara, Let’s Wait and See, 1960. Gouache on paper, 48.9 × 35.6 cm (19 1/4 × 14 in.). Grey Art Gallery, New York University Art Collection.



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images and words as elements of perception in an aesthetic event that includes the reader/viewer. ‘What is evoked,’ argues Dewey, ‘is not just quantitative, or just more energy, but it is qualitative, a transformation of energy into thoughtful action, through assimilation of meanings from the background of past experiences.’47 Everyday lived experience in the world is the inclusive process and effect of the Poem-Paintings; as James asserts, ‘in our cognitive as well as in our active life we are creative … the world stands really malleable, waiting to receive its final touches at our hands’.48

The Poem-Paintings as embodied cognition and action Bluhm spoke later of the process of creating the Poem-Paintings as an enjoyable ‘Happening … the tone was comic or satiric – a kind of operatic buffo. We thought of our collaboration as a theatrical event.’49 Thus, the Poem-Paintings are synaesthetic, somatic performances to be sensually and intellectually enjoyed, taking their place in the tradition of an avant-garde that grew, in the words of Martin Jay, ‘impatient with the worship of art objects functioning as the embodiments of value in both the economic marketplace and canonical history of art’.50 Dewey’s theory of art as experience likewise connects the human body intelligently to the world around it via ‘doing and undergoing’. What Shusterman has termed Dewey’s ‘somatic naturalism’51 recognises the connective flow of human cognitive and physiological processes with the natural environment.  The  effect is exchange: ‘experiencing like breathing is a rhythm of intakings and outgivings’.52 Here, pragmatism meets Personism again, locating the origins of aesthetic experience in everyday life, not to ‘reduce’ the aesthetic but to recognise human experience as art – and vice versa. The thinking process involved in artistic endeavour is translated, via embodiment, to the aesthetic form. Art is experience because ‘it signifies active and alert commerce with the world; at its height it signifies complete interpenetration of self and the world of objects and events’.53 Thus, both the production and the reception of the Poem-Paintings as objects and as art constitute aesthetic events. This type of art is immediate, spontaneous, based on feelings (or in memory of them); it is the ‘precognitive and emotional side of experience [without which] the cognitive would never arise and could have no meaning if it did’.54 William James, at the same time as the Danish psychologist Karl Lange, built his theory of emotion and affect on bodily responsive changes to one’s environment, reversing the received wisdom that our body reacts involuntarily because we feel an emotion (for example, our heart races when we feel fear), and concluding that ‘our feeling of the same [bodily] changes as they occur IS the emotion’.55 ‘Theatrical’ performances of speech act, bodily gesture and impulse, the Poem-Paintings are in Dewey’s terms both the ‘retracings’ of past experiences, externally embodied in order to complete the experience ‘physiologically and functionally’,56 and the traces of the ‘things and events experienced’ that are ‘retained as an integral part of the self’.57

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The philosopher of psychology Jesse Prinz has worked extensively on the question of human emotions, drawing on Jamesian psychological theories and connecting to the embodied consciousness findings of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. Prinz’s researches into what he calls ‘gut reactions’ have led him to conclude that ‘emotion is a form of perception’. ‘Having an emotion,’ Prinz says, ‘is literally perceiving our relationship to the world’ because, put simply, emotions are perceptions of patterned changes in the body.58 Prinz’s findings are not only crucial to investigations into the nature of consciousness, but elevate human ‘feelings’ to the level of perception in psychological study. Additionally, they  help us to understand pragmatism’s concern with emotions. Dewey’s edict that ‘there is no work of art apart from the human experience’ rests on the notion that ‘emotion is essential to the act of expression which produces a work of art’.59 The recognition of the importance of feelings in our ability to experience meaning in events, utterances and actions is only now beginning to infuse contemporary philosophy in the ways Dewey and his followers had hoped. Daniel Stern’s work in the mid-1980s on ‘vitality-affect contours’ – experiential patterns of intermodal perception that might be described in ‘dynamic, kinetic terms such as “surging,” … “explosive,” “crescendo,” “decrescendo,” “bursting”’ – found earlier precedent in the philosopher of mind and art Susanne Langer’s insights into the ways in which such feelings and patterns conjoin with sensorimotor functions to dismantle distinctions between cognitivism and corporeal vitality.60 This conceptual-perceptual meeting place makes it easier to see how Dewey’s concepts of somatic aesthetics influenced the Abstract Expressionists’ emphasis on the embodied expression of feeling. It also clarifies the emotional context of so many of the Poem-Paintings while adding a new dimension to O’Hara’s claim that in writing poetry and creating art, ‘you just go on your nerve’.61 In some ways, then, the Poem-Paintings can be read as a spontaneously erected monument in memory of the feelings of O’Hara and of Bluhm, emergent in the manner of Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Monument’, and likewise needing to be ‘watch[ed] … closely’: ‘it is the beginning of a painting, / a piece of sculpture, or poem, or monument’.62 They are a site of the many ‘selves’ that O’Hara envisages in ‘In Memory of My Feelings’, embodied and indefinable, for, as Prinz points out, ‘an emotional feeling is an embodied appraisal that is broadcasting to working memory, not an independent state that dangles beside the somatic appraisal’.63 Their status as monuments, however, does not still their energy, which is transmitted to the reader/viewer in a transference of emotion, not least because, in Prinz’s words, ‘as James and Damasio pointed out, an emotion can arise when the brain areas associated with bodily change are active, even if no actual bodily change has taken place’.64 In other words, the Poem-Paintings are emotionally engaging because, by directing our attention, they remind us of our feelings. Bluhm’s expressive dashes and splashes of paint, arcing, jabbing and yawning across the paper, connect with O’Hara’s similarly emotional verbal outbursts, for example, ‘We’re all so damned happy it stinks!’, and ‘Did you see me waiting for



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the train? Then why didn’t you sell me a ticket, you prick?’ This last admonition, written by O’Hara around and on top of Bluhm’s thick grey brushstrokes and wide, off-central ‘prick’-like black paint gesture, relates the pragmatic recovery of experience to its attack on the passive ‘spectator’ theory of knowledge. Questioning directly why the person who saw him did nothing to engage with him, O’Hara echoes the pragmatic stance that knowledge of the world is through interaction with its elements, not passive receptivity. The same is true of one of the most intriguing Poem-Paintings, known as ‘Hand’ (figure 5.3). Bluhm’s stylised line drawing of a left hand with fingers bent in a gesture of drumming or piano-playing (quite possibly in response to what Bluhm remembers as Prokofiev’s ‘Piano Sonata for Left Hand’ playing in the room and triggering the ‘conversation’) is rendered dynamic by thin, sharp dashes of black paint to its left, signifying its swift movement, and large, runny white splashes of white paint up its wrist and to its right. O’Hara’s thin, neat lettering runs up inside the fingers and thumb, as well as between them, partially hidden by the central white splash and delicate enough to warrant more attentive scrutiny in order to read: You eat all the time [ring finger] you even know how to use chopsticks [middle finger] so why don’t you write me [index finger] a letter [between index finger and thumb] forget it [thumb]

Employing direct address, O’Hara inscribes on a representation of the most physically creative and interpersonally tactile part of the human body a strong rebuke. Addressed to the self-serving person (‘you eat all the time’) who fails to use their dexterity (‘you even know how to use chopsticks’) for subjective interaction and communication (‘so why don’t you write me’), the poem laments how easily personal relations can be lost to self-interest (‘forget it’), and how ambiguously the means and object of communication (‘a letter’) sits between the digits of a hand in reflection of the way it sits in tension between the self and the other in Personism, the individual and the social in pragmatism.65 O’Hara’s capitalised, larger title for the Poem-Painting in the top left corner of the paper, ‘HAND’, is not a redundant label, therefore, but an attempt to provide the letter(s) that the hand won’t relinquish; it is another rendering of a left hand, this time in letters, and expressing the same need for interpersonal gesture and communication as Bluhm’s pictorial rendering. The embodiment and reciprocity in this Poem-Painting is also on the level of semantics. George Lakoff, Mark Turner and Mark Johnson have written extensively on the ways in which metaphor is an intrinsic part of everyday experience, stemming from our bodily involvement in the world: that is, life is a journey, and more is up.66 Dismissing the disembodied mind as an outmoded philosophical construct, Lakoff has pursued neural linguistics, tracing the notion that ‘thought is largely unconscious, embodied and metaphorical’.67 Lakoff has shown that the action of forming concepts relies on the neuroanatomical structures of

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5.3  Norman Bluhm and Frank O’Hara, Hand, 1960. Gouache on paper, 35.6 × 48.9 cm (14 × 19 1/4 in.). Grey Art Gallery, New York University Art Collection.



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the human body (including the brain) involved in perception. Universal conceptual metaphors are the result, for example conduit metaphors such as Thinking as Manipulating Objects, including the conception of Understanding as Grasping: ‘playing with ideas’, ‘turning a thought over’.68 Linked with this, further research into mirror neurons in the brain demonstrates that when a person sees another person performing an action – for example, grasping chopsticks – the same neurons fire in the observer’s brain as would fire if it were they themselves performing the action. Likewise, these neurons activate upon reading a representation or even seeing a recognisable image of a hand grasping chopsticks; as Lakoff asserts, ‘the discovery of mirror neurons linked first-person experience to thirdperson descriptions, since the same neural executing scheme over mirror neurons could characterise both’.69 Returning to ‘Hand’, then, we can further understand its embodiment; O’Hara’s response to Bluhm’s rendering of a hand and his appeal towards the interpersonal employment of it extends to the viewer of the piece, who is likewise drawn to the encounter. The everyday metaphor ‘give someone a hand’ is entirely apt. It is at these moments when the Poem-Paintings engage in an ethical relation that extends beyond the seemingly private conversation of their two creators to a wider, social field. Other Poem-Paintings belong to this same category of dialogic, push-pull relation between the self and other. ‘Meet me in the park / if you love me’ is an entreaty bisected by Bluhm’s huge surge of black paint up and across the paper, which corners the first half of the phrase in the top right like the sun, and drips down heavily on the conditional half of the request in the bottom left corner, for all the world like a foreboding black raincloud. ‘Skylarks’ (figure 5.4) verbalises the reciprocity of the artistic conversation of which it is an element: the mirrored phrases ‘reaping and sowing / sowing and reaping’ occupy two-thirds of the paper, with the word ‘skylarks’ written slightly right-off-centre at the base. White splashes surround the words in near symmetry, while a cluster of small black splatters drip down over the final word and gather in the right corner. There is creative exchange in this Poem-Painting and there is difference; there is a feeling of freedom and soaring (‘skylarks’, the upward-shooting sprays of white paint), and there is a grounding of such emotion. The dynamic continues to shift. The cognitive somaesthetics of the Poem-Paintings thus render a standard semiotic reading of their verbal-visual interface significantly lacking. The dualism inherent in semiotics echoes the European philosophical mind/body dualism that American pragmatism challenged as fundamentally unnatural, for ‘there can be no experience without thought, and without experience there is nothing to think about’.70 As Lakoff has argued (citing Dewey as a precursor),71 percept and concept interpenetrate in our experience of the world, and must, then, be evaluated simultaneously; they risk becoming ‘a dualism when they are abstracted from the process of experience and each is viewed only as a fixed entity excluding the other’.72 Thus, the verbal elements of the Poem-Paintings cannot be removed from their accompanying painterly outbursts of non-verbal expression, nor must they be seen as attempts to explain them – or vice versa.

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The Poem-Paintings as performance The embodied, gestural aspects of the Poem-Paintings have evoked the most critical attention. Shaw sees the works as a literal recoding of ‘the seemingly exhausted project of gestural abstraction’ of the 1950s, making a persuasive case for the Poem-Paintings’ method of ‘concretising’ gesture ‘in immediate circumstances’,73 while Brian Reed sees Bluhm and O’Hara’s marks as indexical traces abstracted from a dance.74 Offering a valuable analysis, Reed stops short of exploring the reciprocity of the collaborators’ ‘footprints’, emphasising instead how their gestures ‘frame each other’ as inferential or ‘meaning-bearing’ signifiers ‘estranged’ from a continuum. O’Hara, an avid fan of ballet, considered dance an embodied expression of speech – a ‘conversation’ that not only encouraged eavesdropping, but invited audience participation. In a review of George Balanchine’s choreography of Bizet’s Roma, O’Hara notes that the ballet is ‘something you may live with the dancers, a vital, social, exhausting and vivacious exchange between you and them, like trying to keep up with an exciting conversation in a foreign language’.75 Extended to the audience in the same way that the ‘conversation’ of the Poem-Paintings is extended to points and persons beyond the works themselves, the ballet is, in O’Hara’s appraisal, ‘reciprocal’, as the dancers ‘move together and apart subtly extending each other’s range of expression as in a Platonic dialogue’.76 It is helpful, therefore, to consider Bluhm’s painterly gestures and O’Hara’s utterances in the Poem-Paintings as a dialogic performance. While this essay demonstrably resists the Rortyan recasting of pragmatics into a solely linguistic frame, a brief foray into pragmatics as it is practised as a branch of linguistics is useful. In this field, pragmatics understands that an utterance does not hold meaning in and of itself, but conveys a number of shifting meanings in relation to the context in which it is made. The Poem-Paintings are replete with deictic linguistic signatures – indicative elements of language whose meaning is dependent on their context of use – and as such, are highly relevant to the analysis of conversation and pragmatics. They include words and phrases such as ‘this’, ‘that’, ‘you’, ‘yourselves’, ‘me’, ‘here’, ‘there’, etc. In such proliferation, O’Hara’s deictic speech signatures would seem to construct and extend a world of their own context, opening, as I have argued above, perceptual space for a multiplicity of perspectives. Remembering their status as social objects, and Bluhm’s description of their creation as a ‘conversation’, we can read the Poem-Paintings as a dialogue between linguistic and non-verbal deictic gestures. The cognitive linguist David McNeill, in his 1992 book Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about Thought, revolutionised the traditional view of hand gestures as paralinguistic to argue that gesture was not only actively part of an utterance, but an extension of it.77 Deixis in gesture usually refers to pointing motions, accompanying or replacing the spoken deictic, in which the referent is understood as a result of a shared spatio-temporal setting. Tara McGowan’s work on what she terms ‘interactive abstract deictic gestures’ has demonstrated that in conversation, a person can



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make hand gestures to ‘indicate alignment with or [to] elaborate upon expressed ideas, and to reference and reintroduce earlier ideas into the conversation’.78 These can accompany speech or exist as ‘deictic listener gestures’; a non-verbal alignment or response to an utterance. In the Poem-Paintings, O’Hara’s linguistic deictic structures and Bluhm’s abstract deictic gestures point to, reinforce and respond to each other. ‘There I was / minding my own / business when – ’, writes O’Hara, above and over a large curving swirl of white paint. He concludes at the bottom of the panel, ‘buses always / do that to me’, indicating directly Bluhm’s expressive gesture, and emphasising interaction. The swirl – the ‘that’ – remains an abstract idea (at best, we can guess it is a wet splash); what is clear is that the verbal and the visual elements of the conversation reference and indicate one another rather than illustrate one another. The same argument can be made of ‘This is the first person I ever went to bed with / wow!’, in which O’Hara’s lettering clearly indicates the abstract silhouette of a left breast and torso made by Bluhm’s hand. If, as Mieke Bal argues, Abstract Expressionism is essentially ‘first-person … by virtue of the emphatic inscription of the hand of the artist’,79 Bluhm’s painterly gestures join O’Hara’s linguistic ones in foregrounding the second person in their fundamental exchanges with the first. The social aspect of the Poem-Paintings is thus fortified. Much of O’Hara’s poetry connects with the reader via his theatrical poetic persona. Indeed, O’Hara called a large portion of his writing his ‘I do this, I do that’ poems, signalling their function as speech acts in the tradition of John Searle and J. L. Austin, whereby to speak an utterance is to perform its meaning; the most common being the illocutionary act, for example to promise, to complain, to apologise, to name. Hazel Smith has written of the pervasive performative aspect of O’Hara’s verse, noting that the ‘illusion of a speaking voice is signified through the textual production of speech mannerisms’.80 Michael Davidson’s critique of the aesthetics of the Black Mountain poets is equally applicable to those of the New York School poets, and sheds helpful light on the Poem-Paintings. The ‘poets of the late 1950s … thought of their work as capable of effecting change,’ writes Davidson, ‘of “doing” rather than “representing”’.81 By treating the page as a field for action, the poets invested authority in writing via ‘the ways the poem displays its own processes of discovery’.82 In the Poem-Paintings, O’Hara’s utterances and Bluhm’s gestures converse in phatic acts that at moments implicate the viewer/reader as a staged ‘you’ (‘Wait till you see me in my parka’) and at others, confound contextual understanding or extended dialogue (‘Help! I am alive!’). The pieces contain several illocutionary acts of declarative, expressive, representative and directive kinds. These are the ‘interjections, questions, exclamations, redundancies and asides’83 that punctuate the great body of O’Hara’s poetry; the most variably signifying utterances rendered more semantically multiple in their abstraction from his verse. Abstracted and writ large, they are in conversation in a field of action with the similarly punctuating marks of Bluhm’s paint. The Poem-Paintings, in their plurality and shifting significations, are therefore what

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5.4  Norman Bluhm and Frank O’Hara, Reaping and Sowing, 1960. Gouache on paper, 48.9 × 35.6 cm (19 1/4 × 14 in.). Grey Art Gallery, New York University Art Collection.



‘Twenty-six things at once’

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari would call the superlinear, rhizomatic assemblages of linguistic and non-linguistic phatic acts, opening up a dialogue of difference, and challenging our categorisation of their causalities and effects.84 The context in which the reader/viewer seeks to understand them is the experiential act of their creation, joined to the reader/viewer’s own undergone and unfolding experience. The Poem-Paintings are not gestures abstracted from context; they are the context. They therefore present a type of abstraction very different from that which James, Dewey and O’Hara oppose as the fetish of reflective philosophy in its remoteness from the practice of everyday living. Rather, as objects and as process, the Poem-Paintings embody the type of interpersonal communication that O’Hara hopes in his manifesto will be ‘the death of literature as we know it’, signalling a collapsing of linear, semiotic readings and heralding a pragmatic and multivalent field of active interpretation. If the speech acts in the Poem-Paintings appear trivial, they are hardly inconsequential, and their abstraction and simultaneity constitute what O’Hara sees as the ultimate contestation of semantic dualism, a new movement of creative expression ‘being so totally opposed to this kind of [personal] abstract removal that it is verging on a true abstraction for the first time, really, in the history of poetry’.85

Coda Approaching the Poem-Paintings through this cognitive and somaesthetic interface allows for a more appropriate understanding of their perceptive functions than a standard semiotic reading might.86 It also, in keeping with the spirit of O’Hara, Bluhm, Dewey and James, proposes new ways of looking at old problems, suggesting a new discursive vocabulary for considering word-image collaborations that moves beyond notions of ‘competing forces on the page’87 to more useful and inclusive ideas of exchange and variation, and challenging the criticism often levelled at the New York School of a coterie aesthetics that precludes true involvement on the part of the reader/viewer. While I am not arguing for the socially democratic use-value of the Poem-Paintings per se, I am contending that they participate, more than anyone has given them credit for, in a Deweyan experiment of multiple sociality and open, free inquiry into interpersonal and intermodal relations. By enacting and encouraging what Dewey termed an aesthetic experience, they vigorously undermine traditional separations in verbal and visual systems of communication and art, embodying an interactive, intersocial environment whose everyday objects and encounters are both playfully and profoundly artistic. As James Heffernan asserts of all abstract art, ‘once we start thinking, talking, and writing’ about it, ‘we discover that the line between abstraction and representation is no more impermeable than the line between images and words’.88 As objects that encourage us to attend to a plurality of perspectives on experience and challenge the communicability of their expression, O’Hara and Bluhm’s Poem-Paintings are, to paraphrase O’Hara, things needed and to be needed by.

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Notes  1 The term is Harold Rosenberg’s; O’Hara employed it several times, including in ‘Art Chronicle’, originally in Kulchur (Summer 1962), reprinted in Art Chronicles, 1954–1966 (New York: George Braziller, 1990), p. 9.   2 Ibid., p. 10.  3 See Maurice Berube, ‘John Dewey and the Abstract Expressionists’, Educational Theory, 48.2 (1998), 211–27, 222.   4 These principles can be found throughout Art as Experience (1934), and extend to an American ideal of democratic and ethical social sensibility, which has been largely ignored in art criticism.   5 Scholarship on the connections between pragmatism and Abstract Expressionism rests on the invaluable work of Maurice Berube (1998), Stewart Buettner’s ‘John Dewey and the Visual Arts in America’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 33.4 (1975), 383–91, and William Seitz’s Abstract Expressionist Painting in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983).  6 Martin Jay, ‘Somaesthetics and Democracy: John Dewey and Contemporary Body Art’, in Jay, Refractions of Violence (New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 163–76; Richard Shusterman coined the term ‘somaesthetics’ in Pragmatist Aesthetics (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000).   7 Andrew Epstein, Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and Postwar American Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 18.   8 Michael Magee, ‘Tribes of New York: Frank O’Hara, Amiri Baraka, and the Poetics of the Five Spot’, Contemporary Literature, 42.4 (2001), 694–726, 715, reprinted as ch. 4 in Magee, Emancipating Pragmatism: Emerson, Jazz, and Experimental Writing (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2004).   9 There has been some contention as to how long it took Bluhm and O’Hara to create the Poem-Paintings. Even Marjorie Perloff’s most frequently cited conviction that they took place over a series of Sunday mornings is based on an ambiguous comment by Bluhm (see Perloff’s Frank O’Hara, Poet among Painters (New York: George Braziller, 1977), p. 106). The most persuasive account comes from Bluhm in an interview for Lingo 7, in which he asserts that the black-and-white works were made in one sitting, the works involving colour in another: ‘Twenty-six Things at Once: An Interview with Norman Bluhm’, John Yau and Jonathan Gams, Lingo 7 (Autumn 1997), http://168.144.121.83/cultureport/artists/bluhm/ (accessed 25 January 2015). 10 Ibid. 11 Lytle Shaw, ‘Gesture in 1960: Toward Literal Situations’, in Pepe Karmel (ed.), New York Cool, Painting and Sculpture from the NYU Art Collection (New York: Grey Art Gallery, New York University, 2010), p. 46. 12 See John E. Smith, ‘Introduction’, in Sandra Rosenthal et al. (eds), Classical American Pragmatism, Its Contemporary Vitality (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), pp. 1–11. 13 Bluhm, quoted in Yau and Gams, ‘Twenty-six Things at Once’. 14 Ibid., p. 9. 15 William James, A Pluralistic Universe (1909), in Works of William James, ed. Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers and Ignas K. Scrupskelis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), p. 117.



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16 Bluhm, quoted in Yau and Gams, ‘Twenty-six Things at Once’. 17 John J. Stuhr, ‘William James’s Pragmatism’, in Rosenthal et al. (eds), Classical American Pragmatism, p. 40. 18 Ibid., p. 41. 19 Ibid.; James quoted in ibid., p. 42. 20 ‘Personism: A Manifesto’, in Donald Allen (ed.), The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara (hereafter CP) (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 498–9. 21 Magee, ‘Tribes’, p. 698. 22 William James, The Principles of Psychology, Vol. 1. (1890), ed. Frederick Burkhardt and Fredson Bowers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); George Herbert Mead, The Philosophy of the Present (1932), ed. Arthur E. Murphy (Chicago: Open Court Press, 1980). See also the Introduction to this volume. 23 CP, p. 305. 24 CP, p. 498. 25 CP, p. 258. 26 Perloff, Poet among Painters, p. 135. 27 Mead, The Philosophy of the Present, p. 49. 28 Gary A. Cook, ‘Mead: The Many Faces of Processive Creativity’, in Rosenthal et al. (eds), Classical American Pragmatism, p. 246. 29 Mead, The Philosophy of the Present, p. 65. 30 CP, p. 197. 31 Perloff, Poet among Painters, p. 19. 32 CP, p. 197. 33 Smith, ‘Introduction’, p. 7. 34 CP, pp. 257, 256. 35 Harold Rosenberg, ‘The American Action Painters’, Art News, 51.8 (1952), 22, reprinted in Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994 [1959]), pp. 23–39. 36 See O’Hara, Art Chronicles; O’Hara, Jackson Pollock (New York: George Braziller, 1959). 37 Rosenberg, Tradition, p. 28. 38 O’Hara, Art Chronicles, pp. 34–5. 39 CP, p. 498. 40 John Perreault, Art News, 65 (February 1967), 11; William Carlos Williams, ‘The Poem as a Field of Action’ (1948), in The Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams (New York: New Directions, 1969), pp. 280–91. 41 Smith, ‘Introduction’, p. 8. 42 I write ‘at least’ because I have only been able to view 24 of the 26 Poem-Paintings. 43 Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 108. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid., pp. 52, 17. 46 Ibid., p. 57. 47 Ibid., p. 63. 48 James, Writings, p. 456. 49 Quoted in Perloff, Poet among Painters, p. 107. 50 Jay, Refractions of Violence, p. 58. 51 Richard Shusterman, Pragmatic Aesthetics (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), p. 6.

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Mixed messages 52 Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 58. For further discussion on embodiment and pragmatism, see the Introduction to this volume. 53 Ibid., p. 18. 54 Thomas M. Alexander, ‘John Dewey and the Aesthetics of Human Experience’, in Rosenthal et al. (eds), Classical American Pragmatism, pp. 160–73, p. 167. 55 William James, ‘What is an Emotion?’, Mind, 9 (1884), 188–205, 190. 56 Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 53. 57 Ibid., p. 108. 58 Jesse Prinz, Gut Reactions, A Perceptual Theory of Emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 240. 59 Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 69. 60 Daniel Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology (New York: Basic Books, 1985), p. 54; Susanne Langer, Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967). 61 CP, p. 498. 62 Elizabeth Bishop, ‘The Monument’ (1939), in Elizabeth Bishop: The Complete Poems (London: Chatto and Windus, 2004), p. 23. 63 Prinz, Gut Reactions, p. 252. 64 Ibid. 65 James’s aphorism for this dialectic is ‘The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.’ See Epstein, Beautiful Enemies, p. 72. 66 See George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003 [1981]); Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999). Conceptual metaphors are by convention written in small capitals; conduit or mapping metaphors are capitalised. 67 George Lakoff, ‘How the Body Shapes Thought: Thinking with an All-too-human Brain’, in Anthony J. Sanford (ed.), The Nature and Limits of Human Understanding (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2003), pp. 49–74, p. 50. 68 Ibid., p. 63. 69 Ibid., p. 73. 70 Smith, ‘Introduction’, p. 8. 71 Lakoff, ‘How the Body’, p. 74. 72 Ibid. 73 Lytle Shaw, ‘Gesture in 1960: Toward Literal Solutions’, in Robert Hampson and Will Montgomery (eds), Frank O’Hara Now: New Essays on the New York Poet (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010), pp. 29–48, p. 38. 74 Brian Reed, ‘“Footprints of a Wild Ballet”: The Poem-Paintings of Frank O’Hara and Norman Bluhm’, in Hampson and Montgomery (eds), Frank O’Hara Now, pp. 211–28. 75 Reed does not mention the review, but Terence Diggory highlights it in his essay, ‘Ballet, Basketball, and the Erotics of New York School Collaboration’, in Mark Silverberg (ed.), New York School Collaborations: The Color of Vowels (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 35–58; Frank O’Hara, review of the ballet ‘Roma’, in Standing Still and Walking in New York (San Francisco: Grey Fox Press, 1981), pp. 68–72, p. 69. 76 O’Hara, ‘Roma’, p. 69.



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77 David McNeill, Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 78 Tara McGowan, ‘Abstract Deictic Gestures-in-Interaction: A Barometer of Intersubjective Knowledge Development in Small-Group Discussion’, Working Papers in Educational Linguistics, 25.2 (2010), 55–79, 61. 79 Mieke Bal, Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 177. 80 Hazel Smith, Hyperscapes in the Poetry of Frank O’Hara: Difference, Homosexuality, Topography (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), p. 139. 81 Davidson quoted in ibid., p. 141. 82 Ibid. 83 Smith, Hyperscapes, p. 143. 84 In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari read cross-modal and intertextual connections as following the laterally branching patterns of rhizomes rather than the more European aborescent philosophical structures of trees. They align this reading to William Labov’s pragmatics of variationist sociolinguistics, dissolving the distinction between Saussure’s langue and parole at the same time as they collapse Chomsky’s distinction between the surface structure and the deep structure of language. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 85 CP, p. 498. 86 Brian Reed has made a similar observation that semiotics does not provide ‘the best means for conceptualising intermediality’, suggesting ‘tactility’ as a synaesthetic and cross-modal way into the Poem-Paintings (‘Footprints’, pp. 218–19). 87 Monika Gehlawat sees them as such in ‘“An Opposite Force’s Breath”: Medium Boundedness, Lyric Poetry and Painting in Frank O’Hara’, in Silverberg, New York School Collaborations, pp. 163–82, p. 176. 88 James A. W. Heffernan, Cultivating Picturacy: Visual Art and Verbal Interventions (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2006), p. 293.

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‘Being kept in the dark can be a critical gesture’: Arakawa and Madeline Gins’s Mechanism of Meaning Sarah Garland ‘These are among the most realistic paintings I’ve never seen.’ Helen Keller Madeline Gins1

The Mechanism of Meaning (1963–73; 1996), by artist-architect-poet-­ philosophers Arakawa and Madeline Gins, unfolds over more than eighty 8-foot-high painted and collaged panels. The installation uses image, object and text together to prompt the reader-perceiver (their term) to create a moving, mental mechanism to extend and alter what is seen and read, and to produce an epic diagram of the mind as it works at problem solving and meaning-making.2 Talking to Robert Creeley, Arakawa argues that ‘we don’t know what it is that is mind, what it could look like’, ‘we have not yet formed even a profile. So far, using only one or two senses at a time mind has been felt out a bit, but that’s all.’3 Gins echoes this, punning on terms that occur throughout their work, and that will provide the central theme of this chapter: ‘thought itself is a blind spot’.4 As Arakawa insinuates in speaking of the mind as ‘felt out’, their project is a tactile and kinaesthetic one that looks to move beyond vision into the blind spots of the mind. The body-sized panels of The Mechanism of Meaning use a combination of visual, haptic and verbal elements to move between visible and invisible forms in order to provoke the reader-perceiver to consider the active roles of the mind and of the other non-visual senses in reading, seeing and reasoning.5 The panels prompt awareness of our agency as mechanisms of meaning at the same time as they act as stubborn reminders of the intractable physicality, and visuality, of the imagetext itself. At the core of Arakawa and Gins’s project is a mobilisation of impossibility, ambiguity, mistakes, frustrations, puns and illogicality that, in asking for a solution or movement and then denying it, self-reflexively sends the reader-perceiver back to her or his own actions as meaning-making mechanisms in the manner of Zen koans and Dada jokes.6 In The Mechanism of Meaning the combination of image and text undermines any self-sufficiency of the image, text or collage, animating it instead with playful epistemological tensions and incompatibilities to produce what Arthur Danto calls ‘a masterpiece of valuable disappointments



‘Being kept in the dark can be a critical gesture’

and conceptual wrong turns’.7 The eighty-plus panels are structured around sixteen ‘subdivisions’ which use image, text and collaged elements (a miscellany that includes items of clothing, balloons, mirrors, ropes and balls) to invite the reader to enact forms of thought and reasoning contained in abstracted spatial and relational forms like ‘localization’, ‘transference’, ‘scale’, ‘neutralization’, and more trickily, ‘PERCEIVE A AS B’ (figure 6.1). As well as invoking the performance scripts of conceptual art of the period, many of the textual commands create a situation of comic frustration familiar to readers of anti-realist postmodern fictions where written works invoke infinite systems, non-Euclidean geometries and excluded middles. Indeed, one of the panels in the subdivision ‘Review and Self Criticism’ contains the words ‘WE ARE TOLD TO FORGET ABOUT GRAY. ALL RIGHT. THEN IT IS NONGRAY WE MUST FORGET ABOUT WHEN VIEWING THIS PAINTING. THIS MAKES ME ANGRY. OF COURSE, NEITHER IS POSSIBLE, AT LEAST NOT ABSOLUTELY. AND EACH SUGGESTION (COMMAND?) MAKES THE OTHER LESS POSSIBLE. WHAT KIND OF NONSENSE IS THIS? I’M SO CONFUSED I’D LIKE TO FORGET THE WHOLE THING.’ The mind is able to perceive itself at work making meaning in these panels precisely because it is delayed on its path towards that meaning (and often this disjunction and delay manifests in the form of humour). The works function as ‘reflectors’, Charles Haxthausen writes, channelling the energies of perception and reason back towards the mind. Like the shiny mylar and mirrors that The Mechanism of Meaning uses to confront its viewer, and like the more purely linguistic sign systems that Gins uses for her poetry, these panels prompt another order or process outside of themselves. 8 In ‘Notes on my Paintings: What I am Mistakenly Looking for’, Arakawa states that ‘Painting is not my medium. Two or three decisions in the same place establish my medium.’ 9 The simultaneous decision to, for example, forget about ‘gray’ and ‘non-gray’ in The Mechanism of Meaning is itself a paradox, or at least an ambiguity, produced by the combination of object, image and text in Arakawa’s quest to ‘trap questions, areas, operations, answers, to make them visible by combining two or more languages’, to ‘draw and name it’.10 Arakawa can also be taken as looking for meaning by means of the ‘mistake’ in an environment where drawing and naming may be equally arbitrary, and may pull disjunctively away from each other and from recognisable meaning. ‘Draw it and name it’ is not so much a command to identify something, but to create a taxonomy for the ambiguities and meaningful ‘mistakes’ that occur when image and text separate. These panels ask us to perform tasks like ‘SAY one, THINK two’ that both are and are not possible – commands that in many places produce a tension in the combination of image and text. As Mary Ann Caws writes, ‘your intake of the verbal text is not correlated with your absorption in and of the picture itself; the reactions to the verbal and to the visual are differently temporalized, and the activities do not match. Something feels askew’; ‘“You cannot do two things at once,” someone is saying everywhere in the world at this moment, in

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6.1  Arakawa and Madeline Gins, The Mechanism of Meaning 8. Reassembling. fig. 8.2, 1963–71/78. Acrylic, cardboard, lightbulb, lightbulb socket and painted duct tape on canvas, 244 × 173 cm. Photograph by Sally Ritts.



‘Being kept in the dark can be a critical gesture’

some language or other.’11 As the work itself puts it, these are ‘ATTEMPTS TO SELECT (JUXTAPOSE) AMBIGUOUS ZONES WHICH MIGHT EXPLAIN ONE ANOTHER OR THE (AMBIGUOUS) NATURE OF AMBIGUITY’. In this, The Mechanism of Meaning might be taken as akin to, to borrow the term James Elkins adapts in Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles?, an ‘ambilogy’ that resists aporia to map in physical and conceptual detail the way that the mind attempts to negotiate paradox, nonsense, jokes and illogicality. Having been a founding member of the Japanese ‘Neo-Dadaism Organizer’ group in Tokyo in 1960,12 Arakawa arrived in New York in 1961 with an introduction to Marcel Duchamp from Japanese critic Shuzo Takiguchi, and although there are no extended accounts of meetings between the two men, Duchamp’s thinking permeates Arakawa and Gins’s approach to art-making, particularly Duchamp’s efforts ‘to put painting again at the service of the mind’.13 In the ludic excesses and inadequacies of the explanations and instructions provided by the text, Arakawa and Gins are Duchampian, adopting the use of readymade objects for the collaged elements of The Mechanism of Meaning, and, as Duchamp does in the Green and White boxes, extending the notion of the artwork to include preliminary notes, blueprints and sketches as part of the conundrum of the final work. Arakawa and Gins, however, use ‘non-retinal’ resources to reconfigure perception and reason by problematising the visual and textual world through embedding it within a set of playfully irresolvable conceptual constructs. For example, the commands under ‘Neutralization of Subjectivity’ to ‘MAKE THESE LINES AS ELASTIC AS POSSIBLE’ or to ‘MAKE THIS AS TIGHT AS POSSIBLE’ encourage us to perform not only the substitution of manipulable line for drawn line, but also to perform an impossible translation in pictorial space. The nonsensical assistance offered – ‘EXCESS AIR MAY BE LET OUT AT ANY OF THESE JUNCTURES’ – pushes towards three dimensions, or even four, as the air is let out over time, but the command isn’t any real help unless one starts seeing imaginatively, taking each set of lines as on a different plane, perhaps taking the frames for each section as a three-dimensional prompt and then imagining them as inside a container that is also elastic, or that might contain a vacuum. Both because they invoke impossible imaginary structures and because they frustrate any easy manipulation of real structures, these phenomenological koan-puzzles act to bring back to perception those other, non-visual senses, while embedding them in a consideration of the senses brought forth by sightlessness and physical frustration. Often, the relationship between image and text in The Mechanism of Meaning takes a form where Arakawa’s minimalist image depicts an abstraction or reduction of meaning, and the punning, performative text functions as an expansion of the possibility for the creation of meaning (and, indeed, Gins writes in her experimental novel Helen Keller or Arakawa, ‘There exists a point at which his paring down of the world to its essentials converges with her constructing of the world anew each day’).14 This abstraction, however, is never a simple matter of the ‘dematerialization’ of image because the expansion and reduction of meaning

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send the reader-perceiver back to the body as the measure of that transformation, in both physical and metaphorical ways.15 This is especially so in the panels which use the invitation to manipulate objects to plot the meaning of scale. On one panel a reproduction of a kitsch 1950s film poster of a man about to punch a woman is labelled ‘THE INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS BETWEEN PARALLEL LINES (AND REDUCTION IN FIVE PARTS)’, and duly the bodies in the central painting are snatched away, first into colour fields captioned ‘WHERE’S THE PUNCH’, then into a diagram of a face, fear and a fist in colours abstracted from the initial image, with some indicator of time and force printed below (88% 10:40 P. M. 100 ft/sc), and then into a balloon pinned below these with the same colours spotted on to it and an instruction to ‘PULL THEN PUNCH’. As the bodies of the man and woman are removed from the representation, and then the colour and structuring form is removed by stages from the image itself, they are replaced by a physical object and by the viewer’s decision to use his or her own bodily force to reproduce the motion, and perhaps to close off the panel in a ‘punchline’ (see figure 6.2). This is figured as both an epistemological and ethical riddle: if the sections of the panel are related in this way then does the supplementation of the viewer’s force constitute an extension of the suspended punch to the woman? Do we respond to representation as if it were an analogue of reality by refusing the command on the canvas? The movement from bodies in the image to the embodied cognition of the viewer is about responsibility as well as response. Yve-Alain Bois, in Formless: A User’s Guide, talks about Picasso’s cubist transformation of the pictorial plane as the movement from one that, as with standard three-point perspective, opens out into a version of the body’s vertical and horizontal space, to that of a flattened tabletop that has been rotated 90 degrees through space.16 The vertical plane in The Mechanism of Meaning is the space of the designer and inventor’s notebook, rotated. Leonardo is the artist that Arakawa refers to most, and there are pages of sketches and plans for inventions in the Abbeville edition of The Mechanism of Meaning, functioning at a giant scale both to generate sketches of ideas and to capture those ideas in text as would be done in a pocketbook, as well as to create a much more affective physical, architectural, space.17 ‘I prefer not to have to go down at all in scale to enter a notebook’, Arakawa says. ‘It would be best to have notebook pages that were no smaller than a wall of an average sized room.’ ‘The large paintings – each year they get larger – are for me pages of a notebook.’18 Hung vertically at this huge scale the ‘notebook’ panels begin to intimate a new space for the viewer’s  body that is neither deep nor, because it asks for interaction with the canvas’s surface objects  and because it issues commands to perform three-dimensional  translations of  these two-dimensional objects, categorically flattened. As Caws points out, the play between absorption and self-reflexivity operating in The Mechanism of Meaning places the work within the tradition that Michael Fried aligns with ‘theatricality’ in ‘Art and Objecthood’.19 The written instructions



‘Being kept in the dark can be a critical gesture’

6.2  Arakawa and Madeline Gins, The Mechanism of Meaning 6. Expansion and Reduction – Meaning of Scale, fig. 6.6., 1963–71/78. Acrylic, handkerchiefs, metal, oil on canvas in wooden frame, rubber balloon and rubber band on canvas, 244 × 173 cm. Photograph by Sally Ritts.

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on the panels are a form of ludic confrontation, both mentally and physically ‘getting in the beholder’s way’, but they nevertheless act to create a participatory event, albeit one that stresses perception over seeing.20 The extension of the field of the work, both in scale and in the objects that ask to be manipulated, acts in The Mechanism of Meaning to extend, to use Fried’s terms, control of ‘the entire situation’ through ‘object, light, space’ and ‘body’.21 Neither in its ‘theatricality’ nor in its use of signs is the work self-absorbed; instead image, object and text are set up to create a taxonomy of imagined spatial relationships (‘two or three decisions in the same place’) treated through metaphors that, like the word ‘relationship’ itself, implies a further solidity in space, but one which, because the images prompted by the text are immaterial, extends the idea of mentally getting in one’s own way into a generative principle. Extending spatial reasoning across visual and linguistic forms allows for an area of common exchange between text and image and, as the actions named in the sixteen subdivisions of The Mechanism of Meaning suggest, verbal and visual meaning for Arakawa and Gins is governed by physical, as well as conceptual, properties. (This is perhaps one reason why the cognitive linguist George Lakoff calls their work ‘enormously rich’.)22 Meaning in this imagetext is figured as something that has texture, which might be changed in space or condition, or transformed by degrees, scaled up or down, split apart, or reassembled. The ‘area of perception’ created by all these verbal invocations of embodied physical forms  – ‘compound’, ‘creation’, ‘location’, demonstration’, ‘combination’, ‘mixture’, ‘melting’ – sets to work the movements of a mental mechanism that allow us to extend the possibilities of the more flatly geometric realm laid out on the panels, which for Arakawa and Gins constitute both a model of, and a trace of, the field of thinking and experience (see figure 6.3). The relationship between image, text and collaged element, then, might be taken to be as variable as the ‘ambiguous zones’ Arakawa and Gins present for a lemon. A text might be the past of an image, or its translation, or almost an image, an object might have a moving, transitional relationship to its label, or an image might be a misapprehension of a text, or of another image, or of a photograph. Arakawa writes of the ‘gradual creation and erosion of objects through names’, and in this panel entitled ‘Presentation of Ambiguous Zones’, Arakawa and Gins give one version of plotting this creation and erosion. ‘Ambiguous zones exist within each statement of representation and across the conceptual distance which separates these’, the panel’s heading states, underneath which a lemon is translated into multiple and sometimes conflicting terms like ‘still lemon, if possible’, ‘dream of a lemon’, ‘before or pre-lemon’, which make it impossible to consider the idea of a lemon as a singular, simple element of thought. What this panel labels as ambiguities are a mixture of impossibilities, precisions and analyses, ambiguous in the sense that they lead to a translation of the subject, but precise because those translations begin the work of intimating the complexities and paradoxes of the fields of perception and thought. The prospect of a nuanced ambiguity is playfully extended in the dialogues in Helen



‘Being kept in the dark can be a critical gesture’

6.3  Arakawa and Madeline Gins, The Mechanism of Meaning 3. Presentation of Ambiguous Zones, fig. 3.6., 1963–73/96. Acrylic, oil and pencil on canvas, 244 × 173 cm. Photograph by Sally Ritts.

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Keller or Arakawa that take place between voices attributed to Arakawa and Gins but which are also spread out across these figures as dispersed, multiple selves: ‘Well I am beside myself with joy. You’ve left me speechless and so am I.’ ‘Which speechless?’ ‘Oh, probably either number 6 or number 17.’23

Newly created and eroded forms (and this includes, although I don’t have space to consider it further in this essay, forms of the self) need not be taken as pure relativistic difference; instead, ambiguity and multiplicity may be maintained as additional materials to think with. The artwork as notebook is investigative, explanatory or generative in a way that makes sense of Gins’s continual reference to their work as ‘research’; the projective nature of the inventor or architect’s sketch is here mixed with the idea that, as Gins puts it, ‘the artwork of interest beginning, middle, and always for us has been a PERSON’.24 The energy of meaning in these panels is dynamic, moving between the artwork and the reader-perceiver, providing in miniature a version of the ‘reversible’ destiny unfurled in their later treatises on reversing the entropic energy in human life. After To Not To Die (1987), the idea that formal and mental structures can work upon the human being phenomenologically, but might also be effective at reversing the human condition, is brought in to reframe the 1988 and 1996 pressings and exhibitions of The Mechanism of Meaning. The use of textuality to frame this visual and environmental field, and, through selfconsciousness, to create the perceiver, has been present for Arakawa and Gins at least since Arakawa’s diagrammatic paintings of the early 1960s based on room plans and blueprints (see, for example, A Diagram of Imagination, 1965), and since Gins’s experimental novel Word Rain, A Discursive Introduction to the Intimate Philosophical Investigations of G,R,E,T,A,G,A,R,B,O, It Says (1969).25 It remains important for the utopian architectural project that forms the core of Arakawa and Gins’s work after The Mechanism of Meaning, and indeed each version of the work was re-thought in the light of those later theories, with extra examples added to the marginalia, in changes to the ‘Review and Self-Criticism’ section, and with additional prefaces and sections. There are pages at the end of the Abbeville version, for example, that are printed on semi-transparent paper and contain transparent printed overlays, to illustrate Arakawa and Gins’s reversible destiny architecture. Here the halts and frustrations that send the participants back to their own role in embodied meaning-making become physical screens and gauzes in the book, as well as in the full-size environment. The latest full reproduction of The Mechanism of Meaning is embedded within the catalogue for their 1997 Guggenheim retrospective, between covers printed with the words ‘WE HAVE DECIDED NOT TO DIE’.26 In this context, cognitive training in working through impossibilities, delays and mistakes serves double duty in alerting the reader-perceiver to her or his own agency in meaning-making, but also in preparing the participant for a larger project of



‘Being kept in the dark can be a critical gesture’

thinking through mortality and physical decline as the ultimate puzzle. As Gins explains: ‘Since we don’t really understand body-mind, we don’t really know that death is our destiny’, and so their aim is both to plot the ways that a person creates meaning from their physical and symbolic surroundings, and to alter these structures to form a creative circuit that keeps the human in a state of tentativeness. This tentativeness opens up to the potential for infinite change which, in their later work, becomes an insistence on the possibility that destiny itself might be reversed, and that human decline towards mortality might be one more set of energies that can be diagrammatically reconfigured. To concentrate more fully on the mechanisms of perception and meaning as they are manifest across the embodied mind, and to play off against the stasis of objectified visuality, Arakawa and Gins’s career-long thinking through the unseen often crystallises around meditations on blindness. Back as far as 1960, in Japan, Arakawa had conducted a Dada-esque piece, Anti-Happening, in which his audience was plunged into blindness and left stranded on a ledge, in mid-air; the Reversible Destiny lofts in Yoro, Japan (2005), are dedicated in memory of Helen Keller.27 In later years Arakawa went on to produce an almost entirely dark, labyrinthine structure entitled Stuttering God, a series called Paintings for Closed Eyes and another series named Blind Intentions.28 The press release for the Paintings for Closed Eyes exhibition at the Ronald Feldman gallery, New York, places this disorientation as a continuation of painting rather than its negation, and again stresses the control with which these fields are articulated and manipulated beyond the retinal: ‘What comes next are paintings for closed eyes. No revolution in the visual could be more severe. Only by means of a precise (into nowhere) ordering of its blanks could a painting be made to survive the closing of the eyes.’29 This forming of space within blindness is prefigured in The Mechanism of Meaning in a section on ‘covering’ that states ‘CLOSE YOUR EYES’ as part of a series of diagrams that ask a viewer to extend the range of what they consider ‘reassembly’ to be by taking a scribble shape into a solid, square shape through ‘diffusion’, ‘removal’, ‘reduction’, ‘stretching’, ‘covering’, ‘pacing’, ‘layering’, ‘filling and casting’ and ‘measuring (judging)’. ‘Being kept in the dark can be a critical gesture’, writes Gins in Helen Keller or Arakawa, precisely because  – and here they tie in with a Romantic, visionary tradition Gins associates with science and philosophy, as well as with William Blake in the book  – imaginative recreation is able to go beyond habits of perception and cognition.30 In this, the relationship between image and text might be said to work diagrammatically. The written instructions frame the visual matter of the panels as incomplete, and concomitantly as signs in a system for projection. Italo Calvino writes of the motions in mental space prompted by, and beyond, Arakawa’s diagrammatic solo paintings: The lines belong to bundles of lines which may have a common point of departure or else may converge in a point, in which they create perspectives. This is very useful for the mind, which is enabled to contain anything whatever, independently

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Mixed messages of the space at its disposal. The lines also revolve on themselves, this point describes arcs around them, and as the line flows on these form a spiral round it. In short, it is wrong to say that a line simply ‘lies there’ on a two-dimensional plane; a line is an active presence which refuses to ‘lie down’, but creates distances, dimensions, and discontinuities through its urge toward movement, action and communication. 31

However, in The Mechanism of Meaning this kind of translation beyond the plane of the canvas is a function of its mixture of image, object and text. Imaginative projection in The Mechanism of Meaning is directed by the text and anchored in the material image, and might be said to function more like the invisible realm Duchamp describes as the essence of the game of chess. 32 When Pierre Cabanne asked Duchamp in 1966 about his love of chess, Duchamp replied in a way that blends seen and unseen systems in an imagined ‘mechanical reality’ that is itself a way of describing the art of ideas: ‘A game of chess is a visual and plastic thing, and if it isn’t geometric in the static sense of the word, it is mechanical, since it moves; it’s a drawing, it’s a mechanical reality.’ 33 This interest in chess as a set of moving cerebral forms ties chess into both Duchamp’s interest in optics, where perception can be seen to have created the effects of movement across planes where there is no real movement, and into his well-documented interest in representing multi-dimensional space and in describing phenomena beyond what he called the ‘retinal’ aspects of art. 34 ‘In chess there are some extremely beautiful things in the domain of movement, but not in the visual domain’, Duchamp continues. ‘It’s this imagining of the movement of the gesture that makes the beauty, in this case. It’s completely in one’s gray matter.’35 As Charles Haxthausen points out, in Peircean terms the assemblages of image, text and objects in The Mechanism of Meaning that, chess-like, point to invisible forms are not icons of space, but symbols of it.36 This diagrammatic system is already in evidence in Arakawa’s use of architectural and industrial blueprints, but it is extended through further neo-Duchampian means in The Mechanism of Meaning in its blend of image and text that, like Duchamp’s notes for the Green and White boxes, also refer the reader-viewer beyond the purely visible, and into n+1 dimensions. Takahashi writes of ‘the gap between points and lines (one-dimensional) on the same surface (two-dimensional)’, affording the viewer of Arakawa and Gins’s work too ‘a climb in dimension’ towards the multi-dimensional (n-dimensional), translating the viewer’s perception not into a fourth dimension in the literal sense that Duchamp’s sources proselytised for, but as a range of alternate possibilities for the present and for the viewer-participants themselves.37 Gins writes of imagining her book Word Rain, evoking ‘consciousness (primitive term) a few inches above each of its un-paginated pages’, setting up a dynamic for reading similar in its removedness to that which Arakawa prompts by treating image, line and text as diagrams of, and stimulus for, the imagination.38 ‘Why is it better not to look if you want to see?’ the composite narrator asks in Helen Keller or Arakawa: ‘Vision is so distracting’ is the returned reply.39 Here,



‘Being kept in the dark can be a critical gesture’

Arakawa and Gins construct vision as a distraction from a more widely seated cross-body perceptual mechanism, and from the role of the mind in constructing that perception. The moment beyond the delayed thought or gaze where the viewer breaks the two-dimensional paradigm and begins to imaginatively diffuse, remove, untangle and transpose forms can also be seen as a cue to remember, and to cultivate the roles of the other bodily faculties – particularly those spatial intelligences based in kinaesthetic, proprioceptive and haptic senses – in creating forms to think with. This movement into a spatialised imagination that is not dependent upon what is physically seen is present in the story that Gins and Arakawa relate in Architectural Body of Karl Dahlke, the blind mathematician, as well as in the deliberate confusion of Arakawa and Helen Keller in Gins’s book. Dahlke is able to solve the fiendishly difficult polyomino puzzle, ‘a mapping puzzle about bordering territories that had gone unsolved for several decades’,40 without ever having seen the puzzle or the pieces because he is able to generate a mental model from touching polyominos that he has cut out of cardboard. Dahlke constructs an imaginative board that he can return to at any point, referred to in Architectural Body as ‘a special order of precision-held image that marvellously permits shiftings-about and change’.41 He is able to make this model, Arakawa and Gins explain, because the embodied mind, responding to its environment through all the senses, means that the body remains the anchor for the bodiless realm. Dahlke is able to perform a conversion of what they call ‘perceptual’ and ‘dimensionalizing landing sites’ into ‘imaging’ landing sites, that is, a set of sites for an imagined phenomenological construction of form. For both Dahlke and for Keller, as Jondi Keane states, ‘perceptual learning is not confined to the visual’.42 Suzanne Langer writes that ‘symbol and meaning make man’s world, far more than sensation’, and that for these reasons Helen Keller, even without sight and hearing, ‘is capable of living in a wider and richer world’ than one constructed by a being with a full set of senses but no symbolic capability.43 Keller’s autobiography tells of her ability to translate precise impressions received by touch, smell, kinaesthetic or proprioceptive means into shared sign systems including Braille, manual lip-reading and the manual alphabet, to the extent that an incredibly vivid world can be evoked and imagined. As W. J. T. Mitchell states, ‘the implicitly tactile metaphor of a “text” (literally, that which is woven; web, texture)’ is ‘hardly a casual metaphor for the reader of Braille’.44 Keller is able to generate the visual for her reader without the experience of sight because of the way she is able to use body-wide systems of signification and translate them into equally complex linguistic networks through what Gins calls ‘kinesthetic graphicality’: ‘a sense of how things are or should be graphically positioned that is derived not from a seeing of the world’ but from the body’s ‘kinaesthetic-proprioceptive-tactile matrix’.45 Blindness, as it is used here, reasserts a continuum between the figurative and the literal that has perception and the embodied mind at its centre; the ensuing networks of symbols and imaginative structures have the ability to circumvent the retinal while still taking their place in the forming of perception and reasoning.

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However, for all its pointing to a beyond, I would still argue that the way that the image and the text work together in The Mechanism of Meaning constitutes a ‘delay’ in these immaterial realms before embodied consciousness returns us to the materiality of the canvas. (And here I also have in mind the pun Thierry de Duve invokes in pointing out that when Duchamp suggests that ‘a Delay in Glass’ could be ‘a kind of subtitle’ for The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, Duchamp is substituting retard for regard, that is, a delay for a gaze.)46 Indeed, one of the ways of reading Arakawa and Gins’s reframing of Tintoretto’s Susanna and the Elders in the subdivision ‘Neutralization of Subjectivity’ is as a challenge to the perceiver’s immersion in the world of the canvas. The text as puzzle is a form where the solution needs to be tested against the original material problem, and the serial form of The Mechanism of Meaning encourages us to do this, working in concert with the collage’s interactive panels which bring the perceiver back to physical objects demanding manipulation. This paradox that places the perceiver between stopping at the possibilities of the image as given (or at the assertion of nonsense) and a vista that is opened up to imply movement beyond is central to how The Mechanism of Meaning’s blend of image, text and objects works. Despite the diagrammatic function of the panels, the materiality and visuality of the image that ultimately cannot be fully reassembled operates to bring the reader-perceiver back, I think, to a certain intractability of the physical, even as it keeps the immaterial mental movements of its conceptual directions in play. The text may tell us that ‘A LINE IS A CRACK’, but as long as the reader-perceiver remains within the literal, they can only perform figurative manipulations of the work. The tacit restraint that keeps the gallerygoer safely in the realm of figural interactions with the artwork is nicely illustrated by five young artists who defied it in 1969, staging a secondary conceptual art piece by stealing Arakawa’s painting Untitled (1969) which contains the stencilled words: ‘IF POSSIBLE STEAL ANY ONE OF THESE DRAWINGS INCLUDING THIS SENTENCE’. Lawrence Alloway, in his introduction to the thieves’ account, maintains that by direct action they indeed were able to introduce a third term between ‘the ambiguous threshold of visual images and verbal statements’. The group, he writes, ‘violated the aesthetic stasis of the two sign-systems by moving into the realm of illegal action’.47 This need for physicality as a third term that undercuts the stasis of image and text is perhaps why Arakawa and Gins’s work eventually moved into architecture, where the scope for a fully manipulable physical environment, and for obvious effect on the body, is far greater. In The Mechanism of Meaning the imagetext acts as a tension between materiality and immateriality where any conventional split between the text as ‘mind’ and the image as ‘body’ are undercut because both forms are presented to us by the scale, the assembled objects, the action commands and, in the theoretical paratexts surrounding the work of Arakawa and Gins, as mediated by the body, and by an embodied mind. ‘My medium is the areas of perception created, located and demonstrated by the combining (MELTING) of languages, systems, into each other in the same moving place’,



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Arakawa writes, setting up a fluidity between sign and referent, and through two and three dimensions, where the ‘given’ of reading and looking becomes that which is ‘taken’ actively.48 As the preface to the Abbeville version of the work states, taking into account the roles of the mind and body in creating perception profoundly unsettles any conventional separation between subject and object: if to perceive is to take things to be so, how much more useful for the perceiver to think directly in terms of ‘the Taken’ (or possibly, in the first and last analyses, of ‘the Taking’ – i.e., the doing, the arranging, the finding to be there, the bringing about), with the tempting notion of ‘the Mistaken’ handily in tow, rather than of ‘the Given,’ which fairly screams for a passivity that perceiving must lack.49

That said, one of the problems with remaining within the conventional visual resources of the diagram is that the pictorial background often needs to be treated as inert in order to abstract the forces and movements of the foreground in a clear manner – an informative diagram looks to close up any significant gaps in meaning between the designer’s ‘given’ and the reader’s ‘taken’. Visually, this clarity of edges and elements allows for the perpetuation of a visual subject/object split of exactly the type resisted by Arakawa’s other paintings, by their writings on ‘blank’, and by the monist paradigms that underlie those formulations. In Arakawa’s more painterly work this is often accomplished by a modulated and fully worked treatment of the pictorial background, but in The Mechanism of Meaning the negotiation of what is ‘taken’ happens in the tension between image and text, particularly in instances where it is not clear where the subject of the instruction begins and ends. This is signalled explicitly in an image that reproduces Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase with two empty boxes overlaid with stencilling, one labelled YES, the other labelled NO, above the question DO YOU LIKE THIS PAINTING? The answer to the question about taste now depends on deixis: on whether you read the framed area as a separate ‘this’, or the version with Arakawa’s interventions as ‘this’, or the reproduction, or the absent original, as ‘this’, and whether the voting boxes are part of the ‘this’ of the painting or outside of it. This is complicated still further by the unconventional painting of the work’s title on the canvas itself. The scandal Duchamp caused at the Armory show in 1913 was at least as much to do with the labelling of his painting; as de Duve reminds us, titles are generally placed on or outside the frame, not integrated into the painting.50 The designation of the subject under c­ onsideration – whichever one or ones you settle with – is as uncertain and as provisionally attributed as taste-led perception. This invitation to dissolve deixis in field-wide perception, what Arakawa and Gins call an ‘everywhere evenly distributed agent’, is what will later become the architecture-person-surround of Architectural Body, and it brings together a whole fabric of discourses present in post-war art and intellectual history that combine mysticism and monism to take the person as small part of a larger unified field.51 In this Arakawa and Gins’s work occurs at the intersection of conceptual and environmental art, as an instance of where the phenomenological field of the work is taken to include the situation of the viewer, perceiver or reader. Arakawa’s

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paintings often thematise this field consciousness in the form of ‘blank’, an always mobile underlying medium that is neither presence nor void. In the words stencilled across As It Is: Blind Intentions IX, ‘Blank serves as a station for our senses, making possible an impression of continuance. Subject comes to be formed in much the same way. And so, Blank comes to be found thoroughly interspersed throughout Subject, forming an integral part of any act.’52 An older version of this continuous visual field can also be seen in Japanese art, as Norman Bryson argues in ‘The Gaze in an Expanded Field’, where the large open spaces between the visual elements perform as equal compositional elements, but, pertinently, it would also be present in the late paintings of the nearly blind painters Turner and Monet. In Helen Keller or Arakawa, Gins speculates on the kinds of fields created by blindness, linking them tentatively – encouraging a perpetual state of tentativeness is a crucial part of Arakawa and Gins’s anti-entropic architectural practice – into the gerundic and transitive fields of grammar: ‘It is the molten state of this, of transitivity, that some believe to be the special province of the blind.’53 (Indeed, Gins argues extensively for the Japanese language as placing the transitive in an extended role.) Transitivity provides a link between the ways in which the idea of blindness is used in Arakawa and Gins’s work and the importance they place on a pictorial and bodily field that is given to us as a series of misunderstandings, mistakes, or flawed logic so that the perceiver feels the work to be never finished, always under mental or physical phenomenological construction. Reproduction of Susanna and the Elders (see figure 6.4) allows Arakawa and Gins to construct an early model of the perceiver in something more fully appropriating a transitive environment, with a greater range of textures and other consciousnesses than the more ascetic abstractions of the diagram would allow. The merging and re-making of subject and object that they later refer to in puns on the word ‘cleaving’, meaning both to split apart and to hold fast to,54 is here figured as a deliberately anachronistic commentary. The stencilled phrases plot the sites of touch and vision as mingling and ‘neutralization of subjectivity’ where Susanna ‘neutralizes herself’ in the mirror, listening, ‘leg in water’, in touching her foot. This neutralisation is not just a description of Susanna’s absorption in her bathing; the intention is to animate the entire visual and environmental field so that any part can be reconfigured in a phenomenological relationship with any other part, and, in this cycle of activation and neutralisation of subjectivity, to give another figure for the assertion of meaning. As F. L. Rush points out, ‘meaning is a product of an endogenous sundering, a marking-off, a splitting and rejoining’.55 Caws notes the paradox involved in placing Susanna’s self-contemplation under the subheading ‘Neutralization of Subjectivity’: because, in the terms of my present discussion, gazing involves ‘cleaving’ with something other than oneself, and because a material representation is not oneself, contemplation of the mirror can be refigured not as narcissism, but as a ‘letting go of the excessive involvement the reader/observer has with herself’.56 This sits well with the panel’s inclusion of moments of not seeing. In this panel, not seeing is juxtaposed with the detailed and amplified awareness of other



‘Being kept in the dark can be a critical gesture’

6.4  Arakawa and Madeline Gins, The Mechanism of Meaning 1. Neutralization of Subjectivity, fig. 1.5., 1963–73/96. Acrylic and photograph on canvas, 244 × 173 cm. Photograph by Sally Ritts.

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sensual data from the kind of in-between sites that Duchamp might call the ‘infrathin’, directed by the caption that directs us to pay attention to the tactility of the ‘cloth between the arm and leg’ or one elder ‘grabbing a cloth and the losing of all his body except for the head and the arm’. Many of the other panels ask us to pull focus to the background, to the body as frame, or to a mirror behind a painted foreground, or to consider zones of alternate possibilities, and it is only by ascribing a more complex kind of movement to the mechanism of the viewing process, as I have done above by bringing Arakawa and Gins’s later term ‘cleaving’ into play, that we can reinstate the kinds of continuously creative spectatorship intimated in the other panels. In the subdivision ‘Meaning of Intelligence’ there is a painting of a boat on the water framed between two sides of a large bracket, and to take reading and perceiving as a form of framing of thought may give a way out of the closed circuit of narcissism, as well as the unified field of pure Derridean différance. The process, this panel implies, is a mobile one in which image cognitively ‘frames’ text, text frames image, and both frame and are framed by sapience and reflection.57 The illogic that stops the settlement of clear meaning might then be seen to reunite this panel with the theories worked through by the other panels in which an unsettled gestalt prevents us settling into a comfortable denial of embodied cognition’s part in constructing perception, or in being constructed by perception. This constructivist outlook, importantly for the arguments that this collection is making, does not dissolve the work in a relativistic aporia; instead it argues for a taxonomy of mistakes and misreadings that might be used to manipulate mental configurations. There is a figure for this perhaps in the form of the partial immersion of Susanna’s leg: the reader-perceiver is half immersed, but nonetheless still caught up in and playing their part in the network of neutralisations of the work as a whole. (And in this respect the answer to one of the questions the preliminary sketch for the panel asks would be: yes, Tintoretto is also, partly, his own daughter.) The images and text in The Mechanism of Meaning, then, act together to figure multi-sensory awareness as an alternative to visual absorption. In this example the text breaks the stable gestalt of the image and turns the ‘given’ into the ‘taken’  – and, in the case of Tintoretto and his daughter, the humorously ‘mistaken’ – while outlining a number of mechanisms by which this taking might be directed into new forms. In this, it follows the persistent patterns of suspicion regarding the allure of the visual outlined in Martin Jay’s Downcast Eyes, and in Mitchell’s discussions of iconoclasm: ‘In any case, painting is always only an exercise’, Arakawa writes.58 The circuit between reader-perceiver and work in the Tintoretto panel is also disrupted by the comic bathos of the captioning, as well as by the formal riddles that ask us to figure out the kinds of neutralisations that might be effected by not seeing. That this relaxation of the gaze into absorbed spectatorship should be resisted I take as implied by Arakawa and Gins’s insistence on our active participation in transformation, in analysis, in physical interaction, in changing focus, in challenging logic, and in defining and categorising



‘Being kept in the dark can be a critical gesture’

throughout the eighty-plus panels. If the image asks us to change nothing then the complacency that they assert leads to mortality might easily take hold. Mistakes, detours, misidentification and disorientation are necessary to prompt the readerperceiver into attempting to ‘reverse destiny’, and ideas of blindness are used in concert with physical commands to assert the role of fully embodied cognition as the point where one might intervene, through architecture, to effect this reversal of entropy.59 The Mechanism of Meaning’s compound of text, image and unseen forms suggests the reader-perceiver’s active negotiation of an ongoing transitive ‘molten state of this’ that places the embodied mind and its projections in the ‘same moving place’ where languages and systems melt together.

Notes   1 Madeline Gins, Helen Keller or Arakawa (Santa Fe, NM: Burning Books, 1994), p. 125.   2 Shūsaku Arakawa (Arakawa Shūsaku, according to Japanese convention) was known by his surname alone in America.   3 Robert Creeley, ‘“Some Place Enormously Moveable”: The Collaboration of Arakawa and Madeline H. Gins’, in The Collected Essays of Robert Creeley (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989), p. 421.   4 Ibid., p. 423.   5 As Mary Ann Caws points out in The Eye in the Text: Essays on Perception, Mannerist to Modern (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 222, the work coincides with the peak of reader-response and reception theories, and it is perhaps significant here that Hans Georg Gadamer has also written on The Mechanism of Meaning.   6 F. L. Rush, ‘To Think, To Invent, To Be Invented: Reflections on The Mechanism of Meaning’, in Michael Govan (ed.), Reversible Destiny: Arakawa/Gins (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 1997), p. 49.   7 Arthur Danto, ‘Gins and Arakawa: Building Sensoriums (Madeline Gins, Arakawa; Ronald Feldman Fine Arts Gallery, New York)’, The Nation, 251 (1990), 429–34, 429. The Mechanism of Meaning exists in three printed book versions, all slightly different, and as two assembled works (see Govan (ed.), Reversible Destiny, p. 109). Unless otherwise stated I will be referring to the 1988 Abbeville book, or to the 1996 assemblage constructed for the work’s first American exhibition, reproduced in Reversible Destiny. The book substitutes some panels for preliminary plans or sketches and adds in extra explanatory marginalia. The sections ‘Review and Self Criticism’ are different in each edition of the work; each iteration frames The Mechanism of Meaning with more of their architectural and existential theories.   8 See David Joselit, ‘Dada’s Diagrams’, in Leah Dickerman and Matthew S. Witkovsky (eds), The Dada Seminars, CASVA Seminar Papers 1 (Washington, DC: Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, in association with Distributed Art Publishers, 2005), p. 235.   9 This text appears several times, across media. It appears on canvas as Paintings (1968– 69), and is reprinted in ‘Notes on My Paintings: What I am Mistakenly Looking For’, Arts Magazine, 44.2 (1969), 29, as well as in Helen Keller or Arakawa, p. 230. 10 Gins, Helen Keller or Arakawa, p. 230. 11 Mary Ann Caws, ‘Taking Textual Time’, in Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux and

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Mixed messages Neil Fraistat (eds), Reimagining Textuality: Textual Studies in the Late Age of Print (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), p. 125. 12 For Tokyo neo-Dada, see Thomas R. H. Havens, Radicals and Realists in the Japanese Nonverbal Arts: The Avant-Garde Rejection of Modernism (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006); Doryun Chong et al., Tokyo, 1955–1970: A New Avant-Garde (New York: MoMA, 2012). 13 Fumi Tsukahara, ‘Trajectory of ARAKAWA Shusaku: From Kan-Oke {Coffin} to the Reversible Destiny Lofts’, INFLeXions, 6 (February 2013), 313–22; Pierre Cabanne, ‘Introduction’, in Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. Ron Padgett (New York: Da Capo, 1987), p. 11. See Charles W. Haxthausen, ‘Looking at Arakawa’, in Constructing  the Perceiver: Arakawa, Experimental Works: Tokyo, the National Museum of Modern Art, November 1–December 10, 1991, Kyoto, the National Museum of Modern  Art, January 7–February 5, 1992, exh. cat. (Tokyo: National Museum of Modern Art, 1991), p. 313. 14 Gins, Helen Keller or Arakawa, p. 177. 15 In this I am not reading The Mechanism of Meaning as identical to conceptual pieces like Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit (1964) or Douglas Huebler’s work in Seth Siegelaub’s 1969 exhibition, where ‘because the work is beyond direct perceptual experience, awareness of the work depends on a system of documentation’ (Huebler) and where ‘The exhibition consists of (the ideas communicated in) the catalog’ (see Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (London: Studio Vista, 1973), pp. 73–4). In The Mechanism of Meaning, because the work is subject to mental manipulations, its materiality remains a necessary part of the experience. 16 Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997), pp. 27–8. 17 For Leonardo and Arakawa, see Koji Takahashi, ‘Introduction: Forming Space. An Attempt to Trace the Development of Motifs in the Works of Shusaku Arakawa’, in Constructing the Perceiver, p. 307. 18 Gins, Helen Keller or Arakawa, p. 232. 19 Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 20 For the distinction between seeing and perception, and for a comparison of Arakawa’s work with Frank Stella’s, see Haxthausen, ‘Looking at Arakawa’, p. 317. 21 Fried, Art and Objecthood, p. 154. 22 George Lakoff et al., ‘Testing the Limits of Brain Plasticity, or Why Is There a Wall Down the Middle of the Tub?’, in Govan (ed.), Reversible Destiny, p. 115. For other discussion of Lakoff and Johnson’s work, see the Introduction and Gander’s chapter in this volume. 23 Gins, Helen Keller or Arakawa, p. 61. 24 Martin E. Rosenberg, ‘An Interview with Arakawa and Gins’, January–February 2010, https://independent.academia.edu/MartinERosenberg (accessed 1 July 2015). 25 Gordon Bearn, ‘The Mechanism of Meaning: A Pedagogical Sketchbook’, INFLeXions, 6 (February 2013), 255. 26 See Govan (ed.), Reversible Destiny. 27 Charles Green, The Third Hand: Collaboration in Art from Conceptualism to Postmodernism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), p. 228.



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28 For an account of entering Stuttering God, an assemblage that no longer exists, see Mark Taylor, Nots (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 117–20. 29 Press release for ‘Arakawa: Mistakes of Blank (Forming Space)’, Ronald Feldman Gallery, 4 March 1987, www.feldmangallery.com/pages/exhsolo/exhara90.html (accessed 23 September 2013). 30 Gins, Helen Keller or Arakawa, p. 166. 31 Italo Calvino, ‘“The Arrow in the Mind”: A Review of The Mechanism of Meaning’, in Birgitte Grundtvig, M. L. McLaughlin and Lene Waage Petersen (eds), Image, Eye and Art in Calvino: Writing Visibility, trans. Patrick Creagh (London: Legenda, 2007), p. 287. 32 For a Peircean reading of word and image in Arakawa’s solo paintings, see Haxthausen, ‘Looking at Arakawa’, p. 316. 33 Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, p. 18. See Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 124 on the discussions of chess as played through visualisation in Duchamp’s reading of Esprit Jouffret’s Traité élémentaire de géométrie à quatre dimensions et introduction à la géométrie à n dimensions (1903). 34 Here I am following the readings of Duchamp’s work in Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996) and Henderson, The Fourth Dimension. 35 Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, p. 18. 36 Haxthausen, ‘Looking at Arakawa’, p. 315. 37 Takahashi, ‘Introduction’, p. 304. 38 Rosenberg, ‘An Interview with Arakawa and Gins’. 39 Gins, Helen Keller or Arakawa, p. 213. There is also an anecdote that suggests that this interest in blindness might be born out of physical experience of the deprivations of Japan in the Second World War: ‘When he was seven years old, they sent him off to the mountains to get him away from the bombing targets which is what the cities had become. There he became one of a band of children scouring forest and field to keep from starving. They were forced to forage for food, because the food their parents had sent to them was being hoarded by their teachers and guardians. … In their desperation, they learned to identify edible weeds, going so far as to invent ways of farming algae off the lakes and streams. Still this did not make enough. They were starving. Because of the severe nutritional difficulties, several of the children could no longer walk and some among them, and he was one of these, had started to go blind.’ Gins, Helen Keller or Arakawa, p. 157. 40 Ibid., p. 14. 41 Ibid., p. 20. 42 Jondi Keane, ‘The Multimodal Consequences of Coordinology’, Interfaces, 21–22 (2004), 407–34, 428. 43 Suzanne Langer, Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 28. 44 W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘Spatial Form in Literature: Toward a General Theory’, Critical Inquiry, 6.3 (1980), 547. Julie Phillips Brown discusses the use of Braille in conceptual art in her chapter for this volume. 45 Gins, Helen Keller or Arakawa, p. 235. 46 Duchamp’s comments are contained in the Green Box. ‘Use delay instead of picture or painting … not so much in the different meanings in which delay can be taken,

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Mixed messages but rather in their indecisive reunion’; The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (New York: Da Capo, 1989), p. 26; Thierry de Duve, ‘Echoes of the Readymade: Critique of Pure Modernism’, in Martha Buskirk and Mignon Nixon (eds), The Duchamp Effect: Essays, Interviews, Round Table (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), p. 115. 47 Lawrence Alloway, ‘Introduction’, in Kathe Gregory, Marilyn Landis, Russell F. Lewis, David Crane and Scott R. Kahn, Stolen (New York: Colorcraft Lithographers, Dwan Gallery, Multiples Inc., 1970). 48 Gins, Helen Keller or Arakawa, p. 230. 49 Arakawa and Madeline Gins, The Mechanism of Meaning: Work in Progress (1963– 1971, 1978), Based on the Method of Arakawa (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1979), p. 6. 50 Thierry de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism on Marcel Duchamp’s Passage from Painting to the Readymade (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), p. 141. 51 Arakawa and Madeline Gins, Architectural Body (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2002), p. 35. 52 Arakawa and Madeline Gins, Pour Ne Pas Mourir / To Not To Die (Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 1987), p. 38. Also appears on As It is: Blind Intentions IX. 53 Gins, Helen Keller or Arakawa, p. 275. 54 To Not To Die, p. 44. For a discussion of ‘cleaving’ in regard to the formation of subjecthood, see Taylor, Nots, pp. 112–14. 55 Rush, ‘To Think, To Invent’, p. 49. 56 Mary Ann Caws, ‘The Construction in Question’, Interfaces, 21–22 (2004), 267–74, 272. 57 Mark Taylor extends this to the paratext too: ‘Works frame texts that reframe works’, Nots, p. 99. 58 Gins, Helen Keller or Arakawa, p. 232. 59 For entropy, see Reuben M. Baron, ‘The Role of Tentativeness in Perceiving Architecture and Art: A Far-from-Equilibrium Ecological Perspective’, Ecological Psychology, 20.4 (2008), 334.

‘Then art will change. This is the future’: Nancy Spero’s manifestary practice Rachel Warriner Scholarship on the imagetext has long been attuned to hierarchical assertions about genre, and the gendered assumptions contained within them.1 In Iconology, W. J. T. Mitchell dissects the way in which writers on the subject set up claims of seriousness and rigour against delicacy and beauty for both text and image.2 As Mitchell points out, in these competing arguments that which is considered to be less rigorous is often denigrated as being feminine; the gendered metaphor is invoked to imply that a practice is of lesser worth.3 Despite the aggression of the subjugation of the feminine in art historical debate, claims for the masculine authority of painting have encouraged some feminist artists to seek new ways of working that reject masculinist modes of making and instead look towards formally registering female experience. American artist Nancy Spero (1926–2009) is one such practitioner. Her most canonical works were paper scrolls made during the 1970s which featured an intricate interplay of text and image coalesced around women’s experience and a rejection of patriarchy. They stand as examples of the feminist American imagetext. Born in Cleveland, Spero was raised in Chicago and trained at the School of the Art Institute in the city from 1945 until 1949. Developing an expressionistic and individualistic oeuvre, Spero spent much of her early career looking to Europe and particularly Paris for her artistic development. Moving there for the first time in 1949, her longest stay, from 1959 until 1964, was part of a search for an alternative to what she described as ‘the all-consuming pressures of the art system in New York’.4 Having lived a relatively insular life in France, Spero’s return to America in 1964 was coloured by her immersion in the politics of the New Left, anti-Vietnam War protests and, most importantly, feminism. Settling with her family in New York, Spero developed relationships with other women artists, joining feminist artists’ groups such as Women Artists in Revolution in 1969, and The Ad Hoc Committee of Women Artists in 1970. This culminated in her involvement in the founding of the A.I.R. Gallery, the first all-women’s gallery in the United States, in 1972.5 During this period Spero experimented with modes of making, searching for a form that was politically active. She sought a way of creating work that both rejected the self-importance

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of what she perceived to be a masculinist and self-regarding art world and that was suited to protest and political dissent. Spero’s move towards paper, collage and the inclusion of extracts of language, and particularly quotation, marked the emergence of her political form.6 In Spero’s search for a feminist mode of making during the 1970s, the imagetext emerged as the apposite form for second-wave feminist practice. Fully establishing it as a formal technique in her 1969–70 Artaud Paintings, Spero began to work with sections of text quoted from other sources, ranging from single lines to substantial extracts. Developing this practice over the course of the decade, Spero developed a range of tactics for interrelating text and image in order to politically charge each semantic register. Sometimes using text as illustrative of image, sometimes using image as a means to erode the truth-value of text, sometimes to bolster its message, sometimes presenting text as almost image-like, and sometimes suggesting a divergence between image as affective and text as intellectual, the relationship between text and image that Spero developed was one that sought to manipulate the presumptions about both registers in order to make the textual and iconic information she collated work best for her ideological message. Notes in Time on Women (1976–79) is the most extensive and complex of Spero’s scroll works, the form of which she developed by pasting sheets of highquality art paper together. Inspired by frieze paintings, Spero designed it to be non-linear and to defy definitive narratives, looking for a way of engaging with the artwork that was more mobile than the fixed viewing position of traditional paintings.7 Notes in Time on Women consists of twenty-four panels, each panel constructed of four sheets of Bodleian mould-made paper pasted end to end, making each one relatively uniform in size and shape. On the support are appropriated elements that Spero collected over the course of five years. These include printed images, collaged drawings and typewritten extracts of text. The iconography is dominated by images of women, some of which are taken from external sources ranging from contemporary press photography to ancient artworks; others are drawn by Spero and refer to her previous expressionistic visual language. The texts feature, on the one hand, quotations from male public figures: philosophers, politicians and playwrights; and, on the other, records of women’s experience, creative works and revisionist feminist texts about the position of women in history. Spero pits text against image as part of the wider objective of her practice in which she aims to make woman the protagonist. She describes this as reconceiving of the artwork so as it focuses on female experience rather than male, imagining woman as the universal subject, ‘an independent and positive force even when she is trapped in extreme repression in a male-controlled world’.8 The feminist core of the work, then, seeks to recalibrate our ways of viewing so as to centre on female rather than male experience, to see things from women’s viewpoints. Critics tend towards celebratory readings of Spero’s scrolls, arguing for their political potency as anti-patriarchal artefacts.9 Notable discussions of Notes in Time on Women include Jon Bird’s article ‘Present Imperfect’ (2003) which



‘Then art will change. This is the future’

examines Spero’s scrolls of the 1970s as scripto-visual artefacts, considering Spero’s use of language in tension with its use in conceptual art and arguing that her visual and textual signs create new female subject positions.10 Jo Anna Isaak explores the idea of Notes in Time on Women as a modern epic in her 1994 interview with the artist, positioning it as a series of fragments brought together to reflect the dominant values of her time.11 In Nancy Spero, Encounters, Joanna Walker convincingly discusses Spero’s recuperation of the poet H.D. in Notes in Time on Women, examining her use of feminist sources and the influence their oeuvres had on the artist.12 Christopher Lyon posits a move from the public to the private in the narrative of Notes in Time on Women, tracing the thematic and conceptual coherences across the work.13 All four see Notes in Time on Women as an attempt to uncover and restore a hidden matrilineal history, one subsumed by patriarchy, in the service of 1970s feminism. Assenting to Spero’s claim that she was ‘documenting images and stories of women through time’, critics perceive an almost archaeological project at work, one that excavates true histories from underneath patriarchy’s rubble.14 However, despite Spero’s claim that she seeks to document history, a close examination of her use of sources exposes a deliberate manipulation of their original meanings in order to suit a feminist message. As I will expound below, texts by male writers appear more aggressively anti-woman through the removal of their original context, and images mediate the viewer’s experience of interpreting texts. Far from accusing Spero of deception, or dismissing the powerful feminist message contained in the work as being based on false claims, I believe that Spero repurposed signifiers as a deliberate and effective tactic. Her manipulation of sources as formal strategy is elucidated by a number of statements written by the artist between 1970 and 1976 which outlined her sense of patriarchy’s destructive effect on the woman artist.15 The texts describe and condemn an aggressive system that devalues women and their work.16 Consistently exploring the nature of the woman artist’s exclusion from an unjust patriarchal art world and making assertions about the need for revolution, Spero’s writings from this period are often read as – and titled by the artist as – feminist art manifestos. I contend that her visual practice operates in a similar way to the manifesto form, one which is more traditionally considered to be literary. Drawing on this body of written work, I propose that we look at Notes in Time on Women as an example of a visual art manifesto.17 References to the manifesto in the critical responses to Spero’s work are not without precedent.18 However, scholars tend to treat the idea of the ‘manifesto’ in simple terms, using it as a descriptive metaphor for political intent rather than considering the manifesto as form.19 What is useful about the literary manifesto as an interlocutory concept for reading Notes in Time on Women is that it examines the way in which writers and artists manipulate information in order to persuade and provoke their audience on behalf of their particular ideology. For the study of the imagetext, Spero’s manifesto is exemplary because its acts of persuasion exist in the appropriated and repurposed fragments that emerge as imagetexts in the service of feminism. Spero describes her use of text and image

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as being ‘set in tension with one another’, and it is through her redesignation of fragments into a different signifying register, one that is between the seemingly transparent legibility of typed text and the iconic connotations of image, that they can contribute to the developing feminist thesis that Notes in Time on Women elaborates.20 The manifestary narrative that drives Notes in Time on Women, although deeply fragmented and made up of multiple voices, is one that exposes patriarchy’s attack on women throughout history and celebrates women’s resistance to it. Created with a female viewer in mind as part of a thought-experiment in which Spero sought to imagine women as the universal subject of humanity rather than men, certain themes persist in the work: childbirth and pregnancy; female sexuality; the separation of men and women; male misunderstanding of female autonomy; and a masculine wish to control women.21 Spero weaves these themes across the texts, creating a story of women as free beings, fertile and sexual, whom, through fear and misunderstanding, men seek to control. The most hopeful sections of this piece are the moments where women are shown as entirely free from men. In line with this, I would argue that in Notes in Time on Women there is a clear – though not uncomplicated – manifestary drive towards an idealised, freed female subject, one who is fertile and sexual but not under male influence.22 From the scholarship on the manifesto form, which is extensive and contested, the most useful formal features for considering Notes in Time on Women as a feminist imagetext relate to time and performance. The specific temporal quality of the manifesto is part of its rhetorical prowess, creating the impression that it exists in the moment of possibility, a perpetual instant that is on the cusp of change.23 Adopting the continuous present tense, the temporal drive of the manifesto is towards the now, focused on the present as a means of transforming the future.24 Take Marinetti’s repeated exclamations in ‘The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism’: ‘Come on! set fire to the library shelves!’ he exhorts. ‘You have objections?  – Enough! Enough! We know them … We’ve understood!’25 As Mary Ann Caws states: ‘originating within it, the past and future tenses have no more outside referent than the present tense’.26 This mode of writing makes the manifesto feel urgent and imminent, describing actions that are always just about to be. In the manifestary text, the moment of enunciation is forever now. Time is not only an important theme for the manifesto, but also for the imagetext. As Mitchell describes in Iconology, in his 1766 Laocoön G. E. Lessing schematised a distinction between literature and the visual arts that asserted that text was a temporal form and image a spatial one. Lessing’s argument suggests that literary works unfold over time, allowing not only narrative but also complex ideas to develop.27 By contrast, a painting exists in space, the beauty of forms striking the viewer instantly and all at once.28 Mitchell outlines how these categories have been accepted by critics without much scrutiny, meaning that works that attempt to undermine the distinction are either dismissed or excused in the writing around them. Unlike Mitchell’s deconstruction of the categorisation in



‘Then art will change. This is the future’

which he outlines the gendered qualities asserted by critics who employ these metaphors, Spero and her critics use this division and its misogynistic assumptions, usurping them in order to assert the unique power of Spero’s practice. Using the metaphor of space in the visual arts to represent the staid and masculinist work that dominated the art world into which she emerged, Spero’s claims for her scroll works are that they inject time into the spatiality of viewing work, activating the viewer through the need to move around them and encouraging a relationship that is mobile, interactive and feminist.29 Indeed, in viewing the 215 feet of Notes in Time on Women, it is impossible to look at the piece all at once. Although not directly answering the suggestion that works of art are purely spatial  – after all, as Mitchell points out, Lessing’s critical assertion of space is directed at much larger works and even architecture  – the distinct style of the scroll refers to practices that are lexical: hieroglyphics, for example, or narrative works such as the Bayeux Tapestry.30 The frequent critical comparison of Spero’s work to performance underlines this claim; there is a sense that in viewing Spero’s scrolls we are not restricted to a spatial relationship, but engage with the work in a way that unfolds and develops across time and space.31 By introducing time into the viewing process, Spero implies that she is introducing a history, action and, drawing on ancient forms, creating a new type of art.32 Although the references in Notes in Time on Women range across a thousand years, Spero’s decontextualisation of sources makes the piece seem to speak to the moment in which it is viewed. Her paper support is expansive and often blank. In its original mode of display, mounted with pins, the distance between the support and the wall to which it was attached would have been minimal; it is as though the support bleeds into the wall behind it. It is not exactly borderless, but the boundaries of the works are insecure. There is a sense that the scrolls could extend exponentially in that they are constructed of pieces of paper pasted end to end. There is nothing concrete about the borders of these panels; instead, they seem to delineate a sort of non-place that is atemporal and depthless. This atemporality is in marked contrast to the historical references that are collaged and printed on, making the paper support seem to delineate a place that is bracketed from time, always referring to the present. Spero was heavily influenced by Gertrude Stein’s concept of ‘continuous presence’ in which she proposed writing in a way that allowed composition to create a perpetual moment in which action can take place. Spero appropriated this phrase in order to describe her own work, saying, ‘The history of women I envisage is neither linear nor sequential. I try … to show that it all has reverberations for us today.’33 For Spero, continuous presence works in a number of ways. First, she decontextualises sources to make things relevant to the current moment, remaking history.34 Secondly, she creates an illusion of movement and dance. Finally, she creates a sense of potential through this practice, making the work seem to be on the cusp of change, predicting an immanent seismic shift. The use of a quotation attributed to Jacques Derrida in panel seventeen of Notes in Time on Women serves as an example of her remaking history (see

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7.1  Nancy Spero, Notes in Time on Women, 1976–79 (detail from panel 17).

figure 7.1). This moment of the work is much discussed: a naked female figure vaults over the text, seeming to disrupt its misogynistic message which reads there is no essence of woman … there is no truth about woman … the feminist women … are men. Feminism, indeed, is the operation by which woman wants to come to resemble man … the whole virile illusion … feminism wants castration, even that of woman.35

Critics read this as a denial of the feminist subject, which is utterly rejected by Spero’s leaping figure. Isaak, for example, states that the ‘whole virile illusion’ of Derrida’s text is ‘disrupted’.36 In leaping over the text, the figure exposes her naked genitalia, leading to a reading of a vivid depiction of biological womanhood aimed against unthinking and dominant phallogocentrism. However, this is an example of Spero’s remaking history: the text from which she quotes is, in fact, a discussion of Nietzsche’s attitude to women, not a claim made by Derrida himself. In his interview with Christie McDonald in which he discusses the claim,



‘Then art will change. This is the future’

Derrida outlines a position towards feminism that is not dissimilar to Spero’s own.37 In spite of this, critics never note this disingenuous excerption, and the text is presented as an artefact of misogyny, faithfully transcribed with its intended meaning intact and then playfully undermined by the relationship between text and image.38 Spero’s imaging of this quotation is quite different from those that have a meaning that she seeks to privilege. This quotation seems to well up from the bottom of the page, curving in slight arches so that the repeated ‘there is no truth’ and ‘there is no essence’ is emphasised by its shape. Sitting on an extra piece of paper that is collaged on to the support, it follows the shape of the added fragment; typewritten extracts from its quotation spur off, via sharp, pointed arrows, to fly out as shrapnel from this single extract. In this instance, Spero emphasises her hand in the printing process, gently undermining reading conventions by printing it in arcs, giving it the character of text that is more image than information. Her choice of yellow for its printing makes it less emphatic than other statements. From a distance, this text, while not illegible, is less easy to read than others on the scroll, the size of the print being smaller, the colour fainter and the shape less readable than other quotations. The reading of the vaulting figure as an image designed to show disdain for the given message of the text is appropriate; Spero’s use of word and image set into tension is at its most antagonistic here. In leaping over this text, the figure does not engage in its sentiment, barely registering the thought. The viewer is encouraged to see this kind of thinking as an irrelevance, the truth claims of its (incorrectly cited) philosophy undermined in this moment, first, by its material qualities as a printed artefact and, secondly, by its relationship to the free, moving figure. Spero’s lack of attention to the derivation of her source helps to frame this relationship between image and text as part of her ideological intent for this piece. In repurposing historical and cultural source material, Spero asserts that throughout time, patriarchal culture has been oppressing women physically, sexually and intellectually. In attributing this to Derrida she maintains that it was very much contemporary to her own historical position, rather than crediting the quotation, and with this the idea, to someone working in the previous century. Thus she surmises from this remade history – and through her manipulations of text and image encourages her viewer to agree – that the major (male) thinkers of the time normalise a denial of female subjectivity and seek to undermine feminism through intellectual attack. Its placement in this atemporal space implies a timelessness to this struggle, something that will only be overcome by the kind of active, free woman that she pictures. Another example of a remade history appears on panel one where printed in red woodblock print is the quote ‘certainly • childbirth • is our mortality, we who are women, for it is our battle’. Claiming that this text comes from history, but a history that predates Western empires, Spero cites this quotation on the panel as ‘sahagún • aztec • book II.’ Further investigation reveals that Bernadino de Sahagún was a sixteenth-century missionary who chronicled Aztec culture in what is now Mexico. Spero’s source for this text was Marshall Sahlins’s 1978 review of Marvin Harris’s book Cannibals and Kings: The Origins of Cultures.

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It is from Sahlins’s consideration of Harris’s description of Aztec society and human sacrifice that Spero extracts her quote.39 The emphasis of the section she extracts from is not upon maternity: Sahlins’s focus is on the understanding of sacrifice in Aztec culture. It is an aside to motherhood that Spero brings to the fore in her use of the section, not only taking it out of context but also altering Sahagún’s original quote to include Sahlins’s parentheses, in which he inserts the word ‘childbirth’ into the text. Indeed the citation ‘sahagún • aztec • book II’ is an inaccurate reference to the original source.40 Her use of this in Notes in Time on Women with its condensed form and emphasis provided by the interpuncts around the word ‘aztec’ implies that this text comes from an ancient society, erasing the more complex history of the evangelical colonial ethnographer filtered through historians.41 Spero’s seeming lack of concern for the accurate portrayal of sources suggests that she is not attempting a careful recovery of women’s history obscured by patriarchy, as has been claimed.42 Instead, she seeks the text that most fits her message and enables a vision of history that suits her manifestary declaration; her decontextualised use of the Sahagún via Sahlins is based on the suitability of its claim, not the accuracy of its historical message.43 Although panel one is text without image, Spero’s uneven transcription of this extract into a slogan-like introduction to her piece makes it read like a banner, a political artefact that alludes to her activist focus. In this way, Spero’s use of texts is, to appropriate Johanna Drucker’s phrase, marked.44 Drucker outlines how with the invention of typography there emerged two types of text: marked and unmarked. The unmarked is text that is presented in such a way as to elide the process of its making, meaning that it can be read as authoritative and true. This is most often seen in the literary work, but is also at work in an academic text such as this essay; the appearance of the text is secondary to the meaning of the language that is printed, allowing the words on the page to assume an authority that is not bound by their materiality.45 By contrast, the marked text is one that foregrounds its own materiality as text, highlights its constructed nature, and positions the reader in relation to various levels of discourse that are at work in its reading. As Drucker states, it ‘aggressively situates the reader in relation to the various levels of enunciation in the text – reader, speaker, subject, author’.46 In doing so, Drucker asserts, it makes the text ‘public language’, a type of discourse based on rhetoric where the focus is not on the author of the text, or the authority of their voice, but on the reader.47 Its connection to advertising shows that this language is not public in the sense of democratic; instead it is focused on the receiver, a language more of persuasion than authority. Spero’s transformation of this text, removing the complicated history from the original source and cementing one particular meaning as the core of the words extracted from elsewhere, also enhances its materiality. It is by bringing the text closer to the register of image, creating texts that address their own materiality, that Spero charges the words, omitting their history to either reframe their intentions or undermine their truth claims, making them useful for her own ideology. Through her process of



‘Then art will change. This is the future’

7.2  Nancy Spero, Notes in Time on Women, 1976–79 (detail from panel 3/4).

transcription, Spero transforms the texts she appropriates into marked words of persuasion, words hand-printed by someone who seeks to convince. Bringing evidence of oppression and historical inspiration to this moment, Spero creates an instant that is charged with revolutionary potential. Panels two, three and four provide a good example of her temporal allegiance to the instant (figure 7.2). Across these panels, Spero prints from one source repeatedly. The figure is a naked and athletic woman captured mid-leap. Her extended posture instils performativity; the neat lines of the original, seen printed cleanly in her first incarnation in black on the very left-hand side of the panel, become blurred and overlaid towards the right. Spero moves the printing of the figure up and down across the panels, evoking a chronophotographic record of a figure leaping across a vast distance. This allusion to a chronophotography is apt, it being literally a photographing of time. According to Mary Anne Doane, Etienne-Jules Marey, one of the earliest proponents of chronophotography, used the technique in order to ‘cut’ into time, ‘slicing it in such a way that it could become representable’.48 Spero’s repeated and doubled figures, both in panels two to four and elsewhere, similarly freeze an instant. Spero’s figures, however, are not arrested in the same way as Marey’s images; instead, the moment is one of perpetual movement and celebration. Spero’s figures are pictured in constant action, moving towards something imagined but unseen. This is an imaging of a moment on the cusp of change, picturing not a system overthrown, but instead a revolutionary instant pregnant with potential. In this way the figures become emblematic of utopian movement. Rather than seeing her figures are purely representational, Spero considered them in the same vein as hieroglyphs, icons that stand in for particular ideas and meanings.49 Although appropriated from historical sources, the figures are not chosen for the associations created by their historical associations, but instead for their affective resonances. Not as prescriptive as a language, they are instead conceptual markers, indicating an attitude or emotion, the repeated figures on panels two, three and four presenting a visceral freedom, represented not only by the pose that is repeated but also in the vibrant colours that Spero chooses for their printing. On panels eleven to fourteen is Spero’s main declaration for Notes in Time on Women. It reads ‘Notes in Time on Women II. Women: Appraisals, Dance

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7.3  Nancy Spero, Notes in Time on Women, 1976–79 (detail from panel 12/13).

and Active Histories’ (see figure 7.3). To the right of this headline-like text are twenty-eight prints of a woman running with her hands held behind her back. Similarly to the figures on panels two to four, there are inconsistencies in the way they are printed, some in red and some in black, some heavy and some faded. In conversation with Lyon, Spero described this figure as being representative of ‘active-woman-freedom’, a site of specific and legible meaning that requires a mode of perception that is more like reading than viewing.50 However, this is not as directly communicative as a language; the figure is repeated to such an extent that it would be incorrect to interpret the encounter with this set of figures as being one of reading. It is the sense of active women in freedom that is communicated by engaging in a type of signification that is in between text and image; one that seeks to exploit the didactic possibility of text without the dogmatic prescription that didacticism implies. Spero rarely writes anything herself; apart from this inclusion of the title, everything is sourced and cited, a collection of other people’s writings. Spero, therefore, avoids elaborating an argument through text; instead she uses images either to bolster the meaning of the phrases she appropriates or to undermine their assertions. Images become the cipher through which to read the texts, indicative of Spero’s attitude towards their claims. The most notable example of this is panel eight which recounts the experiences of women who have suffered torture at the hands of brutal regimes. Here there is an absolute absence of image; text is left to communicate directly, the truth of these accounts unquestioned and unmediated by Spero’s figures. By remaining in the realm of suggestion through images that refer and texts that are marked, Spero can propose a revolutionary future without having to assert her vision on to her viewer. This is further elucidated by looking to the sections of Notes in Time on Women that are included as evidence of patriarchy’s oppressive realities. From panel seven to panel ten Spero draws on extracts from a variety of sources to help corroborate her statements and radicalise her spectator. Selecting examples of discrimination and subjugation from across culture, politics and society, she puts forward a determined argument against the crimes of patriarchy. Panel seven finds evidence of the pernicious exclusion of women from the workplace, using found source materials to paint a picture of discrimination that works against



‘Then art will change. This is the future’

women from students to professionals. In this panel, the way in which Spero undermines those texts through their interaction with images is manifest. At the far right of the support are extracts from two letters written between John Adams, second president of the United States, and his wife Abigail. Abigail Adams’s letter reads, ‘That your sex are naturally tyrannical is a truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute.’ John Adams’s reply reads ‘depend upon it, we know better than to repeal our masculine systems’. Underneath this section stands a collaged female figure who is naked and looks as though she is in the process of dancing, with one leg kicked up into the air and her back arched. This figure is the first across the entire work to face the viewer straight on; her arms are aloft, seeming to hold up the extract like a scorecard. It is as if she is directly presenting the viewer with evidence of patriarchy’s insidious and enduring dominion over women. Connecting immediately with the (female) viewer, she confronts us with men’s awareness of their tyrannical crimes and their reluctance to surrender control. The collaged figure seems to be imploring us to take on the lessons provided throughout history; she and the other figures act as our guides, candidly communicating with the viewer in an imaging that implies an awareness of, and a dialogue with, the spectator. Spero includes text as a form of evidence; in every inclusion text stands as a proposition, an unquestioned artefact of an attitude, historical document or fact. To this Spero responds, either by manipulating its materiality to undermine or bolster its implications, or by dispatching her female figures to judge the worth of its claims. Her transcription of a condescending advertisement for Cosmopolitan magazine on panel seven serves as an example. It reads: I sometimes think men are a little like apartments _ there s [sic] a catch to each of them. Should a man be a total pussycat _ angel who never looks at another woman, he may also be just a tiny bit lacking in ambition, but if he s a tycoon whom other people seek out, that man may just ignore you at parties. etc. etc. etc. … despite flaws, a man is what makes life worth getting up for in the morning … he adds the dazzle, the drama, the warmth to your life … I guess you could say I’m that cosmopolitan girl.

The top half of a female figure which sits atop a nearby statement looks towards this text, posed in a way that implies that she is unimpressed by its triviality; she leans on her elbow and looks bemusedly in its direction. The hackneyed version of the female voice as filtered through patriarchy is treated with the same disdain that Spero shows for male-authored misogynistic tracts.51 Interestingly, this text is bordered with typewritten ‘u’s and ‘o’s typed in such a way as to resemble tiny, flaccid phalluses; the semantic implication of the text is undermined entirely in the symbolic translation. Foremost, Notes in Time on Women is a piece with an ideological mission; with its extended consideration of women, it seeks to make ‘Woman the protagonist’, to reimagine women ‘as liberated, even if I know this isn’t really the case’.52 In this way, though Spero’s rhetorical strategy is not straightforwardly

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declarative as might be seen in the more prototypical manifestos that form the historical avant-gardes of Futurism, Dada and Constructivism, it maintains a claim to an authoritative interpretation of perceived socio-political inequality which she explicitly articulates, manipulating her sources where needed in order to drive home her sense of deep and unsustainable injustice. Against this Spero pictures female independence, where women can be autonomous, fertile and creative, as a revolutionary force. That this work is not just created to communicate, but to convince, is summed up by Spero in a 1987 interview in which she states: ‘The message has to get through! There are messages that are imperative.’53 Seeing this work as a manifesto places it within a tradition of avant-garde rhetoric that is marked by its interaction with feminism and visual arts practice. Use of the manifesto form for second-wave feminist purposes is by no means unique, but Spero posits an alternative version, ditching the masculinist baggage and hiding in plain sight.54 By bringing her argument into a visual way of making, she can avoid associations with the misogynistic inheritance of the manifesto form and find new ways to convince.55 The potential for this version of an imagetext, one which translates a literary mode into a visual one, is to maintain the connection to earlier examples of artistic revolutionary zeal. Conjuring a politics inscribed in art, sincerely and doggedly pursued in search of a better world, the conversion to the imagetext elides the inevitable weight of the form’s connection to patriarchy: after all, Marinetti makes part of his programme ‘scorn for woman’.56 Her word and image combinations rewrite history, persuading the viewers, calling them in, shocking them with its version of history and asking them to sympathise with its claims. Using the rhetorical power of the manifesto, its sincerity and bombast, Spero manipulates this potent form to make it barely visible, and in so doing devises a feminist mode of practice that transmits the urgency and injustice felt by Spero on a scroll that pictures and inspires the revolutionary instant.

Notes   1 For an explanation of the use of this term, see the Introduction to this volume.   2 W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 109–13.   3 Ibid., p. 110.   4 Christopher Lyon, Nancy Spero: The Work (London: Prestel, 2010), p. 46.   5 For more details about Spero’s involvement in feminist activist groups, see Amy Ingrid Schlegel, ‘Codex Spero: Feminist Art and Activist Practices in New York since the Late 1960s’, PhD thesis, Columbia University, 1997.  6 In a 1985 interview, Spero neatly sums up this sentiment, saying ‘My format and materials are unconventional. Art on paper is ephemeral. It’s light and easily destroyed … There, you guys can splat on your big canvases, but I’m over here doing this fragile thing  – with bite.’ See Nancy Spero, Nicole Jolicoeur and Nell Tenhaaf,



‘Then art will change. This is the future’

‘Defying the Death Machine’, Parachute, 39 (June–August 1985), 50–5, quoted in Roel Arkesteijn (ed.), Codex Spero: Nancy Spero Selected Writings and Interviews 1950–2008 (Amsterdam: Roma Publication, 2008), p. 15.   7 Spero first began making scrolls with her 1971–72 work Codex Artaud. Inspired by Egyptian hieroglyphics, Spero talks of this as a means to develop her work spatially and to maintain the fragility of her works on paper. See Lyon, Nancy Spero, p. 136.   8 Ibid., p. 195.   9 Schlegel, for example, describes Notes in Time on Women as an ‘attempt … to make visible the invisible: by exposing clandestine contemporary torture practices and ancient creation myths predicated on the torture of women; and by assembling a litany of quotations and schematic, printed figures that reveal the obscured presence and eclipsed accomplishments of women throughout time and from various cultures’. Schlegel, ‘Codex Spero’, p. 221. Susan Harris describes Spero’s oeuvre as ‘speak[ing] with a truth-telling urgency about the past and wisdom regarding the future’. Susan Harris, ‘Nancy Spero: Of Joy and Despair’, in Jon Bird and Susan Harris, The Third Hiroshima Art Prize: Leon Golub and Nancy Spero, exh. cat. (Hiroshima: Hiroshima Museum of Contemporary Art, 1996), p. 31. Deborah Frizzell states: ‘In order to reveal the historical continuum of politically repressive strategies underlying the enduring patriarchal mythologies, Spero methodically researched history and ancient mythology.’ Deborah Frizzell, ‘Nancy Spero’s Installations and Institutional Incursions, 1987–2001: Dialogues Within the Museum, and Elsewhere’, PhD thesis, City University New York, 2004, p. 25. 10 Jon Bird, ‘Present Imperfect: Word and Image in Nancy Spero’s “Scrolls” of the 1970s’, in Jon Bird (ed.), Otherworlds (London: Reaktion Books, 2003), pp. 113–36. 11 See Jo Anna Isaak and Nancy Spero, ‘Jo Anna Isaak in conversation with Nancy Spero’, in Nancy Spero (London: Phaidon, 1996), pp. 23–4. 12 See Joanna Walker, Nancy Spero, Encounters (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). 13 Lyon, Nancy Spero, p. 213. 14 Isaak, ‘In Conversation’, p. 24. 15 Spero refers to ‘the woman artist’ to describe a subject position that she perceives as unique and against the masculinist artist. See ‘Feminist Manifesto’, in Arkesteijn (ed.), Codex Spero, p. 52. 16 Spero, ‘Alternate Sex Roles’ (1970), ‘The Liberation of Women’ (1971), ‘Feminist Manifesto’ (1970–71), ‘What is Feminist Art’ (c. 1973), ‘The Feminist Movement’ (1976), in Arkesteijn (ed.), Codex Spero, pp. 49–72. 17 The possibilities of a visual art manifesto are touched upon in scholarship but rarely expounded. Despite valued considerations of the literary manifesto, two of the most prominent scholars, Janet Lyon and Martin Puchner, only briefly discuss the possibilities of the visual art manifesto. See Martin Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), pp. 161–3, and Janet Lyon, Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern (New York: Cornell University Press, 1999), pp. 197–202. Mary-Ann Caws states that a case can be made for ‘the poem-manifesto, the paintingmanifesto, the aphorism-manifesto, the essay-manifesto’ but she fails to include examples of the painting-manifesto. See Mary-Ann Caws, Manifesto: A Century of Isms (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), p. xxix. 18 Spero claims a manifesto-like nature to the War Series, stating: ‘I decided I was going to make very quick manifestos, which expressed my anger and said something about

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Mixed messages violence, collusion, and power in a way that would shock the viewer.’ Quoted in Frizzell, ‘Nancy Spero’s Installations’, p. 86. Lyon briefly posits and then dismisses the possibility of Spero’s 1958 Homage to New York being seen as a manifesto. See Lyon, Nancy Spero, p. 40. In contrast, Benjamin Buchloh avers a connection to the manifesto form, reading Spero’s Codex Artaud as ‘a manifesto of countersublimation and counterenlightenment at the moment of Modernism’. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ‘Spero’s Other Traditions’, in Nancy Spero: Dissidances, exh. cat. (Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2008), pp. 83–4. 19 Spero’s activist and artistic practices are often discussed as though they are inherently linked. Bird, for example describes Spero’s work as ‘a practice which includes artworks, texts, public lectures, seminars, political activities with the women’s movement, the peace movement of the 1960s and 1970s and exhibitions connected with Artists Call’. See Jon Bird, ‘Nancy Spero: Inscribing Woman – Between the Lines’, in J. Bird and L. Tickner (eds), Nancy Spero, exh. cat. (London: ICA, 1987), p. 22. 20 Nancy Spero and Jeanne Siegel, ‘Woman as Protagonist’, Arts Magazine, 62 (September 1987), 10. 21 See Spero, Jolicoeur and Tenhaaf, ‘Defying the Death Machine’, pp. 50–5. 22 This drive is specific to Notes in Time on Women; Spero does not articulate a separatist stance elsewhere. 23 As Caws states, ‘the manifesto is like a simultanist poem: everything goes on at once, and on the same stage’. See Mary-Ann Caws, ‘Notes on a Manifesto Style: 1924 Fifty Years Later’, The Journal of General Education, 27.1 (1975), 88–90, 90. 24 Puchner sees the manifesto as being temporally bound to the anterior future, the ‘what will be’, stating that ‘the speech acts of the manifesto thus are launched in the anterior future, claiming that their authority will have been provided by the changes they themselves want to bring about’. Puchner, Poetry, p. 24. 25 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, ‘The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism’, in Marinetti’s Selected Writings, ed. and trans. R. Flint (London, 1971), pp. 39–44; reprinted in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (eds), Art in Theory 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Oxford: Wiley, 2003), p. 149. 26 Caws, ‘Notes’, p. 90. 27 Mitchell, Iconology, pp. 95–115. 28 Ibid., p. 99. 29 See Walker, Encounters, pp. 179–86. Spero describes this to Siegel: ‘They are like time lapses and sequences. And it’s space in which to move, to rest, and to go on.’ Siegel, ‘Woman as Protagonist’, p. 10. 30 Mitchell, Iconology, p. 100. Both Walker and Mignon Nixon discusses the hieroglyphic quality of Spero’s work. See Walker, Encounters, pp. 97–120; Nixon, ‘Book of Tongues’, in Dissidances, pp. 21–53. 31 See, for example, Judy Purdom, ‘Nancy Spero and Woman in Performance’, in Penny Florence and Nicola Foster (eds), Differential Aesthetics (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), p. 168. 32 Talking to Siegel, Spero states: ‘The reason for their extended format is that … I am trying to put down some kind of extended history, report, or ritual’. Siegel, ‘Woman as Protagonist’. 33 Isaak, ‘In Conversation’, p. 24. 34 Puchner describes the manifestary impulse to remake history as being the manifesto’s



‘Then art will change. This is the future’

use of ‘history as revolution’, a way in which the manifesto alludes to history in order not only to strengthen its claims, but also to create a sense that the change that it is advocating for is an inevitable consequence of the progress of history. See Puchner, Poetry, p. 21. 35 This quote is taken from Jacques Derrida, ‘The Question of Style’, in David B. Allison (ed.), New Nietzsche (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977), pp. 176–89. 36 Isaak, ‘In Conversation’, p. 28. 37 Christie McDonald and Jacques Derrida, ‘Interview: Choreographies: Jacques Derrida and Christie V. McDonald’, Diacritics, 12.2 (1982), 66–76. 38 Isaak, for example, claims it as a disruption of Derrida’s ‘virile illusion’, lumping this together with other ‘misogynistic texts’ against which she claims that the images make ‘real interventions’. Jo Anna Isaak, ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’, Notes in Time: Leon Golub and Nancy Spero (Baltimore, MD: University of Maryland, 1995), pp. 40–2. 39 Marshall Sahlins, ‘Culture as Protein and Profit’, New York Review of Books, 25.18 (1978), p. 239. 40 Spero copied this citation directly from the shortened citation that Sahlins provided with his article. 41 This is also the case in her interview with Isaak where she states that the passage is ‘from an ancient Aztec book’. Isaak, ‘In Conversation’, p. 23. 42 See Walker, Encounters, pp. 81–9; Jo Anna Isaak, ‘Nancy Spero: A Work in Comic Courage’, in Dominique Nahas (ed.), Nancy Spero: Works Since 1950 (Syracuse, NY: Everson Museum of Art, 1987), pp. 25–37. 43 Walker has spoken about this in relation to the very different methods employed by H.D. and Spero, stating that Spero ‘dipped in and out of her sources in a manner which completely disregarded their contextual identity and historical specificity’. Walker, Encounters, p. 98. She ascribes this to a critical distantiation that is a repeated trope of Spero’s oeuvre. See ibid., pp. 94–102. 44 Johanna Drucker, The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909–1923 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 95. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid., p. 97. 47 Ibid. 48 Mary Ann Doane, ‘Temporality, Storage, Legibility: Freud, Marey, and the Cinema’, Critical Inquiry, 22.2 (1996), 313–43, 325. 49 Spero states that ‘for me, the body is a symbol or hieroglyph, in a sense, an extension of language’. See Siegel, ‘Woman as Protagonist’, p. 12. 50 Lyon, Nancy Spero, p. 211. 51 For example, on panel ten Spero extracts a section from Alexander Argyros’s review of A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature by Leo Bersani. See Argyros, ‘The Blank Page of the Play’, Diacritics, 7.4 (1977), 12–19. Focusing on Bersani’s likening of art criticism to the penetration of ‘two still warm female corpses’, Spero again borders the extract with typewritten phallic marks, this time erect and pointing towards the text. 52 Quoted in Isaak, ‘Notes’, p. 33. 53 Siegel, ‘Woman as Protagonist’, p. 10. 54 Contemporaneous examples include Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto (London: Verso, 2004); Yvonne Rainer, ‘No Manifesto’, in Rainer, Feelings are Facts: A Life

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Mixed messages (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006); Valie EXPORT, ‘Women, Art: A Manifesto’ (1972), reproduced in Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (eds), Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 755–6. 55 Both Lyon and Puchner have written about this problematic, with Puchner highlighting that ‘feminist manifestos have to take into account this masculinist heritage, even and especially when they attempt to displace or co-opt it’. Puchner, ‘Manifesto = Theatre’, Theatre Journal, 54.3 (2002), 455. 56 Marinetti, ‘Founding and Manifesto’, p. 148.

Forms of potential: reading Lawrence Weiner Katie L. Price

Although since 1968 American conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner’s primary medium has been language, he prefers to call his works sculptures. Weiner’s preferred term implies that his works are three-dimensional, existing as physical objects in space. However, Weiner’s ‘Statement of Intent’, first published in January 1969 and structuring his artistic output ever since, complicates this notion of three-dimensionality. The statement asserts that his works need not be made by him, need not be authentic and, indeed, need not be made at all. While this statement links Weiner to conceptual art’s emphasis on ideas over material objects, this essay argues that Weiner’s works exist as forms of potential that require close attention to materiality and language. Weiner’s primary interest, I hope to show, concerns potentiality and the ways in which language can structure potential. Working in the medium of language allows Weiner to structure specific relationships that produce unexpected results, objects, meanings and significations. Weiner’s language sculptures – which take the form of statements, mathematical equations, street art, exhibitions, artists’ books and more – exist somewhere in between art and literature, form and formlessness, the second and third dimensions. Weiner’s language is not merely communicative, merely symbolic, or merely aesthetic, but rather prompts us – as viewers, readers and thinkers – to enter into a complex mode of meaning-making that encourages us to continually negotiate between perceptive and cognitive modalities.1 Weiner offers art historians and literary scholars a complex case study for thinking about how writers and artists formalise or aestheticise potential energy. By troubling the customary boundary distinctions between art and literature, Weiner offers us an opportunity to contemplate what form potentiality might take across disciplines. Reading Weiner allows us to reconcile the conceptual ideas that frame his works with the structural relationships that constitute his primary material, language. By staging conversations between representative works and international literary contexts, I hope to clarify Weiner’s use of ‘language and the materials referred to’ as a medium. Working in language, I assert, allows Weiner to structure potential. This essay understands potential in multiple ways: as an adjectival characteristic ‘having or showing the capacity to develop

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into something in the future’, as a physical property ‘that a body possesses by virtue of its position or state, but which is only manifested or released under changed conditions’, and also in its grammatical sense as a potential mood, as in its use in the subjunctive case.2 Weiner’s oeuvre represents a lifelong investigation of ‘potential’ by explicitly querying the relationship between possible futures, material realities and grammatical structures. In an attempt to reconcile these three trajectories – imaginative possibility, potential as a material property of objects, and the subjunctive mood – this essay stages conversations between representative works in Weiner’s oeuvre and various texts and literary movements with which they share formal affinities. I recognise that this methodology goes against the artist’s career-long insistence that his works be discussed within the discourse of sculpture, but nevertheless maintain that such a thought-experiment can prove useful for considering the aesthetic form of potential writ large. By examining how Weiner’s works intersect with questions of potentiality in literary contexts, we can see how they investigate the representation of potential in a material form; locating Weiner’s interest in potentiality offers us a way to consider his structuring of possibility. Furthermore, reading Weiner’s work in relation to literary texts that also concern themselves with material instances of potentiality allows us to theorise potentiality’s relationship to material across disciplines. Weiner’s work is an exemplary case study for this topic because of its demands that critics pay close attention to material realities while constantly thinking about future forms. Weiner is a key figure of conceptual art, which Sol LeWitt famously defined in 1967: In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.3

LeWitt’s description remains the best working definition of conceptual art, but Weiner does not quite meet these criteria. Indeed, Weiner claims, ‘I don’t understand the term “conceptual art” … I make art … It’s very realist art, since it deals with real materials and real relationships of human beings to those materials.’4 Weiner perhaps protests too much, for even though his ‘idea’ might not be a ‘machine that makes the art’, his works certainly participate in the dematerialisation of the art object that came to categorise a variety of artistic practices in the 1960s and beyond.5 We might better characterise Weiner’s ‘Statement of Intent’ as ‘a small (or large) machine made of words’ – to borrow William Carlos Williams’s definition of a poem – that provides the possibility for his works.6 This distinction is crucial, for while LeWitt’s statement places primacy with the idea, Weiner’s practice emphasises structured relationships within language. Weiner’s ‘Statement of Intent’ positions him as a conceptual artist because this initial ‘machine made out of words’ is the conceptual framework though which any of his works – fabricated or not – must pass through:



Forms of potential 1. THE ARTIST MAY CONSTRUCT THE WORK 2. THE WORK MAY BE FABRICATED 3. THE WORK NEED NOT BE BUILT EACH BEING EQUAL AND CONSISTENT WITH THE INTENT OF THE ARTIST THE DECISION AS TO CONDITION RESTS WITH THE RECEIVER UPON THE OCCASION OF RECEIVERSHIP.7

Weiner’s ‘Statement of Intent’, since its publication, has regulated his artistic practice. Artists and critics tend to laud the statement for three primary reasons. First, because of the way in which it firmly situates Weiner in the world of conceptual art, the statement represents the core idea that structures the rest of his artistic practice. Secondly, the statement is lauded for its ability to allow Weiner to largely escape the monetary realities of the art world and its associated cult of celebrity.8 In contrast to an artist like Banksy, the secretive British street artist who must guard his/her brand against imitators, Weiner sanctions the fabrication of ‘a Weiner’ by anyone or no one, radically democratising his artistic practice. Thirdly, the statement establishes a radical new relationship between producer and consumer. I concur that these aspects of Weiner’s work make him a radical artist. However, Weiner defies conceptual art conventions by displaying and creating his works in exhibitions, public spaces and books with a keen eye for their aesthetic qualities; Weiner’s statements do not simply remain in the realm of ideas, but rather exist as aestheticised structural relations in language. While interviews and critical discussions of Weiner’s work often focus on the complex relationship between the written text and any given execution of that work,9 Weiner’s interest in language, specifically within discourses of reading and book-making, garners less attention. Weiner notes, ‘Titles are my work’,10 and frequently claims ‘all works are composed of the language and the materials referred to’.11 Because Weiner works primarily in language, he acknowledges the crucial role that reading has in his work: ‘the work gains its structural qualities by being read, not by being written’.12 The idea that a reader can activate the structural qualities in language is something that Language writing has explored at length. The works published in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine, edited by Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein from 1978–81, imagined a radical relationship between producer and consumer that has launched decades of avant-garde poetry.13 Although Weiner and the Language poets differ widely from an aesthetic standpoint, their formal and theoretical affinities prompt a comparison, especially considering the third proclamation in Weiner’s ‘Statement of Intent’, that the works are complete even if they remain in language. Conceptual art’s interest in language has been present ever since its inception. Joseph Kosuth’s iconic One and Three Chairs (1965) relies on a printed definition of ‘chair’ to indicate to a viewer that the idea of a chair is primary to the work, as opposed to any singular, material chair. The piece consists of an actual chair, a picture of that chair and a dictionary definition of a chair. The piece’s effectiveness lies in the blandness of the photo, the ordinariness of the chair and the unassuming typography of the definition. The three chairs are not exceptional, and do not

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8.1  Page from the exhibition publication, Lawrence Weiner: Displacement, 4 April 1991–2 February 1992. Copyright © 2015 Lawrence Weiner / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of Dia Art Foundation, New York. Photograph by Oren Slor

highlight their status as aesthetic objects as such, prompting a viewer/reader to contemplate what the ‘one chair’ of the title might be, namely the idea of chair. While Kosuth’s work keeps everyday objects and text ordinary to transcend the material world for one of ideas, Weiner’s works often treat words and linguistic symbols with the aesthetic eye of a concrete poet.14 Conceptual art has often come under criticism for treating language as a transparent vehicle for ideas. Liz Kotz recognises the ‘paradox’ of Weiner’s work in that his language has a ‘communicative function while nonetheless remaining “sculpture”’.15 Kotz argues that Weiner’s work relies heavily on the communicative function of language: While Kosuth’s concern is to extricate his production from any specific, ‘morphological’ definition of art, Weiner targets the underlying structures of meaning production. … Weiner’s ‘statements’ programmatically accept the inherent



Forms of potential ‘abstraction’ of language, the relative instability of reference, and the capacity of utterances to ‘signify’ differently in each act of enunciation.16

While I take Kotz’s point, I disagree that Weiner uses language to communicate; rather, his statements reveal an interest in how linguistic relationships house potential. The statements are less about the ‘instability of the reference’ or the ‘capacity of utterances to “signify” differently’ than the multiple material relations that can exist under the sign of a statement. Kotz quotes Weiner declaring ‘if the information is conveyed, then the piece exists’, suggesting that ‘conveyed information’ is about communication.17 I would question the status of ‘information’ in Weiner’s quote; while Kotz reads this as a communicative function, I contend that the structural relationship in the language itself constitutes the ‘information’ of the piece. Eve Meltzer offers further insight into how conceptual artists of the 1960s and 1970s were approaching ‘information’ in relation to visual and verbal registers. In ‘The Dream of the Information World’, Meltzer argues that Sol LeWitt’s drawings emerged from a culture intrigued by structures – from Jean Piaget’s claim that structures exist only through ‘the interplay of its transformation laws’ to structural linguists’ view that words mean only in relation to what they don’t mean. Meltzer reads LeWitt’s grids as an expression of a larger cultural milieu that ‘renounces the visual and, in its place, proposes that there is a deeper, structural logic governing its form’.18 I read Weiner as involved in this new international interest in information described by Meltzer and focused around the 1970 Information show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, of which Weiner was a part. As Meltzer’s study shows, the central theme of the show was not information as such, but rather questioning how artists might display, account for and reveal structural systems. Weiner’s contribution was his exploration of sculptural relationships in language that can produce different material results. His work was and is an inquiry into the aesthetic and linguistic forms that allow for potential. Weiner’s language does not simply communicate and repeat, as Kotz implies, but rather invests in particular types of relationships in language that have the potential to become, or describe, or initiate, material relations in the real world. As Brigit Pelzer argues, Weiner’s statements belie strict adherence to conceptual art because ‘Weiner’s statements/sculptures attest to their status as singular objects’.19 It is precisely the individual statement/sculpture, and the potential it holds as a unique object, not the idea behind it, that constitutes Weiner’s contribution to art and literature. In an interview, Benjamin Buchloh confronts Weiner with the notion that the function of language in his work allies him with Jasper Johns and Cy Twombly’s ‘emphasis on language within the conception of painting’ used ‘to criticize Modernism’s foundational definition of an exclusive visuality’.20 Weiner hesitates to admit to a linguistic turn, but concedes that his work shares affinities with Leo Steinberg’s reading of Johns’s work in Other Criteria,21 where he argues that works such as Target with Four Faces function in that they conflate ‘here’ and ‘there’ in one material object.22 Weiner’s uneasiness with being

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associated with conceptual art or a linguistic turn indexes the complexity that enables his work to remain so fascinating. Weiner represents a kind of conceptual artist who treats statements as unique concrete objects of conceptual possibility. This ability of language to materially contain possibility has been a primary concern of contemporary experimental writing, and particularly experimental poetry, from the Language writing of the 1970s and 1980s to the conceptual writing of the 1990s and early 2000s. Statements, Weiner’s first and most widely discussed early artists’ book, was published in 1968. Alexander Alberro succinctly describes the book: Published in December 1968 in an edition of 1,025, Statements consisted of descriptions of twenty-four works. Each statement, typeset in small lowercase letters in Royal Typewriter face, appears halfway down the face of each right-hand page. There are no illustrations and no catalogue numbers. Rather, the works are divided equally into two groups of twelve statements, one labeled ‘general statements’ and the other ‘specific statements.’23

Although all twenty-four statements are written in the past tense, Weiner and others wanting to exhibit the work in a non-textual form can treat the descriptions as imperatives. While the book’s design might seem to resist a reading of its aesthetic qualities, Weiner insists the design was just as complex as those of his mature artists’ books.24 As Pelzer notes, most of the statements avoid ‘the propositional form of an assertion or declaration’; ‘a state of things is recorded, but without being fixed’.25 Written in the past tense, these statements could easily read as Imagist poems. Weiner’s ‘A TWO INCH WIDE ONE FOOT DEEP TRENCH CUT ACROSS A STANDARD ONE CAR DRIVEWAY’ oddly echoes the syntax of the last three stanzas of William Carlos Williams’s most anthologised poem: ‘a red wheel / barrow // glazed with rain / water // beside the white / chickens’.26 Both statements begin with an indefinite article and then become increasingly specific. The distinction between Imagist poetry and conceptual sculpture fades when we focus on the formal properties of the language. Both seem to describe something that had been, yet both also give us language (‘a red wheelbarrow’ or ‘a trench’) that could describe any number of particular places. Weiner’s statement and Williams’s poem both occupy the space between the particular and the general. ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ positions a red wheelbarrow ‘beside the white chickens’, and though Weiner’s statement avoids the definite article, the specificity of the statement as a whole renders it easily identifiable as ‘a Weiner’. Statements makes explicit Weiner’s interest in the space between the abstract and the precise by grouping the twenty-four statements within the book into two classifications: general and specific. Despite the categorisation, however, all of the statements exist somewhere in between the general and the specific, the descriptive and the prescriptive. For example, the ‘specific’ ‘ONE AEROSOL CAN OF ENAMEL SPRAYED TO CONCLUSION DIRECTLY UPON THE FLOOR’ contrasts the ‘general’ ‘AN AMOUNT OF PAINT POURED DIRECTLY UPON THE FLOOR AND ALLOWED TO DRY’. The ‘specific’ statement limits itself



Forms of potential

by number – ‘one aerosol can’ – while the ‘general’ allows the amount to remain a­ rbitrary – ‘an amount of paint’. Both statements, however, are insistently nonspecific; the repeated phrase ‘directly upon the floor’ suggests a future action. Using the definite article at the end of these statements formalises the shift from general to specific that occurs whenever one of Weiner’s statements is realised. Weiner’s statements thus investigate the status of language itself, and query the relationship to the material world and its representation in language. Weiner himself predicts, however, that ‘first you might see’ any one of his statements ‘as a poem, but with the correct information, you would accept it as it is intended’.27 Weiner ‘intends’ that a reader not take his statements as mere statements; or, as he states: ‘I am interested in what the words mean. I am not interested in the fact that they are words.’28 Although this might seem to suggest an interest in language for its communicative function – an argument Kotz makes – I contend that Weiner is interested in what ‘the words mean’ in a more material sense; he is interested in the potential of what those words could describe. We might gloss Weiner’s explanation as an insistence that he is not interested in the materiality of language, but rather in the structural relationships made possible in language. Language provides Weiner with a way to precisely describe relations that can act as the impetus for future works that are not predetermined. Language, as a medium, allows Weiner to sculpt potential meanings, potential actualities; his statements activate the subordinate clause while remaining themselves material objects. Realisations occur when Weiner or any other artist produces a work that could accurately be described by the statement. The prominent display of ‘$1.95’ in the lower right-hand corner of the cover situates the text within an economy of cheap magazines. This conscientiously inexpensive and unassuming design stands in opposition to the inflated market of the New York art scene of the time. As Joan Lyons remarks, in the 1960s and 1970s ‘inexpensive, disposable editions were one manifestation of the dematerialization of the art object and the new emphasis on process’.29 Furthermore, the design echoes that of instruction manuals, implying that the book be put to use as opposed to being read passively. To use the same example as above, one need only move ‘cut’ to the beginning of the statement to change the description into an imperative: ‘cut a two inch wide one foot deep trench across a standard one car driveway’. With each of Weiner’s statements, the work proliferates: (1) as the original statements, printed in books, displayed in exhibitions, as public installations; (2) as instructions to produce a work that fits that very description; and (3) as a work that could be accurately described by the original statement.30 This implied imperative that would inevitably lead one back to the original statement functions as a structural sign of past, present and future, potential and description. Weiner’s works defy media specificity, temporal fixity and spatial stability. This proliferation of possible iterations, coupled with the inevitable return to language and an artistic culture that was becoming more accepting of dematerialised artworks, leads Weiner to admit that ‘it was possible just to leave it in language’.31 Language allows Weiner to explore potential outside of media specificity – potential as such. Statements are complete as statements

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– sufficient to remain in language – so long as they have the potential energy to materialise into something unexpected, yet strictly structured. The topic of potential in literature has a long and international history. The primarily French collective Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (Oulipo) has, more than any other group, systematically investigated the issues surrounding works of potential. Raymond Queneau and François Li Lionnais founded Oulipo – l­ iterally translated as ‘workshop of potential literature’ – in 1960 as a subcommittee of the Collège de ’Pataphysique, launched just twelve years earlier. The Collège was formed to continue the exploration of ’pataphysics, proto-Dadaist Alfred Jarry’s coinage for ‘the science of imaginary solutions’.32 Marcel Duchamp was famously a member of the Collège, as were such artists as Joan Miró, Boris Vian and Man Ray. The Oulipo consisted of mathematicians, writers and pataphysicians whose primary concern has been to research (anoulipism) and create (synthoulipism) forms and constraints with which literature has been or could be written. Complex theoretical issues surround potential literature. Even among members of the Oulipo, both past and present, disagreements abound on how precisely these works should be executed and for what purpose. For example, some argue that Oulipians should focus on the creation of constraints for producing literature while others insist on the necessity to illustrate – or even better, exhaust – any given constraint. Based on Weiner’s ‘Statement of Intent’, we may place him among the first group because the enactment of any given statement is secondary to the sculpting of that statement. Regardless of which side of Oulipian debates Weiner falls on, however, his works could easily be classified as what the Oulipo defines as ‘recurrent literature’: We will thus classify under the heading of ‘recurrent literature’ any text that contains, explicitly or implicitly, generative rules that invite the reader (or the teller, or the singer) to pursue the production of the text to infinity (or until the exhaustion of interest or attention).33

Although Weiner’s statements typically do not result in more text, he certainly ‘invite[s] the reader to pursue the production of the text to infinity’. Each of Weiner’s statements/sculptures should be seen as language that takes three forms at once – the statement itself, instructions for producing what the statement describes, and any work that could be described by that statement. Language is sculpture precisely because it already sets up the structural relations that have, do, or will occur in the world; language can describe a series of actions and relations that have corollaries in the material world. Weiner would never write ‘A CAN OF PAINT POURED ON THE FLOOR ON JANUARY 18, 1996’, for example, because the statement would lose both its potential to be realised again and its reactive capacity to describe pre-existent material relations. The statement itself could be repeated, reprinted and recontextualised, but the structured potential of its form would be lost. The Oulipo and Weiner thus share the same goal: to create modes of artistic production that are based on pre-existing constraints or criteria, but not determined by them. Like Oulipian constraints, Weiner’s works structure



Forms of potential

potential in a way that allows for a clinamen – a slight and unexpected deviation that facilitates creation.34 Weiner’s statements might be endlessly repeatable, but each realisation has a singular, unexpected outcome. In 1968 Weiner conceived of and carried out ‘A WALL CRATERED BY A SINGLE SHOTGUN BLAST’ for the first time. He later realised the work at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2007 as part of his retrospective exhibition As Far As The Eye Can See. For the piece, Weiner, like a good pataphysician, positioned himself at an exact, predetermined distance from the wall and shot, creating the work his text previously described. The result was one large hole in the wall surrounded by a number of smaller holes. This work, which could be turned back into language through description, represents just one iteration of the text which could be enacted an infinite amount of times and would result in a different outcome every time. The work marks an event in which nothing was left to chance, and yet the outcome happened ‘by chance’. As Weiner writes, ‘If the piece is built it constitutes not how the piece looks but only how it could look.’35 Although Weiner’s work could be repeated an infinite number of times, the result can never be predicted. Weiner’s interest in experiments that, when executed, produce idiosyncratic or anomalous results links his works to a longer history of pataphysical inquiry in the arts.36 In an American context, at least since the 1960s artists have been participating in what Craig Dworkin terms ‘applied ’pataphysics’. Applied pataphysicians engage in ‘the constructing of useless reference tools, the proposing of imaginary solutions, and the cataloguing of exceptions’.37 Weiner can be understood as an applied pataphysician in that each particular manifestation of ‘A WALL CRATERED BY A SINGLE SHOTGUN BLAST’ gives us more information – albeit useless information – about walls cratered by single shotgun blasts. Conversely, each realisation clarifies the potential of the phrase itself by showing us one material example of what the statement could signify. Weiner’s work participates in pataphysical inquiry through creative works that conflate systematicity with chance, absurdity with precision. While science creates knowledge by being able to replicate expected results, Weiner’s work catalogues unexpected outcomes. It relies on the tools of mathematics and science – specific, measurable units – but in a way that humorously questions the conflation of measurability and predictability with value. Further exploring these ideas, Weiner often presents us with ‘imaginary problems’ as opposed to ‘imaginary solutions’. While Oulipians investigate how mathematics can be used to help writers endlessly generate literature, Weiner’s work often places language within a mathematical equation, as in his Statement 687 from 1991. While Oulipians often subject language to mathematical permutations – as in their most famous constraint, S+7 or N+7, in which the seventh noun in any text can be replaced with the seventh noun that follows it in a dictionary – Weiner has maintained an interest in placing language within mathematical equations as a particular kind of language game (see figure 8.2). In some sense, Weiner has presented receivers with language games ever since 1969, when his ‘Statement of Intent’ was set out

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8.2  Page from the exhibition publication, Lawrence Weiner: Displacement, 4 April 1991–2 February 1992. Copyright © 2015 Lawrence Weiner / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of Dia Art Foundation, New York. Photograph by Oren Slor

as the rules by which his statements/sculptures operated. These language games query the relationship between language and art, and also test the limits of language as a structuring medium for potential. Statement 687, depending on how we interpret the distinguishing line, reads as a problem to be solved or as a problem that has already been solved. Although this particular statement/sculpture/mathematical problem remains a mystery in its potential execution, we can nevertheless examine the implications of the form itself. The fact that Weiner places individual words and phrases into mathematical relationships encourages us to imagine that language shares a structural logic with mathematics. The statement – presented in the form of a problem – remains unanswerable. Furthermore, the juxtaposition of the ampersand and the plus sign (both recurring symbols in Weiner’s oeuvre) illustrates the conflation of language and maths and reinforces the statement’s preoccupation with formal relations. Weiner constantly plays with the connections between mathematical



Forms of potential

relations and grammar in ways that challenge a reader/viewer. Particularly after 1971, Weiner begins to make frequent use of punctuation marks, and later mathematical symbols, but ‘never commas, question marks, or exclamation points’.38 As Wittgenstein states: ‘For doubt can only exist where there is a question; a question only where there is an answer, and this only where something can be said.’39 Weiner’s work discovers the use of statements, and explores their meaning through use. Despite his insistence that he is not a poet, his works fit the description of poetic writing offered by Wittengenstein, which Marjorie Perloff describes as ‘the production of short units – aphorisms, fragments, gnomic sentences – that undergo repeated correction, contradiction, and specifically recontextualization’.40 Weiner’s works simultaneously reveal language games already in play and make possible new language games that expand our notion of language and the literary. They become, then, a poetic investigation into the limits of language. To me, Weiner’s poetics are clear, even if he resists categorisation as a poet; his statements are queries into the possibilities of language. As Wittgenstein states, ‘The limit [of thinking, to the expression of thoughts] can, therefore, only be drawn in language and what lies on the other side of the limit will be simply nonsense.’41 By creating a unique form in which to view language, and particularly the statement as such, Weiner gives one occasion to investigate the limits of thinking, and in a way that could be tested through realisation. To clarify, let us return to ‘A WALL CRATERED BY A SINGLE SHOTGUN BLAST’. Every wall that might be accurately described by this statement looks different depending on a number of factors – the type of gun used, the size and type of the bullet,42 the range of the shooter and angle of the gun. We might imagine a pataphysical catalogue of this same experiment conducted ten, twenty or a thousand times. Eventually, we might realise that we have exhausted the possible outcomes, offering us a comprehensive material account of the original statement. Weiner explores the notion of exhausting all possible linguistic relations in specific relation to colour in And/Or: Green as Well as Blue as Well as Red (1972). Most pages contain just one line, positioned at the top or bottom of the page, leaving the middle blank. There are three exceptions where text occurs in the middle of the page, one of which occurs in Section 7, titled ‘Not less nor more’: 7. NOT MORE GREEN NOR LESS GREEN NOT MORE RED NOR LESS RED NOT MORE BLUE NOR LESS BLUE

Although the book’s title suggests an exploration of ‘and/or’, here we see an investigation into description through negation in an attempt to exhaustively catalogue relationships of colour in language. And/Or exemplifies the complex relationships that Weiner builds between language and material, and as such holds interest for literary scholars. For example, the book reveals that Weiner considers colour a material43 in its attempt to explore the relationship between different weights or saturations of colour. The Canadian conceptual writer Darren Wershler’s

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The Tapeworm Foundry, which consists of a list of potential ideas separated by ‘andor’, acts as a compelling intertext: andor stuff mailboxes with thousands of packages containing heavy objects such as ingots addressed to various arts institutions but bearing as return addresses the homes of various critics or judges andor exorcise the ghost of content andor run out of things on which to write andor construct a fiftyfoottall lawn dart and then install it in the centre of the spiral jetty andor put labels under the hygrometers in galleries or museums and then identify the meters as conceptual art sculptures.44

The proliferation of ideas in Wershler’s text indicates a shift in values from early conceptual projects to later ones, from conceptual art to conceptual writing. Wershler shares a Whitmanian, democratic impulse with Weiner by linking a series of actions, each with their own potential, in a way that does not grant one possibility more value than any other. Through a proliferation of statements, both Weiner and Wershler playfully critique their own conceptual practices through comic excessiveness. Despite Weiner’s insistence throughout his career that he is not a poet, he has, since the beginning of his conceptual work, been interested in the book as a medium. While his 1968 Statements was designed to look like a cheap instruction manual, his 1991 Displacement functions somewhere in between an exhibition catalogue and an artist’s book. From 4 April 1991 to 2 February 1992 the Dia Center for the Arts in Chelsea, NY, housed a Weiner exhibition entitled Displacement. In 1991, along with the exhibition, the Dia Center published a book of the same title. The book includes gallery plans, sketches for book design and photographs of the installation. The book was printed prior to the exhibition and made available to visitors. Gary Garrels notes, ‘Lawrence Weiner has taken as his site for presentation of new work these two cross points of time and space – the book and the room.’45 This working in between the exhibition space and the book enacts the title of the exhibition. This proliferation of displacements further indicates Weiner’s interest in potentiality as a structure and a form: Rather than attempting to establish an order of relationships as in the laws of physics … [Weiner] eludes a static set of conditions, setting out procedures and possible relationships so that physical and mental states intersect. … Weiner’s work invokes the freedom of the imagination, without arbitrariness, within a carefully structured set of relationships, both internally and externally. … We are extended an invitation to the pleasures of both precision and play.46

In a gesture of radical equivalence à la Jarry’s livres pairs, the simultaneous exhibition and book publication work to dismantle the primacy of the exhibition space and any particular artwork within that space. Within the exhibition was a work by Weiner, also entitled Displacement. The work takes the form on an off-white wall on which a black rectangle is filled in with metallic silver paint until the unpainted portion of the wall reads ‘DISPLACEMENT’. A photo of this piece appears in the book. DISPLACEMENT is one of many one-word statements made by Weiner. These one-word works



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are Weiner’s most general, thus housing almost limitless potential. Like works such as Raymond Queneau’s Le Chiendent, cited by the Oulipo as their favourite example of a text in which the first and last sentences are identical,47 many of Weiner’s works continually return to their starting point and beg to be performed again. According to Weiner’s ‘Statement of Intent’, so long as a realisation results from the potential sculpted in the original statement, the results are valid. The structure, the arrangement of materials in space, and the relationship as outlined by any respective statement remain the same; any individual outcome is valid. In other words, any permutation of the statement, as a form, is a work of the s­ tatement – and it doesn’t matter which came first. DISPLACEMENT signifies the exhibition, individual artworks, the book/catalogue and anything that has previously been displaced. Nevertheless, Weiner’s sketches for installations and book design reveal his meticulous attention to placement. Books – portable objects which exist in the public and private spheres, and are read as well as used (cookbooks, instruction manuals, etc.) – seem the ideal media for Weiner to combine his interest in materiality and potentiality. Weiner has always worked at the intersection of art and language arts, the conceptual and the material, the visual and the linguistic. The book offers Weiner a way for

8.3  Page from the exhibition publication, Lawrence Weiner: Displacement, 4 April 1991–2 February 1992. Copyright © 2015 Lawrence Weiner / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of Dia Art Foundation, New York. Photograph by Oren Slor

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this language to become at once sculptural – a three-dimensional object – and prescriptive, as instructions for potential works. As a maker of artists’ books, Weiner solidifies his relationship to avant-garde and experimental activities that have been merging art and literature at least since the 1960s. As Johanna Drucker explains, in the late 1940s and into the 1950s American and European artists began to explore the book as an art form.48 While Abstract Expressionists in the 1950s sought to establish New York as an alternative to the European art world, conceptual artists of the 1960s saw the potential to escape what had become an insular art scene through internationalisation. By the 1960s we see artists such as Weiner combining these American and European explorations of the book with New York Fluxus experimentations with art as event. Bringing together the care of a book artist with conceptual and performative practices productively allows Weiner to investigate potentiality and materiality that transcends any particular medium. As these works strategically combine the literary, the artistic and the conceptual, so too must we, as critics, adapt a similarly interdisciplinary and complex approach to encountering these texts.

Notes   1 Sarah Garland’s chapter in this volume offers a compelling argument and case study for how art can encourage a reader/viewer to enter these complex modalities of meaning-making not only through vision and thought, but also through tactile negotiations, affects and bodily reactions. Weiner, Arakawa and Gins are just a few examples of a widespread trend within post-war American art and literature that was concerned with renegotiating the relationship between producer and consumer.  2 ‘Potential’, Oxford English Dictionary online (accessed 11 February 2015).   3 Sol LeWitt, ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’, Artforum (June 1967), 79.   4 Birgit Pelzer, ‘Dissociated Objects: The Statements/Sculptures of Lawrence Weiner’, trans. John Goodman, October, 90 (Autumn 1999), 76–108, 79.   5 For a useful catalogue of artists interested in dematerialisation, see Lucy R. Lippard’s Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (London: Studio Vista, 1973).   6 William Carlos Williams, ‘Author’s Introduction (The Wedge)’, from Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams (New York: New Directions, 1954), p. 256. See also the Introduction and Envoi chapters in this volume.   7 Lawrence Weiner, ‘Statement of Intent’, January 5–31, 1969, exh. cat. (New York: Seth Siegelaub, 1969).   8 Weiner’s ability to circumnavigate the art world was made possible largely through his work with Seth Siegelaub. Siegelaub helped to create alternatives to art world economies based on commodity fetishisation and insider politics. He worked to help artists show work outside of gallery spaces, create books that were art instead of about art, and participate in alternative economies that circulated conceptual art outside of normal institutions and geographic spaces.  9 See, for example, Pelzer, ‘Dissociated Objects’, and David Batchelor, ‘MANY



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COLORED OBJECTS PLACED SIDE BY SIDE TO FORM A ROW OF MANY COLORED OBJECTS’, in Alexander Alberro et al., Lawrence Weiner (London: Phaidon, 1998), n.p. 10 Quoted in Pelzer, ‘Dissociated Objects’, 86. 11 Lawrence Weiner, Displacement (New York: Dia Center for the Arts, 1991), n.p. 12 Alberro et al., Lawrence Weiner, p. 28. 13 For an electronic archive that includes facsimiles of every issue of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E as well as a collection of language-centred poetries, see www.eclipsearchive.org (accessed 25 January 2015). 14 For a further discussion of Weiner’s place between conceptual art and concrete poetry, see Neil Powell, ‘Concrete Poetry and Conceptual Art: A Spectre at the Feast?’, www. ubu.com/papers/powell.html (accessed 25 January 2015). 15 Liz Kotz, ‘Language between Performance and Photography’, October, 111 (Winter 2005), 17. 16 Ibid., 18–21. 17 Ibid., 18. 18 Eve Meltzer, Systems We Have Loved: Conceptual Art, Affect, and the Antihumanist Turn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), p. 33. 19 Pelzer, ‘Dissociated Objects’, 108. 20 Alberro et al., Lawrence Weiner, p. 10. 21 Ibid., p. 10. 22 Leo Steinberg, ‘Contemporary Art and the Plight of its Public’, in Steinberg, Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2007 [1972]), pp. 13–15. 23 Alberro et al., Lawrence Weiner, p. 47. 24 Ibid., p. 20. 25 Pelzer, ‘Dissociated Objects’, 76. 26 William Carlos Williams, The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, 1909–1939, ed. A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 1986), p. 224. 27 Alberro et al., Lawrence Weiner, p. 97. 28 Ibid., p. 19. 29 Joan Lyons, ‘Introduction and Acknowledgements’, in Joan Lyons (ed.), Artists’ Books: A Critical Anthology and Sourcebook (New York: Visual Studies Workshop and Peregine Press, 1984), p. 7. 30 At least one statement in Statements, however, was actualised before the statement was made. Weiner transformed his Cratering Piece (1960) into the written statement: ‘A FIELD CRATERED BY STRUCTURED SIMULTANEOUS TNT EXPLOSIONS’. The question seems obvious and yet remains unmentioned in the literature about Weiner: why turn an already existent work into a statement? This marks an intriguing reversal and points to a telling aspect of Weiner’s work: that a work conforming to the criteria he sets out in his statements may pre-exist that statement. Weiner’s move to retroactively turn a work into a statement reinforces my argument that what became important for Weiner after 1968 was allowing his work to remain in a state of potential. 31 Alberro et al., Lawrence Weiner, p. 11. 32 Alfred Jarry, Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician (Boston: Exact Exchange, 1996), pp. 30–1.

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Mixed messages 33 Warren F. Motte, Jr, Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive, 1986), p. 109. 34 For a useful overview of how modern and contemporary thinkers such as Harold Bloom, Alfred Jarry, Georges Perec and Michel Serres have reappropriated the term from Lucretius, see Warren F. Motte, Jr, ‘Clinamen Redux’, Comparative Literature Studies, 23.4 (1986), 263–81. 35 Alberro et al., Lawrence Weiner, p. 50. 36 Although pataphysics has received nominal recognition as the precursor to such major movements as Dadaism, Surrealism, the Theatre of the Absurd, the Oulipo and Fluxus, relatively little critical work has explored its deep influences on the arts. To help rectify this critical neglect, Michael R. Taylor and I are currently co-editing Pataphysics Then and Now, a collection of essays exploring pataphysics’ global and multidisciplinary influence. 37 Craig Dworkin, ‘The Imaginary Solution’, Contemporary Literature, 48.1 (2007), 29–60, 32. 38 Pelzer, ‘Dissociated Objects’, 94. 39 ‘Denn Zweifel kann nur bestehen, wo eine Frage besteht; eine Frage nur, wo eine Antwort besteht, und diese nur, wo etwas gesagt werden kann. (6.51).’ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C. K. Ogden (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1999), p. 107. 40 Marjorie Perloff, ‘Toward a Wittgensteinian Poetics’, Contemporary Literature, 33 (1992), 191–213, 192. 41 Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, p. 27. 42 For example, the realisation at the Whitney scattered a number of small BBs. 43 Weiner often describes colour as having density, weight and other properties that suggest he views it as a material. For example, in his notes for the Displacement exhibition, Weiner writes, ‘1. The density of the material (color) [nb: color appears in red ink] carries it from place to place (of) its own volition’, Displacement, n.p. 44 Darren Wershler, The Tapeworm Foundry (New York: Ubu Editions, 2002), p. 46. 45 Weiner, Displacement, n.p. 46 Ibid. 47 Motte, Oulipo, p. 109. 48 Johanna Drucker, The Century of Artists’ Books (New York: Granary Books, 2004 [1994]), p. 12.

Testimony by hand: Ann Hamilton’s myein Julie Phillips Brown

I was thinking about those things that are unspoken within our history. I felt like this was a millennial piece in some way. One hundred years ago, these court records of Reznikoff’s accounting – the cases that actually end up in court – were property disputes and many racial disputes. I was thinking about the inheritance of a democracy that actually is formed in slavery. How do we occupy that contradiction, and how do you do that in a public building?1

With her 1999 work myein, the American sculptor and installation artist Ann Hamilton joined the distinguished list of visual artists whose works have represented the United States at the Venice Biennale. Unlike her predecessors, however, whose exhibitions tended to collect previously completed works,2 Hamilton conceived of myein as a site-specific installation that would respond to the ‘givens’ of the United States Pavilion: its spatial relationships, its architectural aesthetics and its history. By the late 1990s such site-specific projects had become an important part of Hamilton’s working practice, refined through an elegant array of minimalist, process-intensive installations. Many of these projects contained key elements from myein in embryonic form, from the material texts of tropos (1994) and lineament (1994) to the animated wall structures of bounden (1997) and kaph (1997). As in these previous installations, myein transformed the pre-existing structure of the United States Pavilion through many accumulations of gesture and text-as-­material. Deceptively plain and minimalist, the installation’s abstract aesthetic belied its intricate co-implications of object, body, architecture and text, as well as its dense interweaving of the present with obscure histories, both individual and national. Hamilton’s exhibition in the Castello Gardens comprised three primary components: a 90-foot-long wall of glass and steel; a table with white, knotted cloths suspended from its surface, located in the forecourt; and the Pavilion itself, with its rotunda and four symmetrical galleries. Visitors to the Pavilion encountered myein in stages, moving from the outer limits of the wall, to the table in the forecourt, and finally, into the heart of the Pavilion. Once inside, visitors heard a low, ambient sound – a recording of the artist as she whispered the words of Lincoln’s ‘Second Inaugural Address’, letter by letter. Moving gradually from gallery to gallery, visitors encountered stark white walls studded with small plaster

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nodules – Braille encodings of excerpts from both volumes of Charles Reznikoff’s serial documentary poem, Testimony, The United States, 1885–1915: Recitative (hereafter, Testimony). In each gallery, a continuous fall of bright fuchsia powder sifted down from the four edges of the ceiling, catching on the nodules and pooling at the edges of the floors.

Wall Constructed of steel and glass, Hamilton’s wall was a liminal structure, acting both as opening and enclosure, aperture and veil. Seen from a distance, the wall rose to the height of the Pavilion’s entablature, the words Stati Uniti D’America barely legible on the pediment (figure 9.1). The wall stood just feet from the Pavilion and spanned the entirety of its façade. It was divided into uniform rectangular segments, each segment framing a solid 4 × 14 grid of steel and rippled glass panes. Together with the L-shaped wings of the Pavilion, the wall enclosed the forecourt, transforming it into a large, plein air anteroom. Because the wall permitted no direct access to the forecourt, visitors entered the exhibition only by turning right or left, and then walking the distance, segment by segment, towards one or the other of the wall’s far edges. In its placement and materials, the wall manifested several kinds of difficulty – of vision, of movement, of access. From afar, the wall veiled all but the tallest parts of the Pavilion’s architecture, and its regular grid of steel and glass offered, at best, a distant and fragmented view of the installation’s inner elements. Although it could fairly be called a wall of windows, for indeed it was, the wall offered only, as Reznikoff wrote in his poem ‘Aphrodite Vrania’, a view like the ‘ceaseless weaving of the uneven water’.3 As they approached, visitors might have been able to peer into the forecourt and glimpse what lay beyond, but the panes of rippled glass distorted even this promising, closer view. Once face-to-face with the breadth of the steel and glass grid, visitors were obliged to move along its length, segment by segment, pane by pane, towards the edges of the wall – in essence, towards the periphery of an already fragmented and distorted visual field. Walking this indirect route no doubt demanded time, effort and persistence to cover the distance. That myein opened with such measures of obstruction, rather than welcome, cannot have been lost on visitors to the installation. As a first point of contact, any wall might suggest refusal. And yet myein’s wall was porous, its refusal tantalisingly incomplete. Even as it screened, distorted and fragmented the space of the forecourt and the architecture of the Pavilion, the wall also framed the site as an object for inspection. Each pane of rippled glass invited close, if frustrated, looking. From one pane to another, each suited in scale to the dimensions of the human face, visitors experienced an accumulation of disrupted visions. From the very outset, then, the wall suggested that in order to see, one must look, and look again, and again. Much as one might attempt to see through obstruction, one must also see the obstruction, in and of itself.



Testimony by hand

9.1  Glass wall of myein installation, with exterior view of the US Pavilion, 1999. The United States Pavilion, 48th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy.

Even after visitors had rounded its corners, the wall permitted only the same broken, vitreous view of where they had first stood. Thus, the wall posed mediation as a problem of enchantment: once aware of the ways in which the wall both veils and reveals our vision, we can no longer see, except through its watery, prismatic lens. The wall suggests that there is no turning back – not in precisely the same way – and that even our own locations in the recent past are no clearer to us

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than those of distant histories. Instead, we are recalled perpetually to the present, and to its status as liminal temporality. To enter and to gain access to myein, and to the histories promised within, visitors needed to persist: to make their way not only through vision, but through proprioception, and to insist on their very presence, their right to enter the installation’s mysteries.

Table The table stood just before the steps of the Pavilion, the only distinct object in the entire exhibition. An ordinary and familiar object, but for the holes drilled in its surface and filled with tightly packed, knotted white cloths, the table married the interior and the domestic realms with the public and the fantastical. Hamilton and others have likened its knots to the quipu,4 an ancient Andean system of record keeping that employs knotted cords to represent decimal  numbers, though the outward resemblance between the two forms is limited. For Hamilton, the knots represented a kind of accounting, a way of materialising ‘the history and institutional authority of the building’.5 In spite of these explicit references, the anthropomorphic qualities of the knotted cloths seem still more noteworthy. The thickly drawn knots read easily as heads, and the loose ends of cloth as so many shrouded bodies. The arrangement of these blank, white figures might easily have unnerved any audience: in effect, the drilled surface of the table served as a multiplied noose, with each of the cloths hung between the legs below. Thus the table, an everyday surface upon which to work or to break bread, became an uncanny, vaguely fearful object. Staged under the open sky of the forecourt, the table seemed rather like an altar, the knots gathered together as offerings.6 If the precise referent of the plain white knots was difficult to decipher, the repetitive process of their making was readily apparent in their uniformity and accumulation. One might imagine the artist winding each knot obsessively, each turning of the cloth a small ritual of memory-making. Like the rippled glass windows of the wall, the Braille encodings on the Pavilion’s interior and the whispered recordings of the ‘Second Inaugural Address’, the knotted cloths remain markedly inscrutable, as though to suggest victims and histories both unknown and yet still somehow accountable. If they are quipu, then their histories are twisted within themselves, waiting to be translated and read by hand and by eye. If they are ghostly bodies, as surely they are, then each knot is indistinguishable from another, their qualitative differences of no apparent import for myein’s accountings. Rather, it is finally their sheer number, and their impossible magnitude,7 that impress the viewer.

Pavilion Once past the table in the forecourt, visitors finally reached the steps to the Pavilion’s entrance. Constructed in 1930 by architects William Adams Delano



Testimony by hand

and Chester Holmes Aldrich, the United States Pavilion was built according to neo-classical principles  – the same Palladian aesthetics invoked by Jefferson’s Monticello more than a century earlier. Although the two historic buildings are quite different – Monticello boasts more than forty rooms to the Pavilion’s modest, symmetrical arrangement of four interior galleries  – Hamilton was impressed by the deep affinities between Monticello’s architecture and that of the Pavilion: This Jeffersonian, neo-classical building, we inherit as a real emblem of an American democratic ideal. And so, I wanted to engage that in the building. How do we deal with the stains of our history? How do we take those aspects of our social history – slavery being the largest one – we have a democratic country that was founded and based on slavery – and how do you talk about that? I thought perhaps the only way to do it was to do it abstractly.8

Although Hamilton describes her approach as abstract, in many ways her critique of the hypocrisy of a slave-trading American democracy was quite literal. The ‘stains of our history’ were materialised in the objects and on the very surfaces of myein. As in earlier installations, like bounden and kaph, in which the walls welled up with tears,9 to encounter myein was to experience the installation as a strange body, from the exoskeleton of the wall to the shimmering interior of its four-chambered heart, the Pavilion. But whereas previous installations wept, myein bled, and the tears that gathered on the walls of bounden and kaph gave way to myein’s plaster nodules, as though Reznikoff’s histories of everyday American tragedies had erupted like a pox from the flesh of the bleeding walls. The bright fuchsia powder sifted ceaselessly from the edges of the ceilings, catching on the Braille nodules, which gradually became more visible against the stark white paint of the walls. Once inside the Pavilion, visitors heard, after a time, the barely audible recording of the artist as she whispered the words of Lincoln’s ‘Second Inaugural Address’. Still quieter, but nonetheless audible, was the faint sound of the fuchsia powder as it sifted down the walls and accumulated on the floors. As they walked from gallery to gallery, visitors could hardly avoid the bright particles on the floors and in the air. Scuffs, trails and even deliberate tracings in the fuchsia powder marked the footfalls and signatures of visitors to the Pavilion. On the floors of each room, their traces glowed, ever changing with the flow of traffic, limning ghostly negatives of their movements throughout the installation (figure 9.2).

The opacity of witness Both of the references to language, in Braille and phonetic code, are veiled in such a way that language doesn’t become the vehicle through which you arrive at a certain set of information. And so you had to sense your way through this.10

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9.2  Ann Hamilton, myein (interior), with view of gallery inside the US Pavilion, 1999. The United States Pavilion, 48th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy.

The word ‘myein’ is Greek in origin, meaning ‘to shut the eyes’ and ‘to close the mouth’.11 For Hamilton, the title acknowledges the origins of the Pavilion in Greek temple architecture, and references ‘the initiation rites enacted in medieval cults’; the artist notes that ‘the closing of the eyes or mouth refers to the secret status surrounding their rites. Across time, myein has come to stand for that thing which has not been, or cannot be, explained.’12 Here Hamilton implies that one shuts the eyes or closes the mouth to keep the secrets of the ineffable, as though they might otherwise escape into articulation. But if the title of the installation insists on various sorts of closure – even blindness, speechlessness – it simultaneously, if paradoxically, offers other forms of opening, other kinds of articulation. In myein, the physical alterations to the Pavilion transformed the printed texts by Lincoln and Reznikoff into more overtly material forms, and privileged other senses and forms of embodiment: the haptic, the aural, the respiratory, the proprioceptive. In their re-mediated states, the texts became striking examples of what Johanna Drucker has called the ‘marked’ text, a typographic style which ‘aggressively situates the reader in relation to various levels of annunciation in the text – reader, speaker, subject, author – though with manipulative utilization of the strategies of graphic design’.13 According to Drucker, marked texts overturn



Testimony by hand

the dominant typographic standards most commonly applied to works of public rhetoric or literature like Lincoln’s address and Testimony: The literary mode of typographic representation, borrowing from the convention of the unmarked text, posited the existence of an absent author whose authority was reworked through the seemingly transparent, speaking-itself, character of the words on the page. The subversive disruption of this authority and its impact on the structure of subjectivity, ideology, and power in the text were effected through typographic manipulation.14

Drucker refers to textual transparency here to explain the plain and unassuming appearance of the literary text. ‘The literary text’, as she writes elsewhere, ‘is the single grey block of undisturbed text’, which ‘wants no visual interference or manipulation to disturb the linguistic annunciation of the verbal matter’.15 Thus the unmarked text’s transparency (i.e. its negation of its very status as a visual and made material object) serves the purpose of enhancing the authority of its ‘absent author’ – so much so that the ‘words on the page’ appear ‘self-speaking’, as though they might bear witness to their own truth value. By contrast, marked texts acknowledge the conditions of their making and perform their meanings not only through linguistic, but also visual and material dimensions. Marked texts, then, make plain the construction of their own authority, so that it is possible for a reader to deconstruct and dispel excesses of textual authority. In her reflections on Hamilton’s work, Marsha Meskimmon notes that in ‘recent years, words have been decorporealised … through technologies of print and practices of reading which have evolved over a lengthy period to effect a “transparency” of the word’.16 Meskimmon argues that the losses incurred through unmarked, transparent words on the page involve more than merely obscuring the source and construction of the text’s authority: What is effaced when we read through printed type, forgetting the corporeal processes by which it came to be made, is the matrix – literally and figuratively. In printing, the matrix is the block from which letters, words or images are pressed; it physically substantiates the negative of words and images. ‘Matrix’, of course, comes from the Latin for ‘womb’ and shares a root with ‘matter’, the term commonly opposed to ‘form’ in dualist thinking. When we suppress the matrix, then, we negate a surfeit of terms associated with corporeality: matter, mother, woman and the sensuous base of knowledge through the flesh.17

Meskimmon’s argument invites consideration not only of an alternative to textual transparency  – the marked text  – but also of alternative reading practices  – reading practices which engage the entire sensorium at once, and which attend to the dynamic interaction between a text’s semantic values and the multiple senses through which the reader encounters and forms the text’s meaning. Of course, the texts of Lincoln’s ‘Second Inaugural Address’ and Reznikoff’s Testimony in myein are not strictly typographic, and so they must be said to be more than merely ‘marked’  – they are opaque. As whispered recordings and Braille encodings, both texts became legible only through the visitor’s

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increasingly layered and complex somatic engagements with the installation. In effect, the ‘marking’ of these texts served to destabilise the authority and truthvalue of the histories they contained. The concurrent opacity of both texts further called into question the texts’ legibility and the ability of the reader to serve as witness to their histories. In an ironic reversal, only the blind might ‘see’ the histories retold in Testimony. For those who could hear, just barely, the letters of Lincoln’s speech, Meskimmon notes that the ‘address had to be reconstituted either by writing each letter heard down and reading it back, or by remembering the letters and “reading” them as an internal, mnemonic process’.18 For most visitors, more familiar sites and senses of knowledge, and more specifically, those of witnessing – the eyes and mouth, vision and speech – were displaced in favour of others perhaps less familiar – the skin, the ear and the lungs, touch, listening and breathing. Because myein transformed its texts into tactile and aural forms, it demanded the reciprocity of the body to translate and to read its histories. Meskimmon argues that this corporeal textual experience in myein served to resist the ‘singular assimilative narrative’ of American history ‘by an active reconstitution of the space and a bodily recuperation of the manifold voices which have been effaced to attain the one’.19 In this respect, myein was indeed a work of its postmodern moment. By the time of the Biennale’s opening, Jean-François Lyotard’s critique of grand narratives in The Postmodern Condition had been in circulation in English for over a decade. The 1990s also saw ground-breaking developments in trauma studies from Dori Laub, Shoshana Felman and Cathy Caruth. For Laub and Felman, the difficulty of testimony, and for Caruth, the impossible belatedness of bearing witness to trauma, figured prominently in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (1992) and Trauma: Explorations of Memory (1995), respectively. The installation’s multi-dimensional sensory engagements of its visitors, and its material retellings of marginalised American histories, speak directly, if only implicitly, to Felman’s description of the witness’s solitude and responsibility: Since the testimony cannot be simply relayed, repeated, or reported by another without thereby losing its function as testimony, the burden of the witness – in spite of his or her alignment with other witnesses, is a radically unique, noninterchangeable and solitary burden. ‘No one bears witness for the witness’, writes the poet Paul Celan. To bear witness is to bear the solitude of a responsibility, and to bear the responsibility, precisely, of that solitude.20

It seems difficult to determine the extent to which such a ‘radically unique, noninterchangeable’ testimony would be, in fact, communicable from the language of the singular witness to his or her audience. In invoking Celan’s words, Felman’s framing of testimonial solitude also claims an unlimited authority for the witness – a claim Caruth deeply troubles through the concept of belatedness. For Caruth, [the] pathology [of trauma] consists, rather, solely in the structure of experience or reception: the event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only



Testimony by hand belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it. To be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or an event.21

Similarly, Hamilton’s use of marked, opaque texts casts doubt on the witness’s ability to produce a complete and coherent narrative. As Hamilton’s epigraph explained at the outset of this section, both texts were significantly abstracted and transformed  – ‘veiled’  – in myein, in an effort to privilege sensory knowledge. Lincoln’s address, a conciliatory speech that famously laid out his vision for a unified nation, took on an ambient, disembodied aural form, while Testimony, Reznikoff’s serial litany of American crimes and tragedy, became still more opaque, obdurate and tantalisingly tactile. Most critically, the installation’s gathering of visitors extended the responsibility of the witness to both individual and social bodies. Through the marked opacity – the materiality and the interactivity of the installation’s texts – visitors were indeed ‘possessed’ by it as ‘an event’. The reciprocity of the body, as the visitors touched, breathed and moved through the installation, meant that body and text were co-implicated and mutually transformative. Thus the ‘stains of our history’ refused to remain on the walls of myein: if we read – if we bore witness to its histories – the blood was on our hands. If we listened, the sounds of Hamilton’s whispers reverberated through our bodies. If we breathed and moved through the space, we suffused our lungs, our bloodstreams, with those stains, and left behind us the traces of our peregrinations. Thus, the installation recalled the visitors’ attention not only to the body, and those histories that cannot be told through unmarked texts, but also to the fraught network of responsibility that awaits any act of collective witness. For if we do violate the sanctity of the temple and begin to see – nay, touch and hear – its mysteries, what might we unveil? myein insists that we each, separately and together, bear the burden of remembering – not abstractly, but bodily and in the present – the buried histories of American democracy.

Reconstruction and testimony: ‘Second Inaugural Address’ Of the two primary texts that served as Hamilton’s touchstones in myein, Lincoln’s ‘Second Inaugural Address’ is certainly the more widely known. Perhaps best recognised by American audiences from its engraving on the interior wall of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., the ‘Second Inaugural Address’ was markedly less legible in Hamilton’s incarnation. For its inclusion in myein, Hamilton translated Lincoln’s speech, letter by letter, using the International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet.22 Thus, in a short video documenting the installation, Hamilton can be heard voicing the letters, ‘Charlie – Echo – Alpha – Sierra – Echo’, or ‘cease’, from Lincoln’s line, ‘Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease.’23 Hamilton’s invocation of the ‘Second Inaugural Address’ returned visitors – particularly if they listened carefully  – to the American institution of slavery,

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sometimes called America’s ‘original sin’, and to a defining moment in the precarious survival of the Union. Like the rippled glass panes of the wall, and the plain, white knots of the table, Hamilton’s telling of this history was fragmented and abstract. Not only did her translation of the speech rend its text asunder – the recordings sounded to most casual listeners like an incoherent sequence of letters – but it also translated those letters into a foreign alphabet, voiced in low-pitched, difficult to hear and echoed whispers. Only the most persistent visitor would have recognised Lincoln’s original speech, let alone taken the time to transcribe its text. Yet this is precisely the sort of reader myein imagines: only through such willingness and care could one encounter its obscured texts, and by extension, the visions they offered of a true and lasting democracy. To read the address properly, then, is to reform Lincoln’s vision of union within the body of the reader – first by listening, and then by transcribing with hand, eye, perhaps even voice, the sequence of the letters, and finally by searching for and verifying the boundaries between words, full sentences and paragraphs. It seems no coincidence that Hamilton chose to deconstruct a speech that has come to be considered one of the most important arguments for Reconstruction. Hamilton has characterised the speech as one of ‘healing’,24 which remains the prevailing interpretation of the Address. Lincoln’s conciliatory gestures are evident in his rhetorical turns, and in his calculated efforts to establish a common foundation where perhaps there was none: On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago, all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil-war. All dreaded it – all sought to avert it. While the inaugeral [sic] address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war – seeking to dissole [sic] the Union, and divide effects, by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.25

In these early lines of the address, Lincoln’s first appeal is to pathos. He paints a picture of a nation disintegrating into factions, but with its citizens still tenuously united in their common fear of war and their efforts to avoid it. Responsibility for the war is not fully ascribed to any particular side; rather, Lincoln emphasises two fatally opposed lines of argument – ‘the inaugeral address’ and ‘negotiations’ – as though the discourse itself, and not the rhetors, were the primary agent of conflict. Even in their deepest moments of opposition, Lincoln claims, the two factions ‘deprecated war’. Neither party could afford to cede its position, lest it give way to the opposition in the slightest and be overcome. Thus, almost as if by design, each party preferred war to the greater evil of defeat, and so ‘the war came’. Here again the agency shifts to war itself, as though its arrival were inevitable. Within this passage, Lincoln italicises the opposing words ‘saving’ and ‘destroy’, ‘make’ and ‘accept’, as though, even at the typographic level, he might cement some fundamental agreement between the two warring sides. Lincoln’s logic resembles the



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paradoxical constructions of myein – he resigns himself to war when he would unite; myein insists on blindness, speechlessness, when it would have us see and speak. In Lincoln’s original text, it is not the ills of slavery itself that are particularly in question, but rather the extent to which slavery had become a divisive issue among the young nation’s warring factions: One eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union, even by war; while the government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it.26

Even if slavery ‘was, somehow, the cause of the war’ – a phrasing too coy by half, and no doubt Lincoln’s calculated concession to his divided audiences  – the address skirted the all-important ethical question of human rights and dignity, and instead settled for declaring the government’s sober pragmatism. In an effort to persuade Southerners to reaffirm their place in the Union, Lincoln assiduously avoids any hint of abolition. He goes so far as to acknowledge the ‘peculiar and powerful interest’ slavery held for the Southern economy, and makes only a modest claim: that the Union must not extend the practice of slavery beyond where it has already existed. To contemporary ears, this concession must ring a false note. myein’s deliberate deconstructions of the address’s narrative, experienced in concert with the shocking fuchsia ‘stains of our history’, disturb the seamless surface of Lincoln’s rhetoric and resist its apologist implications. Ultimately Lincoln absolves both North and South of responsibility for the war, instead laying blame with God’s divine plan for man. He argues that because both sides claim Christian values, both North and South must serve God’s providence equally: ‘Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged’; ‘the Almighty has His own purposes.’27 Only now, with each side equally afflicted and charged with divine responsibilities, does Lincoln invoke the first person plural, ‘we’, to circumscribe his entire audience. This ‘we’ gathers strength through Lincoln’s repetitive syntax, as he works towards this earnest plea and solemn warning: Fondly do we hope – fervently do we pray – that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether’.28

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In this passage, Lincoln’s unwavering faith in ‘the judgments of the Lord’ signals not merely the president’s piety, but his protracted sense of time and history, as well as the lengths to which the government must go to preserve the Union. Lincoln’s warning that ‘every drop of blood drawn with the lash’ shall be repaid, perhaps for centuries to come, was clearly evoked in myein’s pocked and bleeding interior walls. As Lincoln concludes his address, however, he does so with an eye towards healing. He exhorts his auditors to harbour no ill will towards their fellow countrymen, to serve God’s providence and to staunch the flow of blood he had so recently demanded: With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan  – to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.29

Even here, Lincoln expresses the difficulty of seeing ‘the right’ and knowing our place in the course of the divine plan. Although he begs that Americans ‘bind up the nation’s wounds’, the ‘just’ and ‘lasting peace’ he envisions is far from assured. As conciliatory as Lincoln’s speech may have been in its time, Hamilton’s contemporary re-reading (and re-working) of its message does not prove quite so forgiving of its moral lacunae. That the walls of the Pavilion still run red suggests that, at least in myein, the wounds of history continue to pour out into our contemporary moment. The very moment a visitor to the Pavilion seeks to acknowledge these wounds, whether through transcription of the recordings or through touching the Braille walls, she is inextricably marked by the stains of its histories. The installation reminds its visitors that to see, feel, hear and breathe these histories is to reincorporate them within their own bodies, and to recognise the complex ways in which they are always already implicated, both physically and socially, within a network of historical inheritance. In myein there is no way to listen and to read fully without the body, no way to bear witness without also bearing the knowledge and burden of our own responsibilities to history. Whereas Lincoln’s address seeks to blame none but providence, myein blames us all.

Testimony In 1978 and 1979 Black Sparrow Press published the first full edition of Testimony in two volumes. For Reznikoff, Testimony was a lifelong project, however, rooted in the documentary and Objectivist poetics of the 1930s, and occupying the poet time and again until his death in 1976. The initial parts of Testimony were published as prose pieces in 1932 in the journal Contact, as well as the Objectivist Anthology.30 As a full book, Testimony was first published in 1934 by



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the Objectivist Press, a collective of poets that included Louis Zukofsky, William Carlos Williams, George Oppen and Reznikoff himself. Thus Testimony emerged during a time rich with hybrid documentary works, including James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Ezra Pound’s Cantos, and perhaps most notably, Muriel Rukeyser’s ‘The Book of the Dead’. Much like Rukeyser, Reznikoff found his source materials in the transcripts of court proceedings, culled from the thousands of legal volumes he read while employed at the American Law Book Company: ‘I might go through a volume of a thousand pages and find just one case from which to take the facts and rearrange them so as to be interesting’, Reznikoff reflected, continuing, ‘I don’t know how many thousands of volumes I went through, and all I could manage to get out of it were these poems.’31 The writing process Reznikoff describes is painstaking and highly selective, and the poet expressed doubts about the resulting poems’ quality. Indeed, selection and arrangement  – techniques central to both documentary and Objectivist poetics – became the source of many a critic’s scepticism and ire, including Hayden Carruth, who called the 1934 Objectivist edition of Testimony a ‘curious book’, its ‘selection of material – all ugly, brutal, and inhumane’, and its language ‘not poetry at all, but prose printed in irregular lines, and rather lifeless prose at that’.32 The ‘lifeless’ quality that Carruth found so objectionable derives, not coincidentally, from Reznikoff’s commitment to Objectivist poetics. According to Ian Davidson, Reznikoff’s ‘poetics involved not only an objective stance toward reality and a suspicion of the emotional responses of a lyrical “I,” but also the ways language could construct the object of the poem’.33 For Reznikoff, then, an Objectivist approach became a way of conveying a tone or feeling, without sacrificing the fact of the matter. In conversation with L. S. Dembo, Reznikoff explained that he favoured ‘selection’ and ‘arrangement’, rather than self-expression or aesthetic ornamentation, as the primary means of composition: In Testimony the speakers whose words I use are all giving testimony about what they actually lived through. The testimony is that of a witness in court  – not a statement of what he felt, but of what he saw or heard. What I wanted to do was to create by selection, arrangement, and the rhythm of the words used was a mood or feeling. … A reviewer wrote that when he read Testimony a second time he saw a world of horror and violence. I didn’t invent the world, but I felt it.34

Reznikoff suggests that the stuff of history is interesting  – and terrifying  – enough for poetry without the poet’s invention or intervention. The poet’s task, which Hamilton might suggest is also the artist’s task, is to sense these histories, and to select and rearrange the signs of their ‘horror and violence’ into an affective form that will transport the audience. Reznikoff’s role, then, is not strictly that of a primary ‘witness in court’, but rather of a belated witness who feels acts of witness by others. In this respect, Reznikoff parallels Rukeyser’s reconceptualisation of the reader as witness, and her claim that these ‘three terms of relationship – poet, poem, and reader – are none of them static. We are c­ hanging,

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living beings, experiencing the inner change of poetry.’35 The relationship that Rukeyser posits among poet, poem and witness  – and which Reznikoff and Hamilton perform through their respective texts – represents the possibility of dynamic, reciprocal exchange, and therefore fundamental shifts in perspective and action. Just as Hamilton’s glass wall simultaneously shattered and framed the view of the Pavilion, so the Braille transcriptions of Testimony both fractured and concretised the words of Reznikoff’s poem. The excerpts from Testimony on the walls of myein represented only a small selection from the voluminous Black Sparrow Press edition, drawing from sections like ‘Property’ in both the ‘The South’ and ‘The North’, as well as ‘Boys and Girls’ and ‘Thefts and Thieves’ in ‘The South’, and ‘Persons and Places’ in ‘The North’. When one considers how explicitly Hamilton described the installation’s connection with the legacy of American slavery, it might seem curious that her excerpts eschew those sections of Reznikoff’s work that more overtly reference race, like ‘Negroes’ in Volume 1 or ‘Blacks and Whites’ in Volume 2. Read in the ambient atmosphere of ‘The Second Inaugural Address’ and the clouds of fuchsia particulates, myein’s excerpts from Testimony raise the question of race only indirectly and contextually. If Hamilton’s selections reflect her preference for abstraction over explicit narrative, they also highlight not the discrete cases of historical individuals, but the witnessing and reporting of them through juridical discourse itself. The opacity of witness, above all else, is the common thread that unites myein’s selections from Testimony, with each excerpt attending to acts of reading, writing and seeing, to questionable narratives and dubious claims to authority. In one fragment, the speaker admits that he bears false witness due to economic hardship. When his interlocutor points out the certain evil of ‘swearing a man’s life away / for a little money’, the witness merely replies, ‘Yes, / but this is pretty hard times, / and I am pretty hard up’.36 In several of Hamilton’s other selections, deaths occur through minute misunderstandings and happenstance. From the Mississippi Supreme Court case, Vicksburg and M. R. Co. vs. Phillips, on 2 May 1887,37 Reznikoff derives a brief but poignant picture of a young boy’s tragic death: trying to escape the shouts and swinging stick of the conductor, and ‘to get off while the train was running, / Joe fell between the cars’.38 The tone of these lines is flat, and the syntax delays mention of the death, almost as if the very fact of it were an afterthought. Likewise, Reznikoff’s poem based on Joy vs. State, 27 October 1909, recounts in the most matter-of-fact tone the case of a farmer who, convinced that a man had stolen his corn, shot and killed a stranger at his gate after assuming that the victim had been the thief.39 Both poems represent the tragic ends people meet when an assailant fails to recognise, even if only by chance, the humanity of the victim. Reznikoff’s implicit call for empathy is particularly evident in the latter poem’s ironic final description of the victim, now dead: ‘The young man did not look – nor was he dressed – like one who would be stealing corn / and there was no sign of silk or shucks of corn on his clothing.’40



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Of the deaths described in Hamilton’s excerpts, Reznikoff’s retelling of People vs. Rodawald, from 16 February 1904, most dramatically exemplifies the failures of language and of empathy.41 In this alarming account, a neighbour guns down a boarder who happened to intercede on behalf of a widow in a dispute over free wooden posts: On his way to the railroad again, he saw the widow’s boarder beside the wheelbarrow throwing the posts on the ground and shouted to his wife, ‘Get my gun! My revolver!’ She didn’t, but he ran into his house through the back door and came out with both shotgun and revolver. The widow shouted to her boarder, ‘Come away! He’ll shoot you!’ and the colored man shouted, ‘Put down that gun! There’s nobody done anything to you! Put it down!’42

Here Reznikoff’s lines highlight a fatal sequence of rhetorical failures, from the shooter’s plea for his gun (which, unanswered, seems to enrage him still more), to the widow’s warning (unheeded), to the man’s imperative appeal to reason (neglected or unheard). In this drama, language itself fails. Even the victim begs for his life, but his plea proves to no avail: The boarder threw up his hands and cried, ‘Don’t shoot! Please don’t!’ But he fired. The boarder staggered back two or three steps, fell to the ground, and died – as the colored man afterwards said – ‘without a word or groan.’43

Here the man who had pleaded for the boarder’s life now bears witness to its end. The boarder ultimately meets death with shut eyes and closed mouth, without, as the witness states, ‘a word or groan’. If we infer from this that he died without complaint, this is certainly a hard irony. No word of the wrong done him, nor of the mysteries of death, can escape his lips, except, perhaps, in the reading and re-readings of Testimony and myein. Between bearing no witness and giving false account, perhaps the latter is the greater crime. The only other lengthy selection from Testimony tells a story of bank failure and deceit, derived from State vs. Sattley, 3 December 1895.44 The particular bank in question served working-class people and held nearly all of their savings (‘almost all of its deposits / were by servant girls, washerwomen, sewing women, and workingmen’).45 The poem is a litany, a gross accounting of all the losses suffered upon the bank’s failure, all the people whose livelihoods were ruined, and most importantly, of the concerted and repeated efforts of the bank clerks to allay depositors’ fears, all but ensuring their ultimate losses: and the money of the small tradesman who had just sold his business for two thousand dollars and had deposited the money

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That the savings were hard-won makes their losses all the more devastating, the bank clerks’ duplicities all the more heartless. It seems reasonable to wonder if there might ever be an end to the sorts of losses Reznikoff and, later, Hamilton tallied. Testimony does, however, insist on bearing witness to false witness, and to the ways in which men have served institutions and not each other. Testimony tasks the writer, the artist and the reader to tell all the history, and tell it right. The most diminutive of Hamilton’s excerpts from Testimony makes plain just how vital, but difficult, it can be to bear witness. Reznikoff’s text comes from State vs. Johnson, 19 February 1887, a case before the South Carolina Supreme Court, which sought to determine ‘the competency of certain testimony received as the dying declarations of the deceased’.47 Having been shot and taken ill, the soon-to-be deceased victim’s final attempt to name his murderer is remembered by a witness present at his bedside, and recorded in the lines of the poem: They held the light very close to him, but he could not see. They asked him to sign the paper, and someone put a pencil in his hand to make his mark. He could not take hold of it – even feel it.48

The scene depicted in Reznikoff’s lines is affecting in large part because it is easy to recognise the fragility of the victim. The assistance he receives from his attendants is incremental: first the light, then the prompt to sign and, finally, the pencil, placed in his hand. Reznikoff notes – and through her selection and rearrangement of Reznikoff’s text, Hamilton highlights – the precarious material demands



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of bearing witness, and in this case, of rendering one’s own dying declaration. When our sight, or even our strength and sense of touch, fail us, others are needed to help deliver the account.

Red, read And so I feel, as an artist, my predicament right now is to take this process of reading and figure out how it becomes the matter of my work … I’m very interested in the hierarchies of our habits of perception, and how, if something can be contained within the discursive structure of words, that we trust it will have more legitimacy than other kinds of information or ways of knowing. I think that I’m just trying to take this access and tilt it, so that the felt-quality of the words is equal to, but not dominant over, other kinds of sensory perceptions.49

Hamilton’s installation advances an alternative model for witnessing: one in which the textual record – whether of the courtroom or of informal individual accounts  – is no longer privileged over other sensory forms of knowledge. Nothing can remind us of our own implication in myein’s histories quite so clearly, so viscerally, as the reciprocal experience of touching Testimony. Nothing quite impresses the memory, reminding us to remember, like the whispered encodings of the ‘Second Inaugural Address’. Veil upon veil  – from the slow, blurred visions of the wall, to the enigmatic knots suspended from the table, from the low echo of the whispered address, to the Braille encodings of the poems, and the pulsing clouds of fuchsia powder – myein both obscures its histories and pleads to be read. Through myein’s transformations of the space and architecture of the United States Pavilion, and through its marked, opaque material texts, these otherwise silent, marginalised histories became indelibly fused with the bodies of the visitors. To uncover the text of Lincoln’s address or Testimony, visitors must have placed themselves in physical contact with the whisper or wall, ear to pen to paper or skin of the hand to skin of the wall. By initiating these moments of contact, the readers became irrevocably inscribed in the texts’ buried histories of American violence, their hands red as they read. Through the shared language of the senses, so many visitors – strangers to one another, hailing from different nations and backgrounds – could experience and enact a transitory moment of collective witness. myein charges its visitors with the responsibility to bear witness and account, both personally and as a nation, for the heavy toll exacted from the bodies and souls of its early citizens. The marked, opaque texts of Hamilton’s installation prove to be a formidable and persistent material presence, refusing any idealised and whitewashed history of democracy, and insisting that we must not shut our eyes and mouths to the violent secrets of the past. Once its visitors have placed their hands on the wall, breathed in its noxious cloud of blood, only then, equally afflicted and aware of the legacy of implications they bear, can they continue the work of reconstruction. From Lincoln, we learn that our success

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is not guaranteed, and that our ways of reading must gather together even the most strongly opposed lines of history. From Reznikoff, we come to see that the tragedies of our time, like the knots in Hamilton’s table, are indistinguishable from those of other times and places. And in myein, we realise: testimony is borne not with the eyes or mouth alone, but with the entire body. It is not strictly a private or an interior affair, but rather, the duty we owe to a ‘true and righteous’ public memory.

Notes   1 Mary Katherine Coffey, ‘Histories That Haunt: A Conversation with Ann Hamilton’, Art Journal, 60.3 (2001), 14.   2 Other notable exceptions included Jenny Holzer’s The Venice Installation (1990) and Bill Viola’s Buried Secrets (1995), both installations created specifically for the occasion of the Venice Biennale.   3 Charles Reznikoff, ‘Aphrodite Vrania’, in The Poems of Charles Reznikoff: 1918–1975, ed. Seamus Cooney (Boston: David R. Godine, 2005), p. 25.  4 Gary Urton provides a thorough explanation of the quipu in his book, Quipu, Contar Anudando En El Imperio Inka = Quipu, Knotting Account in the Inka Empire: Exposición, Julio 2003–Abril 2004 (Santiago De Chile: Museo Chileno De Arte Precolombino, 2003). Unlike Andean quipus, which use the spatial positioning and construction of individual knots to indicate decimals and numerals, Hamilton’s knots were markedly more minimal in their construction. Their capacity to encode data was therefore also more limited; if they functioned referentially at all, the knots could only allude through abstraction.   5 Ann Hamilton, artist statement on ‘Table’ on the artist’s website, ‘Ann Hamilton Studio’ www.annhamiltonstudio.com/objects/myein_table.html (accessed 12 December 2014). For more information, images and video footage of myein, see www.annhamiltonstu​ dio.com/projects/myein.html.   6 One might read the knots’ minimal, even naive constructions, as a child’s ghostly plaything, or more unnervingly, as an effigy to be hung in a tree, or the bedclothes of a Ku Klux Klan habit.
   7 Without a primary cord or pendant string from which to judge the knots in myein, it is impossible to translate their numeric value.  8 Art 21. Performed by Ann Hamilton. PBS Home Video, 2001. Film.   9 Lisa Saltzman, Making Memory Matter: Strategies of Remembrance in Contemporary Art. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 9–10. Saltzman notes that Hamilton’s weeping wall ‘could be seen to extrude droplets of water, could be seen to shed tears, to weep … it is a work that fully embodies or performs affect in an entirely self-enclosed manner, an infinite aqueous loop, reductively, pure affect as visual effect’. Unlike the weeping walls of bounden and kaph, which were self-contained and apart from the viewer, myein invited and even demanded bodily contact with its visitors. Without them, its texts and its performance of affect remained incomplete. 10 Coffey, ‘Histories That Haunt’, 12. 11 Timothy Weiss notes that ‘the word “mystery” derives from the Greek verb myein (“to



Testimony by hand

close”) – to close, that is, the lips and the eyes of the person being initiated (the mystes) into a cult’. ‘Mystery in a Jellabah: Cultural Worlds in Borges’s Historia Universal De La Infamia’, in Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka and Marlies Kronegger (eds), Mystery in Its Passions: Literary Explorations (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004), p. 85. 12 Ann Hamilton, artist statement on myein, ‘Ann Hamilton Studio’ website, www. annhamiltonstudio.com/projects/myein.html. 13 Johanna Drucker, The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909–1923 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 97. 14 Ibid., p. 103. 15 Ibid., p. 95. 16 Marsha Meskimmon, Women Making Art: History, Subjectivity, Aesthetics (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 151. 17 Ibid., p. 153. 18 Ibid., p. 166. 19 Ibid., p. 165. 20 Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 3. 21 Cathy Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), pp. 4–5. 22 It is perhaps a strange irony that in rendering Lincoln’s speech in the International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet, Hamilton succeeded in making its text more difficult rather than more accessible to the exhibition’s international audience. 23 Abraham Lincoln, ‘Transcript of President Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address’, 10 April 1865. ‘Our Documents’ website, www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php? flash=true&doc=38&page=transcript (accessed 12 December 2014). 24 Art 21. Performed by Ann Hamilton. PBS Home Video, 2001. Film. 25 Lincoln, ‘Transcript of President Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address’. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 30 See Michael Davidson, Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material Word (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), p. 138. 31 Janet Sternburg and Alan Ziegler, ‘A Conversation with Janet Sternburg and Alan Ziegler’, in Milton Hindus (ed.), Charles Reznikoff: Man and Poet (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, University of Maine at Orono, 1984), p. 132. 32 Hayden Carruth, ‘A Failure of Contempt’, Poetry, 10.6 (1966), 396–7. 33 Ian Davidson, ‘The Languages of Charles Reznikoff’, Journal of American Studies, 45.2 (2011), 355–69, 360. 34 L. S. Dembo and Charles Reznikoff, ‘Charles Reznikoff’, Contemporary Literature, 10.2 (1969), 193–202, 202. 35 Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry (Williamsburg, MA: Paris Press, 1996), p. 175. 36 Charles Reznikoff, Testimony, The United States, 1885–1915: Recitative, Vol. 1 (Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1978), p. 76. 37 ‘Vicksburg & M. R. Co. V. Phillips’, The Southern Reporter (Saint Paul: West Publishing Company, 1887), pp. 537–8. 38 Reznikoff, Testimony, Vol. 1, p. 26.

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Mixed messages 39 ‘Joy V. State’, The Southwestern Reporter (Saint Paul: West Publishing Company, 1910), pp. 584–90. 40 Charles Reznikoff, Testimony, The United States, 1885–1915: Recitative, Vol. 2 (Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1979), p. 114. 41 ‘People V. Rodawald’, The Northeastern Reporter (Saint Paul: West Publishing Company, 1904), pp. 1–9. 42 Reznikoff, Testimony, Vol. 2, pp. 179–81. 43 Ibid. 44 ‘State V. Sattley’, The Southwestern Reporter (Saint Paul: West Publishing Company, 1896), pp. 41–9. 45 Reznikoff, Testimony, Vol. 1, pp. 235–6. 46 Ibid. 47 ‘State V. Johnson’, The Southeastern Reporter (Saint Paul: West Publishing Company, 1887), pp. 510–12. 48 Reznikoff, Testimony, Vol. 1, p. 33. 49 Coffey, ‘Histories That Haunt’, 15.

Reading with a knife, or the book art of subtraction: the altered books of Brian Dettmer and Doug Beube Katy Masuga Book art is, of course, not new, but the reinterpretation of intersecting media by artists like Brian Dettmer and Doug Beube creates a new dynamic source for cultural and artistic understanding. William Ganis explains in a 2011 essay on Beube, who has been in the craft for over thirty years, that ‘book art itself is about the rewritings of social conventions’.1 This chapter considers how Beube and Dettmer produce works of art by modifying existing books and then sets them in relation to an expansion of the ‘picture theory’ of W. J. T. Mitchell. The focus is Brian Dettmer’s concept of ‘subtraction’,2 used to describe his own form of book art, namely the modification of old books by removing elements from the existing form, or restructuring that original form of the book without adding anything new. In this re-establishment, shifting or subtraction, what Dettmer also calls ‘reading with a knife’,3 Beube and Dettmer perform an act of ‘critical idolatry’, as defined by Mitchell, that effects a ‘creative destruction’, namely, a simultaneously destructive and productive act in which ‘a secondary image of defacement or annihilation is created at the same moment that the “target” image is attacked’.4 The book is destroyed, and out of that destruction comes a new work of art. Our engagement with these book-objects further provokes what I call a double consciousness squared (double consciousness2), extrapolating from Mitchell’s concept of the ‘double consciousness’5 of the spectator in relation to the image. In the interpretation of the function and effect of images in this theory of creative destruction through reworking an image into another form, Mitchell suggests that visual forms are regarded by mainstream cultures in ways akin to forms of animism and anthropomorphism, asserting that ‘images are like living organisms’.6 However, unlike ‘primitive’ forms of understanding that include worship of inanimate objects as though they really were alive, contemporary Western culture imposes a dual nature on images, such that they are regarded as living objects yet in conjunction with the logical sensibilities that simultaneously reveal otherwise. Images are subsequently imbued with a kind of spiritual quality that enhances (or even creates) their mysterious impenetrability, which, according to Mitchell, is based on ‘a social structure grounded in the experience of otherness and especially in the collective representation of others as idolaters’.7 Mitchell

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suggests that this peculiar role of images enacts upon us a ‘double consciousness’, such that we comprehend their actual inanimate status while concurrently behaving with awe towards their perpetually inexplicable otherness. In other words, we believe in the power of the object despite ourselves. Books confuse the distinction between the meaning produced through their words and themselves as meaningful, living things. They become cultural artefacts that intrigue us beyond their use as text and enter not only into the double consciousness of Mitchell’s image but a double consciousness ‘squared’ (double consciousness2) in which the text itself supports Mitchell’s double consciousness apart from and entwined with the object or image of the book itself. The book is already occupying a mystical position akin to animism: like all images, as Mitchell has demonstrated, the book too is a living organism; we give it meaning beyond its material presence, and at the same time we are aware of this peculiar conferral. To complete the ‘squared’ element to this double consciousness, we consider how Dettmer and Beube add the dimension of text as sculpture. By adding the dimension of text as sculpture to the book, Dettmer, Beube and other alteredbook artists awaken multiple levels of perception, in which the viewer encounters a double-fold double consciousness, such that the dual nature of the inanimate, powerless image (of the sculpture) not only becomes alive and threatening, but the image itself already contains a dual nature as an object, a readable book that has its own complex relationship with the reader as a revered, sacred object but also one of utility and consumption. Fluctuating within this double consciousness2 of the viewer, then, the new bookwork potentially becomes entirely unreadable and yet an eerily readable object (is it still a book?) in which the double consciousness2 both draws us in and holds us at an interminable distance. Dettmer and Beube are effectively sculptors, physically cutting into old books and thereby producing new works of art. In an essay on Beube, Betty Bright notes the different labels such art has been given, ultimately suggesting that an overarching title might be ‘bookwork’. Her list includes ‘book object, non-book, anti-book, and, most poetically, livre détourné, as Caroline Corre and Renée Riese Hubert personify it – a deviant book that seeks to upstage the reader’s presumptions of what books should be and do’.8 Like other book artists, Beube and Dettmer encounter the book as a meaningful object in unique ways, both conceptually and literally, beyond its conventional perception, and build different kinds of transformations or recreations – bookworks – out of its destruction. Without adding any new components to the finished piece, Dettmer often chooses to carve into old encyclopaedias, dictionaries and other non-fiction reference works in order to reveal what he considers the books’ hidden potential. ‘Nothing is moved or added and everything you see in the finished piece is exactly where it has always been within the book.’9 Images and lines of text, now made more vivid and singular, are subsequently revealed, overlapping and intersecting in unexpected ways in the finished piece. Beube in turn considers the book an ‘antiquated technology’10 that he encounters like an archaeologist excavating its ruins.



Reading with a knife, or the book art of subtraction

10.1  Brian Dettmer, New Books of Knowledge, 2009. Hardbook cover, acrylic varnish, 16 × 26½ × 10 in.

Dettmer explains how he transforms the discarded books first into a solid object, like a piece of marble or plaster, into which he can carve. For the work New Books of Knowledge (figure 10.1), Dettmer describes in detail the process of using a complete encyclopaedia set: ‘The books were bent back and the covers were sealed open before connecting all of the books together and sanding them as one single piece of material.’11 He then carved into this object ‘to reveal images and ideas of interest’.12 For Dettmer, the encyclopaedia set and its transformation become what he calls ‘a series of cells combined to create a multi-cellular organism’.13 He also calls this particular piece ‘a mini-landscape’ in which ‘most of the images exposed within are focused on landscape, geography and place’.14 Dettmer uses the piece to explore how ‘information evolves like nature’, with this piece suggestive of ‘an early form of nature’ that permits an exploration of ‘the possibilities of the form and meanings of the books’.15 New Books of Knowledge, initially as an encyclopaedia collection, contains information that changes like geographic forms, evolves like elements of nature, or becomes obsolete like outdated technology, making those particular encyclopaedias themselves obsolete. In their alteration into an artwork, then, the books become part of that evolutionary process whereby the information itself is changing, insofar as the objects now transfer their purpose, or their material identity, from one form to another, in the same way that the elements of a landscape transform, or the cells within an organism. Dettmer’s interest is in establishing a balance between the book  – a given, meaningful object  – and his contribution  – this so-called subtraction  – calling

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it a ‘collaboration between [himself] and the existing material’.16 In explaining the painstaking process of removing one layer at a time, unaware in any critical sense of what will emerge beneath, Dettmer clarifies: ‘The process is totally subtractive once I begin carving.’17 Dettmer attempts to produce ‘a balance between all of the individual elements, balance between text and image, between past and future’.18 This balance results from attempting to retain the essence of the book while exploring its material potential. The books are never altered beyond recognition; Dettmer hopes to acknowledge the original author in his work through ‘an honesty’ based on the method of modification and an incorporation of the very transformation of the book into the sculpture. ‘Keeping an identity to the material as a book helps do this’, he explains.19 This identity is present both in the materiality of the original text, retaining a ghostly sort of Wittgensteinian ‘family resemblance’ [Familienähnlichkeit],20 and in the quality of the subtraction, insofar as elements of the book are taken away with no external structures of any kind ever added.21 The philosophical and philological notion of ‘family resemblance’ is as old as (and likely older than) Nietzsche and John Stuart Mill, but its contemporary invocation is attributed to Wittgenstein, who suggests that members of a ‘family’ do not have one essential quality that joins them, but rather that there are a series of overlapping qualities that produce the familiar and visible semblance of sameness, the essence of which cannot be pinpointed. In the case of his book art, by subtracting rather than modifying in an effort to retain ‘an identity to the material’, Dettmer effects this family resemblance. The source work is present but intangible, providing a glimpse of its former incarnation as a book. The viewer knows what the originating book was, of course, but the essence of that ‘bookness’ within the modified (‘subtracted’) material is elusive and unavailable. The effect is one of a spectral or even uncanny presence that is often both fascinating and unsettling. In a 2011 interview with the French-English art magazine Hey! Dettmer points out how contemporary society is saturated with information from books that become obsolete or simply exist without fulfilling or continuing in their original function. He says, ‘We are left with many books from our recent past that are no longer functional but we don’t want to throw them away. At the same time, we are saturated with information.’22 This quality of saturation is evident in altered-book art in general, where the viewer is immediately alerted to the endless intricacies of a book’s content by suddenly encountering it in a visually assaulting form, with the very minute characters of inked image and text on display in unexpectedly elaborate detail and presence. The viewer is flooded with this saturation, due to the immediacy of perception and the overloading of imagery. All text becomes image via the transfer of the book’s role from a useful object into an art object. This visual saturation points to the metaphorical saturation of the information abstractly contained within the text, which is no longer available for consumption. In Saturation Will Result, Dettmer constructs a wheel from an encyclopaedia collection connected at the spines of each volume, in which the pages of each



Reading with a knife, or the book art of subtraction

spill outward like a waterfall in the shape of a wheel. The splayed book materials are layered across one another; the exposed pages are then cut away to reveal colourful images and text as depicted within the various encyclopaedia volumes themselves. A book in its very essence is emblematic of the saturation of words, which is then literally exposed in Dettmer’s sculpture, which not only inverts the book’s structure to display those words but specifically emphasises the richness of the physical saturation. Beube, like Dettmer, considers his method part of a collaborative process with the form and purpose of the pre-existing book, effecting a similar strategy with much of his work, such as in The Silent Question (2005; see figure 10.2), an altered book whose pages have been connected end to end to create a scroll. Each individual word from the text of the former book has been removed with surgical precision in a cutting-away so that the artwork resembles a piano roll with numerous rectangular and gridded gaps spanning its length.23 Beube explains that the original text was a collection of lectures by Martin Buber from 1951. Citing the book’s temporal proximity to the end of the Holocaust, Beube calls the scroll ‘veil-like’ with its meaning ‘made void’ through the cut-outs.24 If, with the Word, God made the world out of nothing, Beube then asks, in light of the destruction caused by the Holocaust: ‘How does one find God in the nothingness?’25 In her essay ‘The Presence of Absence’ in the collection Doug Beube: Breaking the Codex (2011), Diana L. Linden reads the work as follows: ‘by calling attention to the void, Beube also reminds us that our very consciousness on these hollow spaces is a way to make hallowed what has been lost’.26 If we temporarily suspend Beube

10.2  Doug Beube, The Silent Question, 2005. Altered book, 7 in. × 10 ft × 6 in.

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and Linden’s historical interpretations and view the work simply for a moment in its materiality, we encounter a book that has been taken from its original state as a tool for holding and imparting information, and subsequently meaning, within a historical context, and transformed into an artwork that confronts the utility and physical fragility of the book and the information and meaning contained therein. It also questions the very possibility of meaning, in which an object containing words that hypothetically imparts meaning is transformed into something that still contains those words – here only in a spectral sense – but not only no longer imparts the same meaning (if it imparts any meaning at all), but has destroyed the very mechanism by which we understand how meaning is relayed. Focusing on the loss of value in material books in the digital age, Dettmer’s and Beube’s work also inherently draws attention to the imminent threat that storing data electronically creates. The book as an object is the focus; by separating the book’s material value from its use value, the artist disrupts the spectator’s sense of the form of the medium, simultaneously highlighting the destructibility of the various media used for containing and transmitting information. Dettmer writes of how this process allows him to reimagine the significance and use of the materials that are used: Much of what I do is about loss. It is about the loss of the physical, the stable and solid, but also about the loss of authority and the necessity of verification. It is about the loss of information as we now store our personal and cultural records in ones and zeros, formats that suffer from entropy as new updates render them obsolete. Our ideas are now on life support, requiring a constant stream of electricity and upgrades.27

Similarly, Beube juxtaposes the codex that is the core of his work – the book, nearly literally a block of wood, as the term denotes – with computers, suggesting that both ‘store, perpetuate, generate and recreate information’,28 but the former does so in an extremely limited capacity in relation to the latter. Based on this comparison, Beube attributes programming-like qualities to many of his works in which words are physically removed, items are cut and pasted, and text is hidden in layers, creating an analogue qua digital system within the book. The produced effect is an awareness of the book’s limitations, but it is also reopened to an otherwise unimagined function and value: it now becomes both a work of art and a transmitter of information on a parallel plane with modern computer technology, emphasising its own archaism and formal boundaries. This provocation in Beube and Dettmer of computing and form recalls Johanna Drucker’s work both on book art and digital media. In SpecLab (2009), specifically the chapter entitled ‘Graphesis and Code’, Drucker discusses the widespread, problematic position of presuming the immateriality of computer code. Drucker suggests that misperceptions about the nature of digital media lead to the erroneous belief in a self-identicality of data-as-code. However, as reflexively evoked by Dettmer and Beube in their works which conjure elements of computing and programming, digital media have a physical presence just like



Reading with a knife, or the book art of subtraction

books, even if that presence is made to appear infinitesimally minute. (Drucker points out that, on the contrary, digital media do have an enormous presence, ‘requiring rather large amounts of hardware to perform what was formerly done in rather minimal means (paper and pencil)’.29 In fact, we might say that code requires two levels of materiality: the large computer hardware and the small ‘pattern of stored values on a silicon chip’.)30 On the ontological level, this understanding of the physicality of digital media is pertinent in acknowledging that formal code itself is not form but follows form. Drucker writes what appears obvious but somehow isn’t (particularly in a conventional, unreflective view of digital media): ‘Any act of production and inscription, the scribing of lines that create the specificity of an image, demonstrates that an expressed form is different from the underlying code.’31 Beube and Dettmer integrate this critique directly in those works that conjure elements of computing and programming, first, by disrupting the reader qua viewer’s engagement with the inscription (and image) and, secondly, by their evident concern with data space and storage. Drucker follows up by asserting that the expression is also bound temporally: ‘Any interpretive act returns to this initial inscription through its own productive and generative process, reinscribing a work as product within a specific situation of viewing.’32 Dettmer and Beube’s altered books are an artistic effort at demonstrating this truism. They invoke the alleged yet false immateriality of digital media by juxtaposing the digital form (through an imaginative evocation) against the analogic book, which both elicits and imitates the digital. The viewer/reader imagines this digital form as set alongside and within the elaborately and meticulously carved, heavy and physical, reappropriated book material. In 2011 Beube published Doug Beube: Breaking the Codex on his thirty years as an altered-book artist, which includes essays from critics and artists addressing various forms of his work including those with a cinematic quality, those that focus on geography, the concept of the codex, the issue of meaning, Jewish identity and absence and loss. Linden suggests that Beube’s work is liberating both to the book and to knowledge at large: ‘Fixed concepts – both in the book and of the book – are set free.’33 The concept of the codex plays a major role in Beube’s work, both directly and indirectly, aligning books with computers but also addressing the book’s very material substance as codex. In 2005 Beube constructed Inside Macintosh: an Apple computer manual cut up and twisted in a seemingly gentle and feathery manner that, to this reader’s eye, resembles a large, curved letter ‘M’ flanked by border-like pillars or walls (again, all constructed from the manual) as though the letter is contained between them (hence, ‘inside’). Beube plays on the irony of ‘manual’ in his explanation, pointing out both that there is nothing much manual about a digital machine, the Macintosh, and that a user will hardly become more skilled at understanding the hardware and its construction by consulting the given manual. For Beube, ‘breaking the codex’ is his way of both physically and metaphorically opening the book to modern technology through a destruction qua recreation of both, like the phoenix from the ashes.

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Beube’s manipulated Macintosh manual or Dettmer’s content-revealing e­ ncyclopaedia sculptures also bring to mind Oulipo and such works as Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poèmes (1961, Hundred Thousand Billion Poems), in which a set of ten sonnets, with the same rhyme scheme and rhyme sound, are cut lineby-line, resulting in 100,000,000,000,000 possible combinations for reading them. The physical structure of Queneau’s book, like Beube and Dettmer’s computerand data-evoking creations, contains impossibly large combinatories but it also simply and directly raises the issue of the very material presence of data. Drucker herself is also a book artist who is concerned with the originality and rarity of such livres d’artiste, as well as their history, claiming that they are predominantly a twentieth-century phenomenon and are notably original works of art despite being books (i.e., artefacts containing information). Drucker asserts that the livre d’artiste is indeed about its own materiality through the information it contains. Although she largely disclaims altered books as book art, instead aligning them more radically with sculpture,34 certainly many altered books, as with those just mentioned, speak even more loudly to Drucker’s concern with digital media, code and immateriality in the manner that they deliberately create an inadequate simulation of digital media through an analogue qua digital form. In 2013 Beube created Re-Breaking the Codex, which literally deconstructs the original book by using it as material for an altered-book creation. In Re-Breaking the Codex, Doug Beube: Breaking the Codex is ‘irreverently altered by cutting, gouging and collaging the original book’,35 which Beube calls ‘ironically contemptuous’,36 a phrase that speaks directly to Mitchell’s theory of creative destruction. The modification of the book appears destructive (and of course is, on several levels), but ultimately it is simply the reshaping of raw material into a work of art. Once again, the primary function and value of the book is lost, while something else is added – an elusive or paradoxical aesthetic in destruction – that completely redefines the object. As with Dettmer, Beube considers his book modification to be akin to ‘an archaeological dig or medical dissection’ that reveals ‘the different layers’ of the original artwork.37 The text becomes illegible in one sense, yet readable in another metaphorical sense. Constantly reminded of the process of destruction and recreation, the reader engages with the artwork still as a book, yet stripped of its original role and subsequently loaded with new potential as a work of art. It is now the very surface of the object that speaks to the reader qua viewer, and all references open up towards ‘a fluid space’ that is no longer ‘solid’ or contained as a book.38 In relation to this nebulous understanding of medium, Mitchell makes two crucial claims in What Do Pictures Want? (2005): ‘the shock of new media is as old as the hills’ and ‘all media are mixed media’.39 These two assertions combined provide an understanding of Dettmer’s and Beube’s projects of creative destruction such that they present their works of mixed media in order to shock the spectator into an awareness of the impending obsolescence of the traditional medium of material books. At the same time, Mitchell’s claims demonstrate that these new forms of media call out their self-referentiality by combining two supposedly



Reading with a knife, or the book art of subtraction

distinct forms precisely in order to shock the spectator into awareness. For it is only through self-reference – the book now serving as sculpture – that a brief gaze into the elusive, and ultimately fallacious, idea of ‘pure media’ can be observed. Dettmer’s and Beube’s concerns with the relation between knowledge and its physical, consumable form are but one intriguing issue that comes out of their intertextual work. If the sculpture is a collection of former books, does the viewer read the object or regard it? In proposing ‘the pictorial turn’40 in Picture Theory (1994) – the millennium-recent philosophical shift occurring in the human sciences and mass culture  – Mitchell cites models proposed by Charles Peirce in semiotics, Nelson Goodman’s Languages of Art, Michel Foucault on the discursive and the visible and Jacques Derrida’s grammatology and the decentring of phonocentric language, highlighting that these approaches ‘do not begin with the assumption that language is paradigmatic for meaning’.41 As demonstrative examples within that framework, Dettmer’s and Beube’s works automatically raise questions concerning how different media elicit different sensory experiences, focusing on the immediacy of the visual and elevating the problematic of turning a once-read object into a viewed one. In his travelling exhibition Elemental from the autumn of 2013, Dettmer elucidates the transformative effect of playing with image-text relations: ‘I also like the idea that I am taking a narrative or story developed by one person or group of people and breaking it down to basic textures or events without a narrative or plot.’42 Removing the linearity of the book is one of the first acts of destruction in the altered book. Dettmer is also interested in making the process transparent and evident in each piece. ‘I think it becomes more of an actual experience in this way, and it allows the viewers to take in disparate elements and appreciate or meditate on them individually, or to reconstruct their own narrative from what they see in the piece.’43 By allowing the viewer to ‘reconstruct their own narrative’, Dettmer engages in a facet of the image/text problematic in which meaning is provided only through a convoluted understanding of the form or purpose of the object.44 By allowing the viewer to create his or her own ‘narrative’, Dettmer undermines the initial information-giving nature of the content within the material object, and resets the process whereby locating meaning is put in the hands of the viewer, not as a reader but an observer – the distinction being that the latter regards the object non-linearly and thereby finds meaning in infinite variations of seeing. In Beube’s works such as Life (2003, a set of 1968 Life magazines sliced up and crossed over, similar to a complex, interwoven hair-braiding technique), Interfaith (2002, similarly constructed but made of an altered Bible) and Vest of Knowledge (2008, an imitation suicide vest in which streamers of paper text, contained within dynamite-shaped tubes and connected to electrodes, theoretically shoot out when activated, dispensing material from an Encyclopaedia Britannica), the effect of non-linear meaning is also overtly present. Beube generates a deliberately arbitrary reading device, in which each viewer, and at each viewing, comes away with something different. Beube says, ‘Books have physicality and a history. If you crush the pages you get beyond the linearity of the binding. The first page

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can relate to the last page.’45 The words can be read in any order imaginable as produced by the scope of the project and affected by the viewer. The beginning and end of the book interweave and intersect, permitting different readings to arise without the linear and conventional engagement of a page-turning reader. Instead, the reading viewer studies the content and creates endless interpretations in any manner conceivable. In the instance of Dettmer’s Brave New World, conventional understanding of media is challenged through the presentation of the cut-up text of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World into a sculpture resembling bookends. The text is cut back like steps ascending towards the centre of the two nearly converging halves, with a crevasse between them where the original book’s spine should be. Upon close inspection, the viewer indeed sees the original spine lying under the book with the title Brave New World still visible, and yet clearly there is a new sense to its menacing connotations. Why Dettmer’s Brave New World can cause a new sense of uneasiness, particularly without any expression of language, in the most basic of interpretations is indicative of Mitchell’s theory of the modern-day creative destruction of so-called idols. Whereas Mitchell argues that the destruction of images is also automatically a creative transformation into yet another image, I apply that analysis to the object, or object as image, specifically the object of the book as a cultural artefact, the bookwork. Mitchell certainly writes about objects, ‘things’ and cultural artefacts also, but his aim is more directly at images and the very notion that all objects are indeed images. The focus here is on the application of Mitchell’s theories directly to the bookwork of Dettmer and Beube precisely due to its engagement with books, which contain language and are themselves also complex bodies of images, which then are transformed into new bodies with and of new images. For instance, Dettmer’s Tower of Babble (2011; see figure 10.3) is constructed of thousands of pages spiralling vertically to create a pillar of mashed and seemingly incomprehensible sentence structures. Attention is drawn both to its monolithic design and its doubly incoherent ‘babble’ of words: the words are incomprehensible both because they are contained within the mythical tower of Babel and also because the contemporary spectator is aware of regarding the destroyed material of books that were otherwise readable. Thus, the work’s title ironically reinforces idolatry of the sculpture as a tower for worship, while simultaneously demonstrating its own iconoclasm, both through the materiality of the destruction of the book and the very concept of the tower of Babel, which itself is already an emblem of the inability of a complete and universal comprehension through a single language. Indeed, the tower of Babel signifies a destruction of such unison through language, standing as a paradoxical object of worship and corruption. The book as object becomes the idol destroyed by Dettmer and Beube, which is only to be transformed (via creative destruction) into a sculpture  – what Mitchell would call ‘a secondary image of defacement’.46 (Not insignificantly, Beube calls himself a biblioclast.) Drawing from Nietzsche, Mitchell calls this invocation of the first image a ‘sounding the idols’47 [Götzen aushorchen], insofar



Reading with a knife, or the book art of subtraction

10.3  Brian Dettmer, The Tower of Babble, 2011. Paperback books, acrylic varnish, 28 × 10½ × 10½ in.

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10.4  Doug Beube, City, 1990. Altered books created between 1990 and 1996, 16 × 36 × 16 in.

as the transformation does not, and ultimately cannot, destroy the original image but instead reveals beliefs and assumptions while also raising new questions by necessarily integrating that original image directly into the new image. Perhaps it is the case that ‘there are more idols than realities in the world’, as Nietzsche suggests, which require a sounding ‘with the hammer’, even if the result is ‘to hear that famous hollow sound that resonates from bloated entrails’.48 There exists an inherent impossibility in declaring the destruction of one image, since of course it is simply replaced by another. Thus the desire is not to move towards a metaphysics of meaning through destruction, but towards a mutual understanding of the first image through its recreation in the second. In Beube’s City (1990; see figure 10.4), an eclectic collection of books (novels, philosophy texts, a veterinary book, dictionaries, etc.) has been fanned out and reconstructed to resemble a city skyline, with each book representing an individual building. There are roughly seventeen books in the piece. Each one is of a different height and width, with their only collectively similar feature being the presence of the black ink running horizontally across them, like architectural elements of a skyscraper. The titles are not known, and so the origins of the books are unavailable in any particular sense to the viewer. Beube likens this effect to the urban space at large, where a building’s use, era, architect or other information are not visible to the naked eye. The only qualities present are the building’s shape and its voluminous capacity. Comparing the ‘teeming life contained within the many-storied towers’49 with the information contained in the books produces a similar analysis to that of Dettmer’s Tower of Babble, where chaos and ­anonymity are ironically the markers of something that attempts to be controlled and



Reading with a knife, or the book art of subtraction

orderly. Beube’s piece equally stands as the ‘secondary image of defacement’ in its inability (and lack of desire) to completely remove the signs of the original books, as well as their attendant effects on the viewer. In Tabula Magazine (2012) Dettmer explains that his early work in 2001 involved not the precise constructions he creates today but the aggressive boring of rough holes directly into books, ‘making various shapes while thinking about the dichotomy between the physical experience and the conceptual subject matter’.50 Describing the process of making his first work, Alternate Route to Knowledge, he writes: I stacked up a number of hard covered books and carved a rough hole in from the top. It looked like someone just dug a hole, or like an animal had burrowed into the books. I was exploring the dichotomy between physical labour or a sensual experience to the process of reading or studying to gain knowledge.51

Alternate Route to Knowledge is an irregularly stacked set of nondescript, hardback books through which a large, invasive-looking hole has been bored as though by an indiscriminate drill moving from the surface of the top book to the bottom. The title implies that the purpose of this act of drilling is an attempt to access the value contained within the linguistic content of the books. The fact that this is impossible again sets the materiality of the book in opposition to its primary purpose. Beube has produced similar works, including Ruffled Collar (2004), an English–French dictionary with a hole bored through it, the book then fanned out to make a cylinder; Spanish to English Speakers (2003), a Spanish–English dictionary also with a large hole bored through it; Myth and Guilt (1994), which has a hand-sized chunk like a puzzle piece removed from the spine; and Reading Table: Read Whole (1994), which is a coffee table composed of roughly eighty books lying in eleven stacks wherein the top surface of each stack of books contains a large hole. This interest in physically exploring the potential, or perhaps theoretical essence, of the book can be related to what Mitchell calls the disfigurement that the iconoclast performs on the idolater’s icon or false image. The iconoclast and idolater both regard images with suspicion and wonder. Through an unexpected form of iconoclasm, with these pieces Dettmer and Beube evoke the unsuspecting spectator’s own idolatry by calling attention to the deliberate destruction of the book. The books appear as prized objects that have been disfigured by the iconoclast (or biblioclast). At the same time, the roughness of the hole that marks the books’ ‘destruction’ contrasts dramatically with the spectator’s simultaneous understanding of the piece as a work of art, thus producing the paradoxical effect of also establishing a new idolatry directed towards the very objects created by Dettmer and Beube. When Mitchell asks ‘what do pictures want?’ he is suggesting that our desire to discover the insides of images comes from this mixed belief in the image’s hidden power (or, naturally, lack thereof). Dettmer’s and Beube’s physical manifestation of this process – literally accessing the insides of images in the form of the ­book-object – presents Mitchell’s double consciousness in full force: the spectator

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is simultaneously mystified by the supposed unnatural and unexplainable violation of the book while also apprehending that action as producing the work of art. Strangely, however, the new work of art produces an absolutely new mystification. Mitchell suggests that our usual way of rationalising this double-consciousness is through attributing the ‘naïve, magical, superstitious side’ to ‘someone else’, such as ‘primitives, children, the masses, the illiterate, the uncritical, the illogical, the “Other”’.52 The ‘hard-headed, critical, and sceptical position’53 is thus claimed as one’s own. Nevertheless, both attitudes exist in modern ‘human responses to representation’,54 just as they did in historical ones. Dettmer echoes Mitchell’s theory when he says: ‘I want people to think about books. Think about them as living things, as tangible objects with potential to transform our perception of the physical world around us.’55 To this end, he presents those materials in a manner that necessarily and immediately evokes a double consciousness in his viewer. Beube elucidates the crux of his own project when he states: ‘I’m trying to solve the problem of how to experience the content of the book as a visual phenomenon by layering it and transforming it into a visual object.’56 Books become transformative in how we perceive objects in the world when they begin to display their own objectness with such directness and immediacy; in other words, when they become visual objects and no longer read ones. When this occurs, they still manage to retain their power over us as sacred containers of knowledge, but they are also violated and reduced to material; and yet, at the same time, they are recreated into even more powerful objects in their bookwork transformation, generating a double consciousness2. The viewer is mesmerised, under the spell and control of the unexpected shift in appearance and, hence, function. Dettmer’s and Beube’s works open up new analyses of books, images and their potential obsolescence – an obsolescence and double consciousness that their works themselves encourage and are part of creating. It is also due to the fact that Dettmer and Beube resist the transition towards electronic material that their work can be seen as a form of iconoclasm: namely, a creative destruction of the book as image and living object in order to bring to light its shifting cultural role and potentially impending archaism. Mitchell writes, ‘In acknowledging the life of images, we flirt with idolatry and fetishism, which makes us either fools or knaves, taken in by an illusion that we project onto things, or (even worse) perversely and cynically perpetrate on others.’57 Our fear of images and what they may mean is presented through how we create and respond to bookworks (and other art objects) like Dettmer’s and Beube’s. Not only does our compulsion towards idolatry and the belief in the mysterious power of images lead us to produce and revere art, but that same drive compels us to iconoclasm and to disdain productions that paradoxically appear to violate that idolatrous reverence. Dettmer’s and Beube’s exploration into the literal insides of books is an attempt to get at what is unseen, to explore the dichotomy of the physical object and its conceptual status, and yet of course the process itself is a work of art in the making – from one double consciousness to another. If images have desires, insofar as we permit them such desires through this double consciousness, we



Reading with a knife, or the book art of subtraction

must then ask, as Mitchell does, what is it that pictures lack? In other words, what drives us to imagine them as seeking something through their visual presence? Mitchell cautiously aligns this sense of lack with that of the subaltern, because, he says, ‘If the power of images is like the power of the weak, that may be why their desire is correspondingly strong: to make up for their actual impotence.’58 Mitchell reveals that pictures are surely less powerful than we imagine, and it is only through critical idolatry that we can begin to better understand our engagement with them as both enigmatic beings and speechless objects. In the case of Dettmer and Beube, we might begin by asking what do books lack? In other words, why does the destruction and/or imminent obsolescence of books make us so uncomfortable? There are two points to be made here. The first is that the image of the book represents, among other things, a value for knowledge and meaning. The second point underlies this entire essay, which is Mitchell’s general claim: ‘the theory of images […] is really about the fear of images’.59 Ultimately, it is our double consciousness that ties us to believe in the value of books as powerful (or at least desiring) objects, the depths of which we cannot fathom. The next level, which highlights the final and most obtuse point here, is to ask: what does sculpture lack? (Or perhaps, more pointedly, what do bookworks lack?) For it is here that Dettmer and Beube develop another layer to Mitchell’s analysis by not only creating the secondary image in their work, but by combining, even manipulating, text and image together into an ever more mystifying construction that defies either conventional textual or visual analysis. As Roland Barthes explains, ‘language cannot be exhausted to the extent that it would be able to pierce what is non-language’.60 Dettmer’s Organized Knowledge in Story and Picture is named after the subtitle of a set of World Book Encyclopaedias from 1919. He explains that he found this title ‘humorously over descriptive, which my work could be also’.61 He describes the process of the piece’s construction: ‘A whole set of encyclopaedias are folded back on to themselves sort of in this brick-like pattern but creating a shape that reminds me of the dollar bill. It also reminds me of flight, and also seems iconic, or has some kind of religious-type artefact feeling.’62 Evoking language akin to Mitchell’s of iconology, idolatry, religious totemism and so on, Dettmer and Beube recognise the double consciousness2 that their works trigger. The viewer wants to retain the book in the sculpture but must regard the sculpture as a new object, now wholly visual (with its own desire and lack). Dettmer explains what he hopes to provoke in the viewer: to think about objects that we take for granted as being solid and non-changeable. To explore random, isolated images and ideas and expose new relationships. To take a solid story and break it up into pieces so that the viewer can put those pieces back together or at least appreciate them.63

Both a celebration of the former book and of its annihilation, the bookwork of Dettmer and Beube leaves the viewer in awe of the creative destruction as though it has a life of its own that has been both violated and renewed.

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In ‘The Constantly Shifting Real’ from Breaking the Codex, Karen de Weille describes the effect of regarding a Beube bookwork: Viewing a particular piece, we find our awareness shifts between two interconnected states, as we apprehend now the physical presence, now the abstract concept; now the inanimate object, now the living mind; now body, now spirit. Each work is taut with the life that stretches between the material and the ineffable.64

The bookwork has a life of its own, which the viewer regards with fluctuating responses within the layers of the double consciousness2 that include apprehension of its mystery and power, contempt or distaste for the original destruction and awe for the unexpected effects of the new transformation. Beube’s bookwork A Void: Consonants and Vowels (after Georges Perec) serves here as a fierce example of provoking the double consciousness2 in the way that it addresses the final reintroduction of the text into the image through the very particular literary technique of Oulipo writer Georges Perec. Based on Perec’s novel A Void (French: La Disparition), which nowhere contains the letter ‘e’, thereby echoing the massive loss of the Holocaust (in which the author’s parents died), Beube’s bookwork is a collection of empty spaces and single consonants and vowels here and there; a collection, as he says, of ‘obliterated text’ on a page that cannot be read and is therefore ‘a memory of a memory’.65 It refers to loss on multiple levels. Focusing on the ‘loss’ of the book, Dettmer and Beube raise the issue of image/ object value not only in terms of its use or functionality but also in terms of its status as an organism in its own right, with its own power, desires and needs. As seen in the creative destruction of their sculptures, books acquire a distinct source of power through their subtraction: they mystically become desiring and meaningful organisms whose source of value eludes the viewer. Their fading away from functional book to mystifying sculpture reconfirms how we still cannot (and never could) truly locate an essence. Dettmer and Beube engage Mitchell’s dual nature of the iconoclasm of images by constructing a sculpture/image out of a text/image, raising questions for which the answers, Mitchell explains, first require a new understanding of our relationship with images. The effect of Dettmer’s and Beube’s sculptures is not simply in observing this subtraction or creative destruction, but in recognising the ‘double consciousness squared’ that is produced with the bookwork, and in reimagining that structure in light of the creative destruction.

Notes   1 William Ganis, ‘Cinematic Booking’, in Doug Beube (ed.), Doug Beube: Breaking the Codex, Bookwork, Collage and Mixed Media (Brooklyn: Etc. Etc. The Iconoclastic Museum Press, 2011), p. 35.   2 Brian Dettmer in interview with the author via email, Paris/Chicago, 1 March 2012.



Reading with a knife, or the book art of subtraction

  3 Brian Dettmer speaking in the online video Movers and Shakers (2011), www.youtube. com/watch?v=Hs7DmaTCx5M (accessed 24 August 2015).   4 W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 18.   5 Ibid., p. 7.   6 Ibid., p. 11.   7 Ibid., p. 19.   8 Betty Bright, ‘From Feast to Faultlines: Charting the Territories’, in Beube (ed.), Doug Beube: Breaking the Codex, p. 17.   9 Brian Dettmer interviewed by Anne and Julien, ‘Brian Dettmer: Paper Break’, Hey!, 7 (September 2011), 54–63, 62. 10 Beube, artist statement, http://dougbeube.com/home.html. 11 Marie Dormoy, ‘Quand l’art opère à livre ouvert’ [When Art Conducts an Open Book Operation], Ça m’intéresse (12 July 2011), 86–7, 87. 12 Ibid., p. 86. 13 Dettmer, email interview with the author. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 Dettmer interviewed by Serra Shih, ‘Book Art: Brian Dettmer’, dpi magazine, 148 (August 2011), 38–43, 41. 17 Dettmer, email interview with the author. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, rev. 4th edn (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), p. 67. 21 Again, not under examination here are those works by Beube that incorporate new elements, such as Zipper Theory: Facing Shame Tomorrow (2005/2010) and Border Crossing: In the War Room (2006), each composed of a series of pages from a book, (maps in the case of Border Crossing) that are cut and divided then reconnected with zippers, allowing for new variations by an interactive viewer. 22 Anne and Julien, ‘Brian Dettmer: Paper Break’, 62. 23 Diana Linden’s description is fantastic: ‘What remains of the paper is a fragile skeletal frame; the once void spaces between the vanquished – and vanished – words now constitute the positive space, which in turn creates a lacy pattern of absence and presence.’ Diana L. Linden, ‘The Presence of Absence’, in Beube (ed.), Doug Beube: Breaking the Codex, p. 113. 24 Beube, artist statement on artwork The Silent Question, http://dougBeube.com/ artwork/2154617_The_Silent_Question.html. 25 Ibid. 26 Linden, ‘The Presence of Absence’, p. 119. 27 Brian Dettmer interviewed by Laura McGrane in Brian Dettmer: Elemental (Haverford: Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, 2013), p. 25. 28 Beube, artist statement on http://dougbeube.com/home.html. 29 Johanna Drucker, Spec Lab: Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 134. 30 Ibid., p. 134. 31 Ibid., p. 140.

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Mixed messages 32 Ibid. 33 Linden, ‘The Presence of Absence’, p. 113. 34 Drucker writes ‘I am convinced that many of these works belong more to the world of sculpture or installation art than to the world of books. They may function as icons of book-ness or book identity, but not provide an experience associated with books themselves.’ Johanna Drucker, The Century of Artists’ Books (New York: Granary Books, 1995), p. 10. 35 Descriptive text to online video of Beube’s practice in Doug Beube: Re-Breaking the Codex (2012), posted by the Halsey Institute to accompany the exhibition Rebound: Dissections and Excavations in Book Art. http://vimeo.com/67159248. 36 Beube, artist statement on Re-breaking the Codex, http://dougBeube.com/artwork/ 2933849_Re_Breaking_the_Codex.html. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid. 39 Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, p. 211. See also the Introduction to this volume. 40 Ibid., p. 11. 41 Ibid., pp. 11–12. 42 McGrane, Brian Dettmer: Elemental, p. 29. 43 Tristan Manco, Raw + Material = Art: Found, Scavenged and Upcycled (London: Thames & Hudson, 2012), p. 88. 44 Note the three typographical and hence conceptual distinctions Mitchell makes with the terms ‘image’ and ‘text’ in Picture Theory: ‘image/text’ is ‘the problematic gap, cleavage or rupture in representation’; ‘imagetext’ is used to designate ‘composite, synthetic works (or concepts) that combine image and text’; and ‘image-text’ is used for ‘relations of the visual and verbal’. W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 89. 45 Beube quoted in Diana McClure, ‘Living Arts: Doug Beube, F.Y.I.’, The Local (4 November 2009), http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:p3uFINpDvRgJ:fortgreene.thelocal.nytimes.com/2009/11/04/living-arts-doug-beube-fyi/%3Fsrc%3Dtwr %26pagewanted%3Dprint+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us. 46 Ibid., p. 18. 47 Friedrich Nietzsche, Der Fall Wagner / Götzen-Dämmerung / Nietzsche contra Wagner (Berlin: Goldmann, 1999), p. 49. 48 Ibid., p. 49, ‘[e]s gibt mehr Götzen als Realitäten in der Welt’; ‘mit dem Hammer’; ‘jenen berühmten hohlen Ton hören, der von geblähten Eingeweiden redet’ (my translation). 49 Beube, artist statement on City, http://dougBeube.com/artwork/2154527_City.html.
 50 Brian Dettmer interviewed by Alex Machavariani, ‘Brian Dettmer’, Tabula Magazine (2011), 82–7, 83. 51 Brian Dettmer interviewed by Jian Wang, ‘Brian Dettmer’, Bizmode Magazine (April 2012), 138–41, 141. 52 Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, p. 7. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid. 55 Serra Shih, ‘Book Art: Brian Dettmer’, p. 43. 56 Judith Hoffberg, ‘A Cut-Up and a Book Artist’, in Beube (ed.), Doug Beube: Breaking the Codex, p. 153.



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57 Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, p. 93. 58 Ibid., p. 33. 59 Ibid., p. 96. 60 My translation. Roland Barthes, Le bruissement de la langue: Essais critiques IV [The Rustle of Language: Critical Essays IV] (Paris: Seuil, 1984): ‘l’espace de l’écriture est à parcourir, il n’est pas à percer’, p. 66. 61 Brian Dettmer speaking in the online video Movers and Shakers (2011), www.youtube. com/watch?v=Hs7DmaTCx5M (accessed 24 August 2015). 62 Ibid. 63 Ibid. 64 Karen de Weille, ‘The Constantly Shifting Real’, in Beube (ed.), Doug Beube: Breaking the Codex, p. 83. 65 Beube, artist statement on work entitled A Void after Georges Perec (2004), www. bookarts.uwe.ac.uk/news-archive/bwr08/av1.htm.

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The idea, the machine and the art: word and image in the twenty-first century. Envoi1 Catherine Gander and Sarah Garland In this collection we have been arguing, both explicitly and by implication, that image and text works be considered as mixed, blended and hybrid forms that are embedded in bodily and cognitive experience. These moments of attention to word and image are themselves rooted in particular moments in history, and within particular interior and exterior geographies where ‘the idea becomes a machine that makes the art’, as Sol LeWitt wrote in 1967.2 We are therefore advocating an essentially pragmatic approach to multimedia, mixed media and intermedia works which unites the sensual and symbolic in cognition, perception and affect, and which allows for a set of correspondences between verbal and visual elements. We seek to reassert the material aspects of these works, and to interlace analysis of the figurative and the imagistic with the concrete and literal. For all this, though, we are aware that there can be no self-evident materiality, and our interest in the book and the artwork as object, and in reasserting the pragmatic tradition, may itself be prompted by our own writerly contexts in an increasingly globalised and digital world  – by virtual landscapes, by a conception of the multimedia that privileges that which can be coded and recalled through a graphical user interface, and by daily lives in which much of our experience of image and text is now coming to us on a screen, through speakers and on platforms that are controlled and structured by (often, but not always, American) commercial, multi-national interests and corporations. The trajectory of this volume, from the merging of poetics and built environment in a distinctly American vernacular architectural form, to contemporary artworks as responses to international historical events both in international exhibition contexts and as a response to notions of globalised codices, asks us to continue to think about developments in relationships between image, text and location in more and more nuanced ways. The imagetext, in the manner that the essays in this volume have understood it after Mitchell’s initial coinage, rather than being the rarefied thing implied by the separation of academic visual and verbal disciplines, is now a constant everyday presence in the arrangement of mass and social media. Our media environment almost invariably takes mixed and hybrid forms, and – facilitated by the relative



The idea, the machine and the art

cheapness of digital reproduction  – increasingly image and caption-led forms. Newspapers, magazines, advertisements and web pages join up with phototexts, social media pages, Instagram and Pinterest sites in networks of comments, weblinks and quotation that attempt to merge digital arenas with each other, to provide frictionless continuity with print and broadcast forms through allied image and text content. The ‘experience economy’ underlying the themed designs of many shops, restaurants, galleries and graphic design-led products exists in concert with these hybrid forms, fusing art, architecture, sound, touch and smell to bring images and texts together in a parallel emphasis on highly styled, immersive environments.3 In the contemporary arts, too, there is a consistent move towards immersive, synaesthetic practice and hybrid combinations of digital, symbolic, mechanical and analogue forms. (Here we are using analogue in the colloquial sense to designate the non-digital, or to point to elements or types of work whose physical ontology remains part of their primary mode of signification.) Artists such as Eva-Maria Bolz (Germany), David Strang and Madi Boyd (both UK) and Andy Holtin (USA) are among many new international practitioners whose work blends synaesthesic experience of the world with neurological studies and/or perceptual interfaces that encourage embodied viewer participation. Their exhibition at Art Laboratory Berlin’s dedicated international SYNAESTHESIA series (October 2012–July 2013) showcased the increasing emergence of image and text artworks that offer aesthetic experience in new configurations of multi-sensory perception and push the established boundaries of symbolic systems.4 Bolz, for example, a grapheme and lexical synaesthete, explores the relationships between colour, text and visuality as she unchangingly experiences numbers, letters and even words as specific colours. The wall of ‘text’ in Der Innere Monitor (‘The Inner Monitor’) – a grid of colour blocks translating Oscar Wilde’s The Rose and the Nightingale – prompts considerations of perceptual variance as it re-perceives linguistic methods of meaning-making to evoke an emotional response different but akin to the response generated by Wilde’s original words.5 It is tempting to set up an opposition here between digital and non-digital somaesthetics; between the bodily experience of printed, painted, photographed and assembled imagetexts and the bodily experiences brought to us through touchscreens and display screens. Notions of tactility take different forms in the digital world, as does smell. Audio and visual are much more likely to be united in a digital imagetext, and digital film offers different affordances to celluloid, and, as embedded frames, to digital imagetexts themselves. While attending to the synaesthetic, somaesthetic effects of, say, an immersive art exhibit such as Ann Hamilton’s myein seems a relatively straightforward fulfilment of the artist’s aims, a consideration of the centrality of the body in hypertexts and digital artworks appears more of a stretch of the imagination. But stretching the imagination is the point: the most promising researches into the social and cultural impact of new media and digital technologies do not locate cognitive process and aesthetic experience as something dematerialised, abstract or disembodied; they follow

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Marshall McLuhan’s prescient contention that all media are ‘extensions of man’ to argue for reconceptualisations of the machine–body interface along lines that include Extended Mind Theory, embodied information aesthetics and ethicoaesthetics.6 There also looks to be no obvious narrative emerging about the fate of the book in the age of the digital. Graphic design plays an increasingly large part in the presentation of commercial texts, bringing even pages printed without pictures closer to the kinds of imagistic typographical considerations that we might use to interpret L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, concrete poetry, Dada collage, calligrammes and illuminated manuscripts. However, the contemporary ubiquity of these marked forms suggests that, paradoxically, they may no longer be experienced by readers as differentiated. Many commercial texts are now multi-platform, and this kind of re-mediation highlights the changed kinaesthetic experience of the digital imagetext.7 As Johanna Drucker outlines in Figuring the Word (1998), the scrolling and hyperlinked nature of the digital page fundamentally changes the spatial experience of a digital text, creating a new experience of movement ‘into’ and ‘through’ the page, intimating an extended movement down the page, and maintaining only tenuous connections between the size of the pages. 8 This vocabulary of going ‘into’ and ‘through’ that connects language to bodily experience (and indeed our own use of scare quotes to designate the spatiality of the web) reminds us that Lakoff and Johnson’s image schema still remain pertinent. However, those bodily cues are now captured in media where, particularly on tablets, one is mimicking the perception of volitional threedimensional movement through a screen in zooms, pans and pinches, rather than moving wholesale through them via footsteps or on wheels. The dimensions of bodily orientation and scale that were always a central part of the presentation of visual art are reformulated in a fundamental way with tablet gyroscopes and extreme zoom functionality, so that, as James Elkins points out in an essay on the extremely magnified views of paintings now possible through Google Art Project, we can now make a single set of brushstrokes so large that we ‘cannot tell what the limits of ordinary vision are’. ‘For that,’ he states, ‘you have to go to the original.’ 9 Drucker’s summary in Graphesis (2014) suggests that the way forward in terms of the book as artefact may in fact be many ways, all of which remain tied to bodily senses of orientation and scale, but many of which find their materiality outside of the archival source of the material: The ‘book’ of the future will combine reading and writing, annotation and social media, text processing and analysis, data mining and mind mapping, searching and linking, indexing and display, image parsing and distant reading, in a multi-modal, cross-platform, inter-media environment. Pages will be temporary configurations based on calls to repositories and datasets. We will ‘publish’ our data trails as guidebooks for the experience of reading, pointing to milestones and portals for in-depth exploration of stories, inventories, and the rich combination of cultural heritage and social life in a global world. 10



The idea, the machine and the art

Drucker’s own continuing work as a theorist and as a book artist also suggests that the story of image and text in the age of the digital may not be a simple metamorphosis from one form to another, that here too there is correspondence and coexistence. Indeed, as a response to the digital turn, we are currently seeing a renewed popular interest in notions of craft and performance, as well as a continued interest in material artefacts, including forms that, like artists’ multiples and collectors’ pieces, sit between artisanal and mass produced. The medium still matters in re-mediation: artists’ agents and copyright holders still often withhold permission for digital reproduction rights unless there is proof that the scale, colour and layout will not reflect the original work poorly or inappropriately. Here, as with the newer hybrid archival forms such as filmed for cinema broadcasts from major art exhibitions and performances, the digital is still often treated as a form of (often problematic) container rather than as a presentation in its own right.11 The differences between print and electronic versions of image and text works are particularly in evidence in commentary on the digitisation and new media production of avant-garde poetry, a genre where, as Alan Golding argues, reprising Jerome McGann’s statement in Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism, it is especially obvious that ‘the way poems are printed and distributed is part of their meaning’.12 Golding’s readings of works by Steve McCaffrey, Robert Grenier, Madeline Gins and Charles Bernstein reminds us of the ways in which those poets who associate themselves with the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E movement always considered the visuality of the word and the page, often working ‘on the edge of what is usually called “writing,” proposing that work ranging from non-alphabetic, glyph-like designs to hand-produced letter-like drawings to barely legible palimpsests to simple pen strokes can be seen/read under the sign of poetry’, and he charts the continuing attention to visual form in their translations on to the internet or in new web-based work.13 Golding appeals to those theorists who assess the degrees of materiality of the electronic text (not merely its platform) such as Drucker, N. Katherine Hayles and Loss Pequeño Glazier in order to argue for a concept of ‘transitional materialities’ that ‘places different materialities on a spectrum rather than in opposition to each other’.14 Against the binary that labels print static, sequential, ordered and solid, and electronic text dynamic, interactive, fluid and chaotic, Golding places the work of poets who, through their attention to the potentials of language’s materiality, treat words as productively unstable and mutable, raising ‘questions about seeing and reading, the mark and the sign, circulation and distribution, and the meaning of “materiality”’ that, we would agree, ‘seem crucial to thinking about new media poetries’.15 Of course, formal innovation is always embedded in larger issues of distribution and patronage, and digital culture’s very medium  – popular, ubiquitous, corporate-run, a key technology in state-surveillance practices  – challenges the avant-garde status of work that utilises it as a platform. This in turn amplifies questions about the autonomy and commercialisation of earlier modernist

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avant-gardes.16 Between 1969 and 1972 even conceptual art eventually became mainstream and commercialised, despite predictions that it was too dematerialised for this to happen, leading Lucy Lippard to conclude with some disillusion in 1973 that ‘whatever minor revolutions in communication have been achieved by the process of dematerialising the object’, ‘art and artists in a capitalist society remain luxuries’.17 Even without the aura or materiality of a traditional artefact, regulation of art reproduction in the form of platform and international copyright legislation inevitably allows control of access, and problematises simplistic notions of the digital world as fully deterritorialised. The lexicon of the digital  – with its rhizomatic networks, multi-modality and insistence on participation  – would seem not only to speak loudly to the concepts and methodologies explored in this book, but to represent a new world of imagetextuality wherein the potentialities for verbal and visual interfaces to extend ­tempero-spatial boundaries might both be met and unfold. However, we are cautious about asserting the new multimedia as a radical break with the older versions of mixed and intermedia that the writers in this volume examine. As Golding points out, the connection between hypertexts and the avant-garde tradition is by now a widely proposed one.18 Several digital humanities scholars draw on the imagination of Jorge Luis Borges, for example his stories ‘The Aleph’ or ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’, to analogise the internet’s expanding and looping, infinite information structure, and to invoke Borges’s sense of ‘consciousness constantly reforming itself, of an utterance constantly in the process of translation’19 in relation to the digital’s capacity to do the same.20 New media can perhaps be understood most obviously as the (re-)encoding of modernist experimental positions; at the height of modernism in the USA and in Europe, new techniques in typography, in picturing multiple perspectives, in montage, collage and constructivist design all challenged bourgeois norms. As Lev Manovich notes, these innovations ‘now define the basic routine of post-industrialist society: the interaction with a computer’.21 Manovich utilises this indisputable point to make a disputable one: that new media is therefore the ‘new avant-garde’, because its innovations in image and text, across the temporal and the spatial, are ‘at least as radical as the formal innovations of the 1920s’.22 However, Manovich also notes that the new media avant-garde is only concerned with accessing and manipulating visual and written information; the ‘make it new’ paradigm of modernism is here reconfigured as ‘access and utilise it anew’. Both Manovich and Janet Murray have pointed out that the 1960s represent another cultural moment in which new media practices germinated, offering a set of intertexts for digital practices that intersect productively with many of the essays in this volume on post-war works. In addition to the participatory aspect of several installations, performances and happenings which may give us a way of understanding the rhetoric of participation that is invoked in Web 2.0, the art world saw the emergence of conceptual art, which positioned an artwork as an open system, textual fragment or temporal process.23 Indeed, as Manovich notes, new media artists such as Jeffrey Shaw and Roy Ascott began their art careers in



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the 1960s, and the visual ‘combinatorics’ of Sol LeWitt (and the verbal combinatorics of Oulipo) anticipated computational algorithms. Moves towards the ‘dematerialisation’ of the artwork grew through the decade, with Ted Nelson (‘the conceptual father of the hypertext’) the only computer scientist to directly apply the era’s radical artistic ideas to computer design.24 Lucy Lippard traced as early as 1967 the shift in the postmodern art world from the invested object to the dematerialised concept.25 A clerk in the library of the Museum of Modern Art, New York at the same time as Sol LeWitt was on the night desk and Robert Ryman was a guard, and just a few years after Frank O’Hara had been working as front of house and then guest curator, Lippard saw what she then labelled ‘“ultra-conceptual art” emerging from two directions: art as idea and art as action’.26 Both of these starting points, but especially the latter, meant that Anglo-American art during the late 1960s and early 1970s was both a product of and a reaction to the political ferment of the era.27 Nancy Spero was one of a group of artists organising against the Vietnam War (the first ‘televised’ war, whose images were as heavily censored as those of the ‘war on terror’), as well as pushing a strong feminist agenda, and Lippard implies that conceptual art’s offering of ‘a bridge between the verbal and the visual’ facilitated the activation of such ideas.28 In our current time of wars, more than one being fought by the USA on foreign soil as part of the larger fight against global terrorism, this bridge becomes ever more vital. W. J. T. Mitchell has suggested that terrorism comprises ‘a war of words and images carried by the mass media’, ‘a form of psychological warfare whose aim is the demoralisation of the enemy and not the direct destruction of military personnel or equipment’.29 Mitchell’s contention, however, is that the failure of both the verbal and the visual to speak or represent the full horror of contemporary warfare resides at least partly in the tendency of both visual and verbal image-making and warmongering to engage in reproduction and proliferation practices that Mitchell connects with biotechnical cloning. But as Anna Munster has noted in her discussion of ‘the clone, the sample and the differential’ in digital information aesthetics, the concept of cloning has existed more as an unstable, if titillating, link between science and the public imagination than as a scientifically successful integrational practice.30 Mitchell’s observation connects, however, with a recent ‘aesthetics of terror’ that has permeated not only popular culture but art galleries across the globe since the events of September 11, 2001. Curator Manon Slome has drawn upon the work of artists such as Coco Fusco, Harun Farocki and Jon Kessler to argue that such an aesthetics engages us in a sense of ‘critical citizenship’, prompting us to interrogate the new economy of images, whereas Dorothea Keeser, president of the Chelsea Art Museum, cancelled Slome’s show ahead of its opening in 2008 for fear of its lack of respect towards terrorism’s victims. The digital indifference to temporal and spatial boundaries here, and the distribution of repeated image and text works across those realms, contributes to a troubling of the notions of private and public speech which are at present being negotiated in debates about the links between seeing and imagining, and

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between shaming, appropriation and offence, and which are direct responses to the rhizomatic structure of global hypertextual linking and duplication. The situation McLuhan speculated upon in 1960 in which ‘electronic media contract the world to a village or tribe where everything happens to everyone at the same time’ is now part of the developed world’s real and everyday cultural concerns: ‘everyone knows about, and therefore participates in, everything that is happening the minute it happens’.31 The digital realm’s disregard for such limitation might also be logically traced back to conceptual art’s quintessential indifference to temporal and spatial boundaries. As artist Mel Bochner wrote in 1970, ‘a fundamental assumption in much recent past art was that things have stable properties, i.e. boundaries. This seemingly simple premise became the basis for a spiralling series of conclusions. Boundaries, however, are only the fabrication of our desire to detect them.’32 Arguing that the root word of ‘imagination’ – image – ought not to be considered only in terms of substitution, representation and reference, but in terms of ‘a shift in referential frames of the viewer from the space of events to the space of statements or vice versa’, Bochner saw the imagination as ‘a projection, the exteriorising of ideas about the nature of things seen’: It reproduces that which is initially without product. A good deal of what we are ‘seeing’ we are, in this sense, actually imagining. There is an overlap in the mind of these two dissimilar activities. We cannot see what we cannot imagine.33

Bochner’s point, which is embedded in the pluralism that all pragmatist pursuits espouse, connects to his dismantlement of the term ‘dematerialisation’. Contending that the term is unhelpful in its segregation of the components of an artwork, Bochner saw ‘dematerialisation’ as a result of a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of ‘abstraction’. If all abstract art was founded on ‘the belief in a first-level reality composed of constituent and separate qualities’, then the itemisation and amplification of those constituents (colour, form, texture, etc.) in search of a truer ‘reality’ is flawed from the outset: ‘it simply is not possible to break things down into classifiable components, at least not without destroying the essential unity that is their existence’.34 When Lippard stated in 1997 that ‘the process of extending the boundaries’ has not ceased but rather depends upon new artists to ‘plug into’ the ‘energies’ that will be ‘potential fuel for the expansion of what “art” can mean’, her words also seemed to hint at the potentialities of the digital, computational realm. In keeping with the genealogy Manovich suggests, combinations of image and text in the age of the digital in many ways offer an intensification of the tropes of postmodernity. The internet is as much an archive of easy accessibility and redistribution as a new medium (and indeed large amounts of digital humanities scholarship consists of re-imagining and deterritorialising the archive). The presentation of poetry, for example, across the web works to underscore Mitchell’s argument that ‘all media are multimedia’ as texts are frequently paired with readings, with visual presentations of varying degrees of appropriateness, and closely ‘linked’



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(in the digital sense) to visual, manuscript and critical works.35 Indeed, Matthew Wilson Smith argues for a tradition in which Bauhaus theatre, Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable and Disneyland might be considered as varieties of the gesamtkunstwerk, and there is a connecting line to be drawn between this notion of a total work of art and between readings like those proposed by some of this volume’s contributors that emphasise the neglected oral, aural, tactile or kinaesthetic elements of works like illustrated books, graphic novels or concrete poetry as subtle inflections of aesthetic experience.36 The Electronic Poetry Centre (EPC), the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH), UbuWeb, PennSound, Poetry Foundation and Poets.org, to name a few of the poetry repositories, take their cue from modernist and mid-century experimentalism to create experiences which, while they are too private in their modes of consumption to be considered fully allied to Dada or neo-Dada performance art, nevertheless grow out of the packaging of art (and anti-art) as experienced in Cabaret Voltaire, or in publications like the 1960s avant-garde ‘magazine in a box’, Aspen, originally produced in New York by Roaring Fork Press, and now hosted on UbuWeb, which gave its readers films to project, sculptures to build, scores to perform and incensescented kites to construct. (One 1968 advert for the magazine promises that ‘being three-dimensional, and therefore not limited to the printed word it stimulates touch and hearing as well as sight like no two-dimensional magazine has ever done before’.)37 Aspen commissioned, and was the original venue for, Roland Barthes’s ‘Death of the Author’, and Barthes’s argument, in Richard Howard’s translation for the magazine, that a text is ‘a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture’ anticipates many of the ongoing debates about copyright and authorship that still characterise the digital arts.38 In another way, ideas of access and re-mediation might be taken to be the absolute opposite of a modernist Greenbergian sense of medium specificity, but it may be the case that, over time, the increasing ubiquity of digital works further increases the value of printed, crafted and individually assembled objects. And here too there are some ironies at play in the promise of democratic and universal ‘access’ in the more utopian digital discourses if the hyperreal increases the value of the real, and that real is priced as a collector’s piece partly as a response to digital reproduction. While the ‘appropriation of other artists’ works or words, sometimes mutually agreed-upon as a kind of collaboration’ was a ‘Conceptual strategy’, Lippard tells us, in the realm of the digital appropriation, quotation, linking, referencing and collaborative authorship now form its very structures, and our navigation of these structures  – what is referred to in the quotation from Drucker above, as well as in digital humanities scholarship more generally, as our traces  – constitutes a second-level narrative in a way that was not possible, or perhaps even desirable, in earlier twentieth-century dematerialised and immaterial art.39 Anna Munster currently leads the field in eschewing the Cartesian dualism that still commonly connects the computational to the disembodied, placeless and formless, by espousing a ‘materialisation’ of digital culture via a reconfiguration of bodily experience and materiality.40 In her ground-breaking book Materializing

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New Media, Munster argues for the need to radically challenge the appraisal of digital culture as one that has been shaped by binary logic stemming from outdated (and misapprehended) Cartesian schema, proposing instead an idea of embodiment that is ‘both sensate and virtual’.41 Aiming to redirect common assumptions that phenomena such as virtual reality and telepresent artworks augment ‘a distance from both the material of our bodies and the ability of art to directly affect the senses’, Munster suggests that ‘the incorporeal vectors of digital information draw out the capacities of our bodies to become other than matter conceived as mere vessel for consciousness or a substrate for signal’.42 (Think, for example, of the proprioceptive engagements of our bodies in many information interfaces in which actual and virtual gesture are fed back to each other in interaction.) Noting that N. Katherine Hayles has termed this entering ‘the condition of virtuality’, Munster advises that we also conceive of such experiences as pushing somatic boundaries by understanding that ‘our bodies are immanently open to these kinds of technically symbiotic transformations’.43 Hayles offers an equally promising perspective, reminding us in her introduction to Mark B. N. Hansen’s Embodying Technesis that she shares with the theorists we cited in our Introduction  – including Mark Turner on cognitive science, Lakoff and Johnson on cognitive linguistics and Andy Clark on the ‘extended mind’ model  – ‘a conviction that human cognition does not stand apart from the world of technical objects but remains deeply immersed within it’.44 From Hansen’s point of view (with reference to the work of phenomenologist and philosopher Don Ihde) this means that ‘technologies underlie and inform our basic “ways of seeing” the world and thus cannot be thematised as “objects”’.45 Janet Murray puts it this way: ‘the digital medium is as much a pattern of thinking and perceiving as it is a pattern of making things’.46 For Hansen, this means that a whole sub-verbal realm of perception is conditioned by our experience of the digital in fundamental ways; the digital, he argues, offers a serious challenge to the rhetoric of immediacy that we find in phenomenology by integrating into our lives calculations and data that operate beyond the capabilities of consciousness. The speed and scope of calculation within the digital, he asserts in Feed Forward, means that we are always late, following behind massive and micro-calculations that are never directly perceptible to us.47 From a pragmatist’s point of view this digital metaphysic nevertheless needs to be encountered at those sites of perception and apprehension, and here too, as it did in our Introduction (and as Hansen asserts in his insistence on a ‘robust materiality of technology’),48 consideration of experience through the body breaks down any stable binary between analogue and digital imagetexts. Munster understands this lateness as a mixture of ‘lag’ and ‘distribution’ – two vectors of three principal ones (the other being ‘proximity’) that remove themselves from cultural standardisation to complicate our temporal experience in and of the digital realm, disrupt forces of homogenisation in global information culture, and reorganise data-space ‘as a function of dispersed time’.49 The concept, however, is not exclusive to digital media. Gertrude Stein’s apprehension of such a lag, for example, situated it between two kinds of ­



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k­ nowledge: active, perceptual and instinctively felt, and cognitive, remembered and systematically learnt. Citizens of a technologically mediated world, we struggle, not to break ahead of our era’s developments (because ‘no one is ahead of his time’), but to catch up with them.50 More recently, Brian Massumi’s theory of the autonomy of affect rests partly on this apparent lag in cognition and immediate active response. According to Massumi and other affect theorists (who borrow heavily from neuroscientific researches), there is a delay between a subject’s affective responses and its cognition of the situation or experience that produces them, so that cognition arrives ‘too late’ for meaning to actually play the role usually or traditionally accorded it. The result, as Ruth Leys notes, is ‘that action and behaviour are held to be determined by affective dispositions that are independent of consciousness and the mind’s control’.51 Massumi distinguishes, therefore, embodied affect from signification. In Massumi’s words, ‘what we think of as “free,” “higher” functions, such as volition, are apparently being performed by autonomic, bodily reactions occurring in the brain but outside consciousness’.52 The platforms and interfaces of negotiation between these two kinds of knowledge (which connect with traditional understandings of how we process images and text) form, we argue, part of a cross-body, often synaesthetic, but always sensual architecture; both the analogue and the digital need to be considered as part of a wider concern with perception, experience and affect, because both analogue and digital imagetexts mobilise non-verbal, imagistic, conceptual and potential realms. Interactive experience is, appropriately, a central term (a cliché, even) for the new aesthetics. The experience of reading a digital text online is an experience of being potentially embedded in infinity, and while the intertextual matrices of libraries, footnotes, bibliographies and encyclopaedias always functioned in this way, never before could one explore those connections with just a finger click or swipe. What is even newer is the function of the web as an interruption system which responds, prompts and solicits bodily interaction in an increasingly insistent manner, scrambling our attention and inducing cognitive overload precisely because the human brain is not (yet) accustomed to the rate at which it is now being required to transfer information from working memory to long-term memory.53 As Adalaide Morris has noted, ‘what we do and see does not match the inscriptional and representational conventions through which we think’.54 Critical consideration of the image and text works of the future will therefore need to take account not only of textual consumption in a conventional way, but of multi-sensory interpellation, of response and ‘feedback’, and of modes of agency and intention that are programmed as well as implied. The intersection of this art-world aesthetic of interactivity, often figured in utopian terms, with other commercial and ideological uses of interruption and interpellation is another area that is as yet under-researched. When the French curator Nicholas Bourriaud coined the term ‘relational aesthetics’ in 1997, he attempted not only to characterise the artistic practice governing the 1990s in the US and Europe, but to break the cycle of politicised and intellectual agendas that

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had dominated art criticism from the 1960s onwards. Bourriaud’s insights were in tandem with developing notions of distribution in information aesthetics that saw cognitive processes extending beyond those within the individual to networks that connect individuals to each other, to their tools and to their machines. Arguing that artworks of the 1990s considered ‘the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space’, Bourriaud emphasised the (real or potential) intersubjectivity of the new aesthetic, in which meaning is made collectively and collaboratively.55 As Claire Bishop notes, it is important to remember that Bourriaud’s theory is not one simply of interaction, but is a means of situating contemporary practice within a culture of virtual cosmopolitanism, because of the expanded opportunities the internet has provided for commerce, globalisation and for the extension of an economy that had recently shifted from goods-based systems to servicebased ones.56 Brian Reed argues, however, that what Bourriaud sees as the core political function of relational aesthetics – the ‘DIY’ assemblage of ‘microtopias’ in which relations are forged with one’s immediate neighbours in an attempt to ‘inhabit the world in a better way’, rather than hoped for across a much wider, even global spectrum – is actually shaped by commercial structures.57 The microtopias are often, Reed comments, little more than ‘occasions when artists and their audiences are brought together as corporate-style led teams tasked with the generation of creative content, whether formal or experimental’,58 echoing earlier critiques of the structures of patronage in 1960s’ art and technology programs such as EAT (Experiments in Art and Technology), John Chamberlain’s collaboration with the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, and the 1970 MoMA exhibition organised by Kynaston McShine, Information.59 Yet while the term ‘interactivity’, at least for its first generation in hypertextual art, may have been a misnomer given the pre-programmed nature of the clickable ‘options’ available to the reader/user, the second generation of critics and practitioners have understood the term to encompass an aesthetics that is more akin to avant-garde poetics than to linear narrative.60 This shift in methodology is still, however, based on a literary semiotics, and the problem we highlighted in our Introduction regarding the lack of adequate terminology for the experiencer of the imagetext haunts the lexicon of the digital realm. While emphasis is now on poetics rather than poetry, or aesthetics rather than art – pragmatically implying process over object – there is still a telling lexical confusion. As Hansen has noted, the receiver of any ‘digital image’ cannot be its ‘reader’, for ‘read’ has a new definition in computer parlance (to decode and interpret a document’s signs), and reading in the traditional sense has shifted to involve operation, utilisation and, importantly, at least some form of change.61 These developments, which turn the object into an event in lived relation with the human body, connect with what is currently a strong theme in several spheres of studies in the arts and humanities: that of affect. Various strains of affect theory move ahead from relational aesthetics to feed into several spheres of inquiry, among them non-Cartesian philosophies such as



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Spinozism (connecting matter movement with processual incorporeality); AI and bioengineering; feminist, queer, disability and subaltern theory; and pluralist materialism. Perhaps most importantly for this volume, they also connect with the move away from the ‘linguistic turn’ of the latter half of the twentieth century to incorporate neuro-, cognitive and quantum sciences while at the same time often ‘returning to and reactivating work that had been taking place well before and alongside the linguistic turn and its attendant social constructions’, such as the socio-aesthetic and empirical findings of Susanne Langer, John Dewey, Raymond Williams and Frantz Fanon.62 The body in all such approaches is considered not as a bounded substance but an interface; affect is understood not to reside within the body as site, but to pass between bodies (human or otherwise) in fluctuations and fluxes of intensity and resonance. As Gregg and Seigworth attest, affect’s force lies in its potential  – ‘a body’s capacity to affect and be affected’ – and its inseparability from cognition is in part due to the fact that ‘thought is itself a body, embodied’.63 As Baruch Spinoza contended (reprised by Arakawa and Gins as ‘we don’t know what it is that is mind, what it could look like’),64 ‘No one has yet determined what the body can do’, and this potentiality of knowledge and of action positions it as in motion. Massumi, arguably the most exciting and certainly the leading philosopher on the subject, emphasises this motion as a key element to his researches into affect, stating that approaches to the subject would have benefited greatly from our most familiar modes of inquiry having begun with movement rather than stasis, with process rather than position. In Parables for the Virtual, Massumi pragmatically argues for the body’s status as virtual in that it must not be connected to a certain subject position, but be recognised as constantly in transition between its potential forms of state. Following Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze and William James, Massumi states that the body is ‘real but abstract’: in motion, a body is in an immediate, unfolding relation to its own nonpresent potential to vary … Here, abstract means: never present in position, only ever passing. This is an abstractness pertaining to the transitional immediacy of a real relation – that of a body to its own indeterminacy (its openness to an elsewhere and otherwise than it is, in any here and now).65

Massumi positions his theory thus: the ‘real-material-but-incorporeal’ is to the positioned body as energy is to matter (‘mutually convertible modes of the same reality’). It is due to this formulation of the essential ‘incorporeality’ of the body that Massumi situates it as ‘virtual’, pitching the term against its habitual collocation, ‘digital’. Recognising that the digital, a form of codification consisting of ones and zeros, is ‘a numeric way of arranging alternative states so that they can be sequenced into a set of alternative routines’, Massumi contends that the medium of the digital is not virtuality, but ‘possibility’. Indeed, ‘nothing is more destructive for the thinking and imaging of the virtual than equating it with the digital. All arts and technologies, as series of qualitative transformations … envelop the virtual in one way or another.’ Digital technologies in actuality t­herefore enjoy

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only a tenuous connection to the virtual, ‘by virtue of the enormous power of their systemization of the possible’.66 Massumi’s thinking aligns with and informs Munster’s in that both call for a reworking of the virtual by dint of a re-imagining of the body’s complex status as materialised and interfacial in relation to information aesthetics. ‘Digital embodiment,’ argues Munster, ‘entails the capacity for us to conceive of and experience bodies as something other than inert, weighty masses distended in space and out of sync with the absolute speed of an unremitting technological tempo.’ Instead, their incorporeality stems precisely from their interactivity with a machine’s ability to ‘replicate, amplify and split us from the immediacy of our sensory capacities’.67 Munster’s digital embodiment exists in between-spaces, in areas of potential and becoming. Massumi goes further, to connect this potential with the analogue, by contending that: The analog is process, self-referenced to its own variations. It resembles nothing outside itself … Sensation, always on arrival a transformative feeling of the outside, a feeling of thought, is the being of the analog. It is matter in analog mode. This is the analog in a sense close to the technical meaning, as a continuously variable impulse or momentum that can cross from one qualitatively different medium into another. Like electricity into sound waves … Or light waves into vision. Or vision into imagination. Or noise in the ear into music in the heart. Or outside coming in.68

As such, Massumi argues – in a productive inversion of what is currently conventional reasoning – the analogue mode is dynamic and transformative, whereas the digital mode is static, grid-like and has potential for positive social impact, rather than just distraction and inattention, ‘only through the analog’.69 In other realms, too, processes of knowledge, response and cognition are proving to be more similar than previously thought, in a manner that further serves to undermine the philosophical linguistic turn of the late twentieth century and complicate even further the dilemma in terminology highlighted above. In neuroscience, the perceptual–conceptual, verbal–visual division is becoming increasingly disintegrated. At the time of writing this conclusion, research appeared in the Journal of Neuroscience empirically pointing to the fact that the human brain ‘reads’ known words as pictures  – that is, as whole visual forms, not as a string of letters, letter chunks, or as groups of phonetic sounds. Glezer et al. set their subjects a series of real words and pseudo-words to read. Once the subjects had learnt the (invented) meaning of the pseudo-words, fMRI scans showed exactly the same part of the brain ‘lighting up’ as when they encountered real words: subjects were processing the recognised pseudo-words in the visual word form area (VWFA) of the brain, adding to an existing visual dictionary.70 This in turn raises interesting questions pertaining to Massumi’s autonomy of affect, Munster, Massumi and Stein’s various interpretations of cognitive lag, and could connect with considerations of computational systems that necessarily feed both images and text through the same mathematical codes and algorithms.



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The concepts driving the proliferation of virtual environments and computer networks are nothing new. What is new, and is developing at a pace too quick, according to Jaron Lanier (whose insights echo Gertrude Stein’s),71 for us to be able fully to predict its implications or even see its effect on the nature of our intelligent and social existence, are the capabilities and the penetration of the medium. However, if we approach the computational as an element of a wider poetics of ‘performative operations’ in the way Hansen and others encourage, then the digital interface becomes a pluralistic site whereby human bodies help to facilitate and augment the digital image.72 This repositions the machinic not as robotic and other, but as part of a process of virtuality and potential in a way that connects to Sol Le Witt’s contention that ‘the idea becomes a machine that makes the art’ and William Carlos Williams’s famous edict that poetic meaning resides in the potential energy of movement and transition: the poem ‘is a machine made of words’.73 The mixed messages contained within these pages bear meaning not least in terms of process – that is, in terms of how they connect to past concepts and make possible future actions in the field of practical and scholarly experience. We therefore close the book in the spirit of John Dewey, whose words best point to our own hopes for further developments: ‘A thing is more significantly what it makes possible than what it immediately is.’74

Notes   1 Here we are following (and paying tribute to) James Elkins’s use of the ‘envoi’ to provide the last words to his critical works.   2 Sol LeWitt, ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’, Artforum, 5.10 (1967), 79–83, 79.   3 This term was coined by Joseph H. Pine II and James H. Gilmore in The Experience Economy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2011).  4 See the gallery’s website: www.artlaboratory-berlin.org/html/eng-exh-archive.htm (accessed 25 April 2015).   5 Art Laboratory’s 2013 international conference, run by Regine Rapp and Christian de Lutz and dedicated to ‘discussing synaesthesia in the Arts, Humanities and (Neuro-) Science’, attracted scholars and artists from across America and Europe, although at the same time underlining the fact that advances in this field are primarily taking place on European soil. The exhibition organised in 2010 by the Albuquerque Museum of Art & History in collaboration with the Burchfield Penney Art Centre, Buffalo, entitled ‘Sensory Crossovers: Synesthesia in American Art’, perhaps represents an exception to this trend. However, the curation was retrospective, and it is debatable whether the featured artists – who included Arthur Dove, Charles Demuth, Man Ray, Agnes Pelton, Adolph Gottlieb, Clyde Connell, Jackson Pollock and Joseph Stella – were synaesthetes or rather engaging in abstract strategies of perception and visualisation.  6 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Berkeley, CA: Ginko Press, 2002 [1964]).   7 Here type ‘setting’ is converted into reflowable text, and we end up with the strange situation where, for example, a reader on a Kindle or in iBooks, or Google Books, experiences automatically standardised plain columns of serif or sans serif in a radical

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Mixed messages discord with the graphic design elements that remain in subheadings, illustrations and call-out boxes.  8 Johanna Drucker, ‘Through Light and the Alphabet: Interview with Matthew G. Kirschenbaum’, in Drucker, Figuring the Word (New York: Granary Books, 1998), p. 11.   9 James Elkins, ‘Is Google bringing us too close to Art?’, 23 March 2013, DailyDot.com, www.dailydot.com/opinion/elkins-is-google-bringing-us-too-close-to-art/ (accessed 11 August 2015). This difference might be formulated in terms of the distinction between re-mediation and what Alan Golding calls ‘rematerialization, a shift in material medium or environment that raises a new set of aesthetic and theoretical questions about the texts’. Alan Golding, ‘Language Writing, Digital Poetics, and Transitional Materialities’, in Adalaide Morris and Thomas Swiss (eds), New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts and Theories (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), pp. 249–83, p. 252. 10 Johanna Drucker, Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), p. 63. 11 Exhibition On Screen’s current series, by Seventh Art Productions (UK), includes HD presentations of Henri Matisse from MoMA and Tate Modern, Edvard Munch from the Munch Museum and National Gallery Oslo, and Leonardo da Vinci from the National Gallery, London. The Met Opera also screens live to cinemas in HD, as does London’s Royal Opera House.
 12 See Jerome McGann, Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 168. 13 Golding, ‘Language Writing’, p. 251. 14 Ibid., p. 277. See also Loss Pequeño Glazier, Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2002). 15 Golding, ‘Language Writing’, p. 252. 16 Influential analyses on this question include Lawrence S. Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998); Peter Burger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); and Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1968). 17 Lucy Lippard, ‘Escape Attempts’ (foreword), in Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997 [1973]), p. xxi. 18 In poetics this often takes the form of ‘a standard line that includes Mallarmé, Apollinaire, Dada, Russian constructivism, lettrisme, concrete and visual poetry’, states Golding, ‘Language Writing’, p. 249.
 19 Janet H. Murray, ‘Inventing the Medium’, in Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort (eds), The New Media Reader (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), pp. 3–11, p. 3. Lev Manovich also draws on Borges in the same volume: ‘New Media from Borges to HTML’, pp. 13–25. 20 At the time of writing, it was reported on several arts media sites that Jonathan Basile, a Brooklyn author, had recreated Borges’s Universal Library, or Total Library, from his short story ‘The Library of Babel’, as a potentially infinite website. You can visit it at https://libraryofbabel.info/. 21 Manovich, ‘New Media from Borges to HTML’, p. 22. 22 Ibid.



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23 See Eve Meltzer, Systems We Have Loved: Conceptual Art, Affect, and the Antihumanist Turn (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013). In line with Bourriaud’s assertions below, the reality of digital participation is more serialised, more private and more individualised than were the localised simultaneities of the Happenings and the Living Theatre. 24 Manovich, ‘New Media from Borges to HTML’, p. 24. 25 ‘The Dematerialisation of Art’ was written by Lippard and John Chandler in 1967, and published in the February 1968 Art International. 26 Lippard, ‘Escape Attempts’, p. ix. 27 See Lippard, ‘Escape Attempts’, pp. x–xiii on the politicised nature of conceptual art, against charges of its apoliticism. 28 Lippard, ‘Escape Attempts’, p. x. 29 W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘The Unspeakable and the Unimaginable: Word and Image in a Time of Terror’, ELH, 72.2 (2005), 291–308, 298. 30 Anna Munster, Materialising New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2006), p. 26. 31 Marshall McLuhan and Michel Moos, Media Research: Technology, Art and Communication (New York: Routledge, 2014), p. 124. Consider, as the most obvious example, the broadcasting of the fall of the World Trade Center in Manhattan, New York, in real time across the globe. 32 Mel Bochner, ‘Excerpts from Speculation (1967–1970)’, Artforum, 8.9 (1970), 70–3, 72. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid., 73. 35 W. J. T. Mitchell in Oliver Grau (ed.), MediaArtHistories (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), pp. 395–408, p. 399. See also the Introduction to this volume. 36 See Matthew Wilson Smith, The Total Work of Art: From Bayreuth to Cyberspace (New York: Routledge, 2007). 37 ‘Marshall McLuhan was here. He left a message for you.’ August 1967 advertisement for Aspen magazine, digitally archived on UbuWeb: www.ubu.com/aspen/advertisements/ aspen4Ad.html (accessed 1 August 2015). 38 Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, 1967, digitally archived on UbuWeb: www. ubu.com/aspen/aspen5and6/threeEssays.html#barthes (accessed 27 January 2016). 39 Lippard, ‘Escape Attempts’, p. xv. 40 See Munster, Materialising New Media. 41 Ibid., p. 17. 42 Ibid., p. 19. 43 Ibid. 44 Hayles in Mark Hansen, Embodying Technesis: Technology Beyond Writing (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2000), pp. v–vi. 45 Hansen, Embodying Technesis, pp. 2–3, his italics. 46 Murray, ‘Inventing the Medium’, p. 11. 47 Mark B. N. Hansen, Feed-Forward: On the Future of Twenty-First-Century Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 48 Hansen, Embodying Technesis, p. 4, his italics. 49 Munster, Materializing New Media, p. 22. 50 Gertrude Stein, ‘Composition as Explanation’, in Gertrude Stein: Writings 1903–1932, ed. Catherine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman (New York: Library of America, 1998), pp. 520–9, p. 521.

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Mixed messages 51 Ruth Leys, ‘The Turn to Affect: A Critique’, Critical Inquiry, 37 (Spring 2011), 434–72, 443. 52 Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), p. 29. 53 See Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010), published in the UK as The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember (London: Atlantic Books, 2011). 54 Adalaide Morris, ‘New Media Poetics: As We May Think/How to Write’, in Morris and Swiss (eds), New Media Poetics, pp. 1–46, p. 3. 55 Nicholas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2002), p. 14 (emphasis in original). 56 Claire Bishop, ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, October, 110 (Fall 2004), 51–79, 54. 57 Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, p. 13. 58 Brian Reed, Nobody’s Business: Twenty-first Century Avant-Garde Poetics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), p. 8. 59 For corporate patronage in the 1960s, see Meltzer, Systems We Have Loved, pp. 46–7, and Pamela M. Lee, Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), pp. 17–23. 60 See Morris, ‘New Media Poetics’, p. 14. 61 Mark B. N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). 62 We refer particularly to Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth’s ‘An Inventory of Shimmers’, the introduction to The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 1–25, p. 7. 63 Gregg and Seigworth, ‘An Inventory of Shimmers’, pp. 2, 3 (emphasis in original). 64 Robert Creeley, ‘“Some Place Enormously Moveable”: The Collaboration of Arakawa and Madeline H. Gins’, in The Collected Essays of Robert Creeley (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989), p. 421. 65 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, pp. 4–5. 66 Ibid., p. 137. 67 Munster, Materializing New Media, p. 18. 68 ‘On the Superiority of the Analog’, reprinted in Parables for the Virtual, p. 135. 69 Ibid., p. 138. 70 Glezer et al, ‘Adding Words to the Brain’s Visual Dictionary: Novel Word Learning Selectively Sharpens Orthographic Representations in the VWFA’, The Journal of Neuroscience, 35.12 (2015), 4965–72. 71 See Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget (London: Penguin, 2011). 72 See Morris, ‘New Media Poetics’, p. 17. Hypertextual poems by Stephanie Strickland and Cynthia Lawson (‘Vniverse’) and Talan Memmott’s Lexia to Perplexia are examples of this. 73 For further discussion on this, see Katie L. Price’s chapter in this volume. 74 He continues: ‘An intellectual sign denotes that a thing is not taken immediately but is referred to something that may come in consequence of it.’ John Dewey, Experience and Nature (1925), in The Later Works, 1925–1953, ed. Jo Ann Boydston, Vol. 1 (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981), p. 105.

Index

‘n’ after a page reference indicates the number of a note on that page. Abstract Expressionism 92, 101 abstraction 12, 63, 89, 92, 100–3, 111, 122, 149, 174, 206 action art 3 Adorno, Theodor 72–3 affect 1–3, 7, 12, 77, 95–6, 112, 130, 137, 173, 176, 190, 200, 208–11 Alexander, Thomas 5, 6 animism 181, 182 Arakawa 3, 9, 10, 108–28, 158, 211 Anti-Happening 117 As It Is: Blind Intentions IX 122 ‘Notes on my Paintings’ 109, 121 Untitled (1969) 120 see also Arakawa and Gins Arakawa and Gins 10, 108–28, 158, 211 Architectural Body, 119, 121 The Mechanism of Meaning 9, 108–28 To Not to Die 116 see also Arakawa; Gins, Madeline architecture 1, 2, 8, 13, 18–33, 59, 116, 120, 121, 125, 133, 161, 162, 165–6, 177, 201, 209 ornament in 18, 23, 25, 27–9, 31 poetic 18, 19 Arnheim, Rudolph 6 artists’ books 1, 145, 150, 158 Bal, Mieke 101 Barthes, Roland 2, 195, 207 Benjamin, Walter 2, 52, 64, 73 Beube, Doug xviii, 13, 181–99 City 192 Interfaith 189 Inside Macintosh 187

Life 189 The Silent Question 185 Vest of Knowledge 189 Black Mountain Poets 6, 101 blindness 74, 108–28, 166, 168, 171 Bluhm, Norman xviii, 3, 8, 12, 85–107 Poem-Paintings ‘Did You See Me’ 96 ‘Hand’ 86, 97, 98 ‘Help! I am Alive’ 88, 90, 91, 101 ‘I’m So Tired’ 88 ‘Let’s Wait and See’ 93, 94 ‘Meet Me in the Park’ 88, 93, 99 ‘Skylarks’ (‘Reaping and Sowing’) 99, 102 ‘There I Was’ 88, 101 ‘This is the First’ 101 ‘We’re All So Damned Happy it Stinks!’ 96 see also O’Hara, Frank body (human) xix, 3, 4–6, 8–12, 34, 42–3, 85, 92, 95–9, 108, 112, 114, 117, 119–21, 124, 146, 161, 165, 168–70, 172, 178, 196, 201, 202, 208–12 Bois, Yve-Alain, 112 book art 181–99 Borges, Jorge 204 Braille 119, 162, 164, 165, 167, 172, 174, 177 Breton, André 67, 69, 71, 72, 78 Buber, Martin 88, 185 Buchloh, Benjamin 142, 149 Cartesian dualism 4, 6, 64, 90, 92, 99, 207, 208, 210

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Mixed messages Caruth, Cathy 168 Caws, Mary Ann 109, 122, 125, 132, 141, 142 Civil War, American 170–1 code 11, 14, 71–2, 165, 186–8, 200, 210, 212 cognitive linguistics 6, 7, 208 see also Lakoff, George; Turner, Mark collage 73, 80, 108–28, 129–44, 202, 204 conceptual art 9, 109, 120, 131, 145–50, 156, 158, 204–6 conceptual writing 150, 156 daguerreotype 1, 13, 37, 39, 43, 47 dance 7–8, 26, 68, 77, 78, 100, 133, 137 Deleuze, Gilles 103, 211 Derrida, Jacques 124, 133, 134, 135, 189 Dettmer, Brian xviii, 3, 13, 181–99 Alternate Route to Knowledge 193 Brave New World 190 New Books of Knowledge 183 Organized Knowledge in Story and Picture 195 Saturation Will Result 184 Tower of Babble 190–2 Dewey, John xvii, 4–7, 9–10, 12, 85, 87, 88, 92–3, 95–6, 99, 103, 211, 213 digital xix, 1, 61, 186–8, 200–13 documentary photography 51–4, 56, 61–2, 65 poetics 162, 172, 173 double consciousness2 181–2, 194–6 Drucker, Johanna 3, 136, 158, 166–7, 202–3, 207 Duchamp, Marcel xvii–xviii, 3, 74, 111, 118, 120–1, 124, 152 Elkins, James 8, 10, 111, 200, 202 Embodied Mind Theory 7, 8, 97, 117, 119, 120, 125 embodied cognition 7, 13, 95, 112, 124–5 embodiment 4–7, 11, 30, 95, 97, 99, 166, 208, 212 sensorium 3, 167 see also Embodied Mind Theory Emerson, Ralph Waldo xvii–xviii, 2–5, 12–13, 18–27, 30–1, 38, 47, 59, 63, 86 emotion 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 14, 18, 28, 37, 39, 41, 46, 58, 61, 62, 85, 95–6, 99, 137, 173, 201

Evans, Walker xvii, xviii, 12–13, 51–66, 173 Felman, Shoshana 168 fragment xviii, 5, 13, 14, 21, 51–66, 74, 86, 131–2, 135, 155, 162, 170, 174, 204 see also Schlegel, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Freud, Sigmund 14, 69, 71–2, 80 Fried, Michael 112 gesture 4, 8, 10, 12, 13, 36, 44, 52, 58, 61–3, 86–7, 89, 92–3, 95, 97, 100–3, 108, 117, 156, 161, 170, 208 Gins, Madeline 111, 116, 117, 118, 122 Helen Keller or Arakawa 111, 116, 117, 118, 122 Word Rain, A Discursive Introduction to the Intimate Philosophical Investigations of G,R,E,T,A,G,A,R,B,O, It Says 116 see also Arakawa and Gins Goodman, Nelson 6, 189 Guattari, Félix 103 Hamilton, Ann (myein) xvii, xviii, 3, 161–80 Happenings 95, 117, 204, 215 n.23 Hawthorne, Nathaniel and Sophia xviii, xix, 13, 34–50 hieroglyphs 14, 68, 71–3, 75, 77–81, 133, 137 hysteria 78–80 see also Freud, Sigmund idolatry 190, 193–5 critical idolatry 181 installation art 1, 3, 9, 10, 13, 108, 151, 156–7, 161–7, 172, 174, 177, 204 International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet 169 James, William xvii, 2, 7, 85–8, 92, 95, 96, 103, 211 Jay, Martin 4, 9, 13, 85, 95, 124 Johnson, Mark 4, 7, 9–10, 97, 202, 208 Kant, Immanuel 4, 87 King Aroo 74–5 Krazy Kat 8, 75–8 Lakoff, George 7, 97, 99, 114, 106 n.66, 202, 208

Langer, Suzanne 8, 96, 119, 211 Laub, Dori 168 Lessing, Gotthold 2, 132–3 Lincoln, Abraham 161, 165–72, 177 Lippard, Lucy 158 n.5, 204–7 loss 13, 43, 59, 90, 167, 175–6, 186–7, 196 manifesto 14, 67, 71, 88, 103, 129–44 Marcuse, Herbert 73–5 Marx, Karl 14, 69, 71–2 Marx, Leo 38 Massumi, Brian 8, 209, 211–12 McLuhan, Marshall xix, 202, 206 Meskimmon, Marsha 167–8 metaphor xviii, 1, 2, 7, 13, 14, 18, 25, 35–7, 46, 47, 92, 97, 99, 112, 114, 119, 129, 131, 133, 184, 187, 188 memory 12, 38–9, 42–3, 90, 95, 96, 117, 164, 168, 177, 178 196, 209 Mill, John Stuart 184 Mitchell, W. T. J. xviii, 10–11, 13, 68, 72, 75, 77, 119, 124, 129, 132–3, 181–2, 188–90, 193–6, 200, 205, 206 double consciousness2 13, 181–2, 193–5 imagetext xviii, 3, 11, 13, 108, 114, 120, 129–32, 140, 200–2, 208–10 Monticello 165 Munster, Anna 205, 207–8, 212 Nancy, Jean-Luc 44 neuroscience xviii, xix, 6, 7, 10, 12, 14, 96, 97, 99, 201, 209, 211, 212 Nietzsche, Friedrich 134, 184, 190, 192 Objectivist poetry 172–3 O’Hara, Frank xviii, 3, 8, 12, 85–107, 205 ‘The Day Lady Died’ 89 ‘In Memory of My Feelings’ 90, 96 ‘Meditations in an Emergency’ 90 ‘Personism: A Manifesto’ 88–9, 92, 95 Poem-Paintings see Bluhm, Norman ‘A Step Away from Them’ 89 Oulipo xviii, 152, 157, 188, 196, 205 ’pataphysics 3, 152–3, 155 Peirce, Charles 118, 189 Perec, Georges 196 photography xix, 1, 10, 13, 34–50, 51–66, 114, 130, 137, 156, 201

Index polaroid 51–66 Pollock, Jackson 85, 89, 92 potential literature xviii, 152 pragmatics (linguistics) 100 deictic structures 100–1 speech acts 95, 101, 103 pragmatism 4, 7, 8–13, 59, 85–107, 171, 200, 206, 208, 210, 211 see also Dewey, John; James, William Queneau, Raymond xviii, 152, 157, 188 quipu 164 relational aesthetics 209–10 Reznikoff, Charles 161–2, 165–7, 169, 172–8 Testimony 172–8 romanticism 18, 26, 28, 59, 61 Rosenberg, Harold 92 Schlegel, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich 13, 51–3, 55, 59–60, 62, 64 Athenaeum Fragments 52–3, 55, 59, 60 semiotics 99, 107 n.86, 189, 210 Shusterman, Richard 65, 95, 104 n.6 Siegelaub, Seth 126, 158 signage 51–3, 60, 65 slavery 161, 165, 169, 171, 174 Smokey Stover 78–80 somaesthetics 3, 85, 92, 95–6, 99, 103, 168, 201 Spero, Nancy 3, 8, 13, 129–43 Notes in Time on Women 130–40 Stein, Gertrude 2, 15 n.4, 133, 208, 213 Steiner, Wendy 11 Stern, Daniel 96 Sullivan, Louis 2, 3, 13, 18–33 ‘Characteristics and Tendencies of American Architecture’ 32 ‘Emotional Architecture as Compared with Intellectual: A Study in Objective and Subjective’ 31 n.3, 32 n.40 Guaranty Building 28–9, 33 n.45 Kindergarten Chats 20–1, 27 Schlesinger & Meyer Store (later Carson Pirie Scott Store) 29–30 ‘The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered’ 21–3, 29 Wainwright Building 23–5, 28 synaesthetics 2, 4, 95, 201, 209

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Mixed messages translation 5, 18–19, 25, 111, 112, 114, 118, 119, 139, 140, 164, 168–70 trauma 168–9 trauma theory 168 Turner, Mark 97, 208 Ut pictura poesis 13, 16, 18 Venice Biennale 161, 163, 166 Vietnam War 129, 205 virtual 200, 208, 210, 211, 212, 213 Warhol, Andy 58, 74, 207 Weiner, Lawrence 9, 12, 145–60

Whitman, Walt 1–2, 3, 10, 15 n.1, 19, 26–9, 31, 47, 88, 92, 156 ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’ 27 Democratic Vistas 26 ‘Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun’ 26 Leaves of Grass 1, 26, 47 Williams, Raymond 211 Williams, William Carlos xvii, 9, 11, 12, 13, 17, 62, 92, 146, 150, 213 witness 3, 165–9, 172–7 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 13, 155, 184 family resemblance 184 Zeki, Semir, 7, 15 n.23