LITERARTURE: Lines Between Art and Literature

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RESEARCH MASTER THESIS

L I T E R

A R T

U R E :

LINES BETWEEN ART

AND LITERATURE

University of Amsterdam

Research Master Literary Studies Research Master Thesis 2016  

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to express my deep gratitude to all of those who have helped me throughout the process of writing this thesis. First and foremost, I want to thank my thesis supervisor, Dr. Carrol Clarkson, for her enthusiasm, dedication and support. Her book Drawing the Line: Toward an

Aesthetics of Transitional Justice inspired me to write this thesis, and our discussions have guided me

through the process. The idea of this thesis was conceived in 2013, when I attended a course at the University of Barcelona titled Literature and Art by Dr. Álex Matas Pons. Those weekly lectures triggered me to write my bachelor thesis in the direction of literature and art: my dissertation was titled The Discourse regarding Art and Literature within Foucault’s ‘The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the

Human Sciences' and was written under the supervision of Dr. Nora Catelli. Furthermore, I

continued in the same direction throughout my master program at the University of Amsterdam. In conclusion, I would like to express my gratitude to both Dr. Álex Matas Pons and Dr. Nora Catelli for their guidance which eventually has led to the topic of this thesis dissertation. Also, I would like to express my gratitude to Lluis Pla for his encouragement ever since he heard about my plans of moving to Amsterdam.

I would also like to thank my parents, for making it possible for me to be in this city. Without them I would have never made it this far: they have been there for me every step of the way, they have loved me unconditionally, and they have supported me through all of my decisions. And finally, Arturo: without his full love and support these past two and a half years, I would not have realised my full potential. Thank you so much. 

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PART 1

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CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

I.

The central task of this thesis is to study art and literature in an articulate way, and for doing so, I propose a transversal approach which reaches out towards the fusion concept of Literarture. Disciplines are never as isolated as they seem: and there are many connections between art and literature which can be seen in an interactive way. By developing a new concept, the barriers between art and literature fade, allowing me to conduct an analysis of the shared structures which are relevant to both disciplines. It is important at this stage to clarify that the corpus of works which will be discussed consists of works which defy ready categorization : concretely, 1

works of art which have borrowed verbal elements and works of literature which have borrowed visual elements. The question about visuality and pictoriality has become fundamental in the context of cultural studies since the 1970’s and specifically since the 1990’s . And nowadays a lot 2

of contemporary art and literature deals with these visual phenomena: literature has become both the object of representation as well as the basic material for art, and similarly, art has occupied a central role in the way that literature is being written. Therefore, my aim is to engage in theoretical discussion with a corpus of artworks which challenge the parameters of what technically would be considered pure art or literature, and furthermore to question the increased use of the written word as a means of visual art practice , and comparably, to query the 3

increased use of visual composition within the literary practice.

Similar debates have been raised by W. J. T. Mitchell in his essay There Are No Visual Media, in which he discusses that the idea of pure media is imprecise and that all media is mixed media:

CLARKSON, C. (2014): Drawing the Line: Toward an Aesthetics of Transitional Justice. Fordham University Press. New

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York. Page 69

LIZARAZO, L. (2016): Iconic Writing: Illegibility and the materiality of literature. Text for Panel 1, Day 1, European

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Summer School For Cultural Studies in 2016 about Legibility. Page 1.

LERM-HAYES, C.M. (2015): Writing Art and Creating Back: What Can We Do With Art (History)? University of

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Visual media is a colloquial expression […] which is highly inexact and misleading. […] All the so-called visual media turn out to involve the other senses (especially touch and hearing). All media are, from the standpoint of sensory modality, ‘mixed media’. The obviousness of this, raises two question: (1) why do we persist in talking about some media as if they were exclusively visual? Is this just a shorthand for talking about visual predominance? […] And if so, what does ‘predominance’ mean? (2) Why does it matter what we call ‘visual media’? 4

Mitchell continues to elaborate that “all media is mixed media”, by stating that purely visual media does not exist: “any notion of purity seems to question modern media, both from the standpoint of the sensory and semiotic elements internal to them and what is external in their promiscuous audience composition” . For the purposes of my argument, I focus on works of art 5

or literature which represent this lack of purity of media through various figurative and stylistic devices that highlight the interdisciplinary nature of their construction. In other words, I mainly concentrate on works that mix different media and therefore defy strict categorization.

On the following page there are six images which are very helpful for exemplifying what I mean by works that defy ready categorization in different ways. Figure 1 is a painting by Catalan artist Antoni Tàpies, titled Esperit Català I: it is a rather simple painting in which Tàpies has represented letters, symbols and lines on a plain greenish/grey background. Figure 2 is an installation by Joseph Kosuth, in which he uses neons to describe the work of art itself: Four Colors Four Words. Henry Flynt wrote in 1961 that “concept art is a kind of art of which the material is language" 6

and Kosuth's neons are a good example of this use of language as a basic element in art. On the other hand, Figure 3 is detail of Verskanste Openbaring, by Willem Boshoff: this work belongs to a series of unique typed scripto-visual pages , titled Kykafrikaans. Figure 4 is another work by 7

Boshoff titled Culmicolous, and it is included in his Oh No! Prints. Figure 5 is a detail from J. M. Coetzee’s Book Diary of a bad year and finally, Figure 6 is a detail from Jacques Tardi’s graphic novel Putain de Guerre:

MITCHELL, W. J. T. (2005): There are no Visual Media. Journal of Visual Culture, Vol. 4. No. 2, Page 258

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Ibid. Page 258

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FLYNT, H. (1963): Essay: Concept Art in An Anthology. www.henryflynt.org/aesthetics/conart

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PATON, D. (2008): Body, Light, Interaction, Sound: A critical reading of a recent installation of Willem Boshoff ’s Kykafrikaans in

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Fig. 1. Antoni Tàpies, Esperit Català I Fig. 2. Joseph Kosuth, Four Colors Four Words

Fig. 3. Willem Boshoff, Kykafrikaans - Verskanste Openbaring. (Detail) Fig. 4. Willem Boshoff, Oh No! Prints - Culmicolous

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The reason behind these six figures is that each of them exemplifies a different situation in which the line between art and literature becomes blurry. Antoni Tàpies scribbles letters on a canvas, which is a compelling representation of inscriptions, scratches and lines. Joseph Kosuth uses his neons to write words, proving that language is yet another material which is used for the creation of art, making the public engage with the artwork by both reading and looking at it. On the other hand, the two works by Willem Boshoff are made with a typewriter: a machine which is usually associated with the act of writing, but with which he creates works that resemble conceptual art and concrete poetry at the same time . Kykafrikaans can be characterised as a 8

homage or a farewell to the typewriter. The images were created using the typewriter as a drawing instrument, manipulating it to mimic movements as diverse as brushstrokes, carving, textiles, or soldiers marching with letters and words . For instance, Figure 3 is a detail of an 9

artwork in which Boshoff has typed over and over the text of the Book of Revelation repeatedly, in 10

order to create a visual work of art (or can it still be considered literature?), while Figure 4 shows the use of visually shaped sentences to create a work of literature (or does it become art because of its visual composition?). Figure 5 is a detail from J. M. Coetzee’s book Diary of a Bad Year and it is an example in which the visual component of the page itself is vital within the book: there are three sections in each page which are separated by a line. This structure of the page confronts the reader with a different way of reading a book, making it possible to read the book in the conventional way (front cover to back cover) or actually skip forward and then return to read the other sections (going back and forth). Consequently, these works of art defy ready categorisation because they play with the uncertainty between what is seen and what is read in each work, and this way they build an argument which is both visual and verbal. Finally, Jacques Tardi combines both disciplines to create a visual and verbal story. This last way of combining image and text has been categorized as bande dessinée, graphic novel or comic . Although neither will be studied in 11

CLARKSON, C. (2014): Drawing the Line: Toward an Aesthetics of Transitional Justice. Fordham University Press. New

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York. Page 69.

Quoting the description of the work in Bonhams: https://www.bonhams.com/auctions/17848/lot/146/

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Boshoff uses the text of the Book of Revelation, which should be an enlightening tex,t but when typing it over and

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over it becomes darker. Nevertheless there are a few spots which remain white, giving the impression of light coming through the darkness of the typed text.

I will use the terms “bande dessinée”, “comic” and “graphic novel” to refer generically to this genre. For further

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depth in this thesis, it is useful to take into consideration Francis Lacassin’s observation about the conceptual implications of the technique and structure of comics and graphic novels:

The specific technique of comics is characterized by the visual breakdown of the story into ‘shots’ depicting moments of very short duration.[…] The structure of the story is based on the harmonious imbrication of sound (speech, noises) and image, with the former placed inside the latter. 12

This harmonious imbrication between image and text that takes place in comics and graphic novels is crucial for their full appreciation. Some critics have stressed the value of the text over the image, making it look as if the images are merely a complement to the text : which is definitively not 13

accurate for thinking about this genre. It is precisely the combination of both sound and image, which constitutes the materialization and elaboration of comics. However, sometimes one of the two elements can be more dominant: for instance, there are some artists who have created purely visual stories without any text, as for example Otto Soglow, Ivo Milazzo and Lewis Trondheim . 14

On the other had, if an artist created a work entirely with words and without any images, then we would categorize it as regular or pure literature. So, actually, the image is essential for us to consider the work to be a comic or a graphic novel. Lawrence R. Sipe puts it this way in his book

How Picture Books Work:

Both the text and the illustration sequence would be incomplete without the other. They have a synergistic relationship in which the total effect depends not only on the union of the text and illustrations but also on the perceived interactions or transactions between these two parts. 15

Notwithstanding the notion of codependence between text and illustration in comics and graphic novels, I will not further explore this genre in this thesis. However, the theory does remain of interest for my discussion, in particular the synergistic relationship between word and image for the

LACASSIN, F. (1971): Dictionary Definition in MILLER, A. and BEATY, B. (2014): The French Comics Theory Reader.

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Leuven University Press. Belgium. Page 39

GROENSTEEN, T. (1986): The Elusive Specificity in MILLER, A. and BEATY, B. (2014): The French Comics Theory

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Reader. Leuven University Press. Page 64

SOGLOW, O. (1930-1975): The Little King. The strip is notable for having virtually no dialogue.

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MILAZZO, I. (1974-1977): Ken Parker collected in the volume Il respire e il sogno. TRONDHEIM, L. (2004): La Mouche usually described as his “silent comic”.

SIPE, R. L. (1998): How Picture Books Work: A Semiotically Framed Theory of Text-Picture Relationships. Children’s

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artwork to be fully understood. Most of the works which I have included in this project are both visually and verbally engaged, meaning that both the text and the illustrations that constitute them, should be taken into consideration. The visual and the verbal elements are combined in a way that makes the categorization of these works rather problematic. With these types of works, the line which separates art from literature becomes undefined and blurry.

II.

The major question that will be developed in this study concerns the relationship between art and literature, and therefore the issue of word and image should also be mentioned. In his essay Word

and Image, W. J. M. Mitchell elaborates on this relation in a very clear way:

Consider, for instance, the words you are reading at this moment. They are (one hopes) intelligible verbal signs. You can read them aloud, translate them into other languages, interpret or paraphrase them. They are also visible marks on the page, or (if read aloud) audible sounds in the air. You can see them as black marks on a white background, with specific shapes, sizes, and locations; you can hear them as sounds against a background of relative silence. In short, they present a double face to both the eye and the ear: one face is that of the articulate sign in a language; the other is that of a formal visual or aural gestalt, an optical or acoustical image. 16

Artists have played with the word-image relation for quite some time now, for instance, Rene Magritte with his famous This is not a pipe goes back to 1926. It has been argued to have 17

juxtaposed an image and a contradictory sentence with the intention of exhibiting the ambiguities of word-image. Mitchell continues:

Normally we look only at one face and ignore the other: we don't pay much attention to the typography or graphic look of a text; we don't listen to the sounds of words, preferring to concentrate on the meaning they convey. But it is always possible to shift our attention, to let those black marks on a white background become objects of visual or aural attention, as in this self-referential example. We are encouraged to do this by poetic or rhetorical uses of language that foreground the sounds of words, or artistic, ornamental uses of writing (e.g., illuminated manuscripts, calligraphy) that foreground the visual appearance of letters. But the

MITCHELL, W. J. T. (1996): Word and Image from: Robert Nelson and Richard Shiff, Critical Terms for Art History.

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University of Chicago Press.

FOUCAULT, M. (2008): This is not a Pipe. University of California Press. United States of America. Page 15.

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potential for the shift "from word to image" is always there, even in the most spare, unadorned forms of writing and speech. 18

When thinking about words, the main focus is usually a concern with the meaning that each word conveys. However, as W. J. M. Mitchell explains, words have both this linguistic relationship and also an important visual materialization. This visual appearance brings words even closer to images, because, “the black marks on the white background” become objects of visual attention. Mitchell goes on to explain:

A similar potential resides in visual images. In the act of interpreting or describing pictures, even in the fundamental process of recognizing what they represent, language enters into the visual field. Indeed, so-called "natural" visual experience of the world, quite apart from the viewing of images, may be much like a language. […] As a practical matter, the recognition of what visual images represent, even the recognition that something is an image, seems possible only for language-using animals. 19

In short, words are naturally composed by a visual component: the written symbol; whereas images are fundamentally linked to the process of recognition: a process in which language enters the visual field. Words and images are always intertwined, so what happens when this relationship is taken one step further? What occurs when the visual component of words is actually used in a visual artwork in itself ? And what happens when language enters the visual field in the process of reception and recognition of a work of visual art?

In his book Picture Theory W. J. M. Mitchell claims that “the interaction of pictures with texts is constitutive of representation as such: all media are mixed media, and all representations are heterogeneous; there are no ‘purely’ visual or verbal arts” . Figures 7 and 8 are works by Jaume 20

Plensa , a Spanish artist who often engages with the verbal in his artworks. He uses texts, letters, 21

signs and symbols for creating his drawings and sculptures, producing highly heterogeneous

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University of Chicago Press. Ibid.

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MITCHELL, W. J. T. (2005): Picture Theory. Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. The University of Chicago

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Press. Chicago and London. Page 5. (Similar idea is presented in his essay There Are No Visual Media, which I quoted on pages 5 and 6).

See Figures 7 and 8 on page 12.

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artworks. Túa Blesa, a professor from the University of Salamanca, uses Jaume Plensa as one of the main examples in his book Lecturas de la Ilegibilidad en el Arte . Plensa is known for his 22

characteristic plurality of techniques and materials. He uses paper, glass, polyester, different kinds of metals, etc. and then he combines them with water, light, sound and language. Túa Blesa 23

focuses mainly on the topic of legibility or illegibility in Jaume Plensa’s art; specifically in the way that scripture has been integrated into his works.

Fig. 7. Jaume Plensa, Aura III. Fig. 8. Jaume Plensa, Spiegel I and II.

Returning to W. J. M. Mitchell’s statement regarding the double nature of words; Jaume Plensa’s work is a good example in which words are not only “black marks on a white background” with a linguistic meaning, but they become “black marks on a white background” that constitute the raw material for his art, and they also determine the shape of the artworks per se. And it is interesting to question what does it mean for art historians that artists such as Jaume Plensa have adopted the written word in their visual artworks?

On the other hand, what implications does it have for literary critics that writers include visual composition into their verbal artworks? Figures 9 and 10 illustrate a key example of how visual representation has entered into the literary word, with Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes . This 24

Readings of Illegibility in Art (my translation, because the book has not been translated)

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BLESA, T. (2011): Lecturas de la Ilegibilidad en el Arte. Editorial Delirio. Salamanca, España. Page 87.

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SAFRAN FOER, J. (2010): Tree of Codes. Visual Editions Great Looking Stories. See Figures 9 and 10 on the

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book is a unique work which explores the materiality of literature itself. Jonathan Safran Foer chose his favourite book, The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz and used it as a canvas, in which he cut the pages in order to create a new story told by himself. This book has been called 25

revolutionary and a “true work of art” because of the experimentation with the die-cut 26

technique:

Fig. 9. Jonathan Safran Foer , Tree of Codes (detail) Fig. 10. Jonathan Safran Foer , Tree of Codes (detail)

By cutting into The Street of Crocodiles Safran got the title: The Street of Crocodiles, and by repeating this process of cutting out words and letters throughout the rest of Bruno Schulz’s book, he revealed the story of 'an enormous last day of life’ . The cuts create multiple levels in 27

the story and also layers of visual depth, which confront the reader with a new way of interacting with the book. It creates an “immense, anxious, at times disorientating imagery, crossing both a sense of time and place, making the story of one person's last day everyone's story” . Visual 28

Editions, the editorial that agreed to working in collaboration with Jonathan Safran Foer for creating such a work, explain the point of departure of Tree of Codes:

Tree of Codes began with Jonathan saying he was curious to explore and experiment with the

die-cut technique. With that as our mutual starting point, we spent many months of emails and phone calls, exploring the idea of the pages’ physical relationship to one another and how this

Read more about the production of this book in the following link:

http://visual-editions.com/tree-of-codes-by-25

jonathan-safran-foer or watch Jonathan Safran Foer explain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsW3Y7EmTlo WAGNER, E. (2011), Cited in Tree of Codes’ Cover. Visual Editions. The Times.

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American Book Centre’s description:http://www.abc.nl/search/detailed_qty.php?isbn=9780956569219&valuta=$

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Ibid.

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could somehow be developed to work with a meaningful narrative. This led to Jonathan deciding to use an existing piece of text and cut a new story out of it. 29

The book explores a new direction in literary creation, which has intrigued different kinds of audiences. Literary audiences have shown interest in this avant-gardiste way of writing, and art and design audiences who have been captivated by the visual experience which is offered in the book. Which has lead to questions such as: what does it mean for literary critics that writers have adopted the image within the written practice?

III.

To a certain extent, parts of this thesis might resonate with Carrol Clarkson’s Drawing the Line. 30 Toward an Aesthetics of Transitional Justice, because it was the book that inspired some of the main

ideas which will be developed. In particular, chapter three, Justice and the Art of Transition, in which she discusses the role of the arts in times of political and legal transformation. In this chapter, Carrol Clarkson mentions William Kentridge and Willem Boshoff, two South-African artists that were unknown to me up until I read her book, and both artists have proven to be very useful for my own discussion because of their highly heterogeneous artworks . Both of them strategically 31

combine elements of visual grammar with the structures of language in order for their images to emerge.

For example, Figure 11, is a drawing by Kentridge, titled Cambio which means “change” in Spanish, and it is a drawing made on top of a text which seems to be a travel guide of the city of Turin. In this case the verbal element is pulled out of its context, and is used as the base for the visual creation. In his drawings, Kentridge “releases loose, dusty particles of charcoal and chalk onto large-format sheets creating ‘landscapes’ which he then treats as plastic forms, setting to work on them and splaying them little by little. Existing marks on the sheets are never entirely

http://visual-editions.com/tree-of-codes-by-jonathan-safran-foer

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The artists which I have chosen to discuss in this study were brought to my attention due to their different stylistic

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artworks. However, I would like to clarify that many of the artists are Spanish (A. Tàpies, J. Plensa, R. Bilbao, E. Olondriz and M. Ullán) because they are artists that I knew before hand, while I lived in Spain Other artists are South African (W. Boshoff, W. Kentridge and J. Halse) because they were recommendations from my thesis supervisor, Carrol Clarkson. Nevertheless, many other artists with different nationalities have also been included (J. Kosuth, J. S. Foer, J. Drucker, R. Roth, I. Mood, etc.)

Heterogeneous in the sense that the spectator engages both visually and verbally with the works.

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removed. They simply become blurred and are covered over again” . Cambio reflects this idea of 32

a mutable drawing: on the one side, the drawing itself changes as time passes, and on the other side, the text which he has used as raw material, also reflects modification: a step from verbality to visuality.

Fig. 11. William Kentridge, Cambio Fig. 12. Willem Boshoff, Sdrow Fo Nwodkaerb. (Detail)

On the other hand, Figure 12 is a detail from one of Boshoff ’s Sdrow Fo Nwodkaerb. The title is an ananym (a name written backwards) for “Breakdown of Words” and the work consists of eight panels which are collages of the Dictionary of Perplexing English wrapped around old and broken tools. Katja Gentric, a doctorate on the work of Willem Boshoff at the Université de Bourgogne, describes this series by Boshoff in her monographic study of the artist in detail:

As a pebble is shaped by the flow of water in a river, language becomes worn down and hybridized through the centuries. Boshoff imagines this laborious evolution as a process taking place in a workshop, a kitchen, a building site. The craftsman uses his tools, sometimes inflicting violent blows on the material, adding, subtracting, shaping... In this work the tools have been broken and abandoned, the once useful words are now unwanted, defunct, extinct. The logic of their definitions is sometimes fragmented, sometimes maintained with infinite care only to be left incomplete at the end. In this sense BREAKDOWN OF WORDS confronts us with the same catastrophe as that of Babel. 33

KENTRIDGE, W. and BREIDBACH, A. (2006): William Kentridge Thinking Aloud: Conversations with Angela Breidbach.

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Verlag der Buchhandlung. Walther König, Köln. Page 5.

GENTRIC, K: http://www.willemboshoff.com/documents/artworks/sdrow_fo_nwodkaerb.htm

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Although differently, both Kentridge and Boshoff combine writing into their artworks. The logic of language is ripped out of its context, and placed in the studio of these contemporary artists , 34

as if another pigment on their palette, which they use at choice. One may even ask, what do painting, drawing and writing all have in common? As Tim Ingold wrote in the introduction of 35

his book Lines, A Brief History: “the answer is that they all proceed along lines of one kind or another.” . In this study, I aim to engage in discussions regarding the way in which lines are 36

materialized between art and literature. IV.

The proposed readings and interpretations of the visual illustrations should not be understood as definitive nor final readings of the artworks presented in this study. Instead, they should suggest an interpretation which supports and shapes my discussions. In Part 1 of the thesis I will explore the lines between art and literature: the introduction provides a broad definition of what will be done in the thesis, then chapter two departs from Lessing’s Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of

Painting and Poetry to stress the line which has separated the visual and the verbal arts.

Consequently, my discussion in chapter three explores the possibility of re-drawing the line which separates both disciplines and find a way of making that line encircle both disciplines together: and suggests the possibility of defining the fusion concept of Literarture. Then, in Part 2 of the thesis, I have chosen to approach three moments for defining this concept of Literarture: projection, composition and reception. These three moments illustrate what happens during the creation of a work and what occurs at the final phase of reception (and recognition) of the work in question. By looking at these three phases it is possible to access literature and art and start looking at them as interactive and dialogical disciplines, and no longer as independent and isolated from each other. Finally, in Part 3, I will bring together the main conclusions of the study. Altogether, my study encompasses art an literature as well as the lines between them, because after all, art, like literature, consists of drawing the line somewhere . 37

Not only W. Kentridge and W. Boshoff, but also A. Tàpies, J. Kosuth, R. de Bilbao, E. Olondriz, inter alia.

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Modification on Ingold’s initial question: “What do walking, weaving, observing, singing, storytelling, drawing and

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writing have in common?”

INGOLD, T. (2007): Lines: A brief history. Routledge. London and New York. Page 1.

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Echoing Chesterton’s sentence: “Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere” (1928)

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CHAPTER 2

DRAWING THE LINE BETWEEN 38

VERBAL AND VISUAL

I.

There is a long tradition of philosophers who have focused on the relation between the verbal and the visual arts. The comparison of poetry and painting, literature and visual art has been a consistent theme since antiquity in both Eastern and Western aesthetics . The main starting 39

point of this discussion is Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and his famous Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits

of Painting and Poetry. In this book Lessing argues against the tendency of using Horace's ut pictura poesis (as painting so is poetry) as indispensable for understanding art and literature: instead he

articulates the differences between poetic and artistic production. Horace’s phrase ut pictura poesis was taken by many generations of critics to be prescriptive (“poetry should be like painting”) rather than analogical (“poetry, like painting, does the following…”) . Lessing questions this 40

presumption of equivalence between poetry and painting, and suggests an argument which differentiates and categorizes the visual art and the verbal art in space and time. Lawrence R. Sipe summarizes Lessing’s argument by stating that the main difference between visual art and a verbal art is that “we see a painting all at once; but in order to experience literature, we have to read in a linear succession of moments through time” . Similarly, in his book Unflattening, Nick 41

Sousanis explains the different ways in which we employ verbality and visuality:

Reference to chapter 1: Drawing the Line in CLARKSON, C. (2014): Drawing the Line: Toward an Aesthetics of

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Transitional Justice. Fordham University Press. New York.

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University of Chicago Press.

LEITCH, V. , CAIN, W. , FINKE, L. , JOHNSON, B., McGOWAN, J. , SHARPLEY-WHITING, T. and

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WILLIAMS, J. (2001): The Norton Anthology of Theory & Criticism. Norton & Company. New York and London. Page 461.

SIPE, R. L. (1998): How Picture Books Work: A Semiotically Framed Theory of Text-Picture Relationships. Children’s

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We’re concerned with the ways in which we employ visual and verbal modes in order to distill something tangible from the vastness sense of experience. The verbal marches along linearly, step by step, a discrete sequence of words “strung one after another”, as Susane Langer writes, “like beads on a rosary”. The visual, on the other hand... presents itself all-at-once. Simultaneously. All over. Relational. 42

Fig. 13. Nick Sousanis. Unflattening. (Detail)

A study of art and literature involves concretising the characteristics which commonly have differentiated each discipline. At first glance, these are some of the differences between 43

literature and art which come to one’s mind:

Some of these may seem obvious, but nevertheless it is useful to mention them: for instance, literature uses language and words as the medium of communication while art uses shapes and images as the medium of expression. Commonly, words have been given more value than images, because they have been seen as the tool of thought, whilst images have repeatedly been

LITERATURE ART

WORD IMAGE

LANGUAGE FORMS

WRITING PAINTING

BLACK INK VARIETY OF COLOURS

TIME CONSUMING IMMEDIATE

CAPTURES A MOMENT CAPTURES AN INSTANT

TONES IN TIME FIGURES IN SPACE

CHANGE STATIC

SOUSANIS, N. (2015): Unflattening. Harvard University Press. Cambridge and London. Page 58.

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This scheme is meant to bring together the main differences: it is not a definitive scheme and it does not represent

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undermined and sidelined as mere illustrations which support the text . They also use different 44

materials: since the 19th century, literature has mainly been produced on paper , while paintings 45

had to be produced on a thicker material; sometimes on wooden panels but most commonly on canvas , although sometimes also on paper. Literature is also associated to black ink, which can 46

vary, but strictly speaking black ink is the most common choice for printing . On the other hand, 47

art is usually associated to a wider variety of pigments.

But, returning to what Lawrence R. Sipe and Nick Sousanis had pointed out, one of the major differences between art and literature concerns immediacy: the reception of visual art is immediate in contrast to the more active, time-consuming role which has to take place for the reception of literature. This immediacy goes hand in hand with the impossibility of transmitting movement or change: visual art captures an instant which remains immortalized. Literature is capable of capturing an entire moment, not only the instant which is captured in a work of visual art. Furthermore, David Wellbery takes the matter even further by pointing out the common imitative characteristic of poetry and painting. But nevertheless he also points out the difference between the means of their imitations:

Poetry and painting, both are imitative arts; the purpose of both is to awaken in us the liveliest, most sensate representations of their objects. They therefore have in common all the rules that follow, from the concept of imitation, from this purpose. However they make use of entirely different means for their imitations; and from the difference of these means all the specific rules for each art are to be derived.

Painting uses figures and colours in space. Poetry articulates tones in time. 48

SOUSANIS, N. (2015): Unflattening. Harvard University Press. Cambridge and London. Page 54.

44

Literature has been produced on other materials throughout history: palm leafs, cloths, animal hide, stones, metal,

45

clay, wood, slate, parchment and papyrus. But since the 13th century, paper was introduced in Europe, and since Friedrich Gottlob Keller invented a machine which could make paper out of wood fibres, in 1840, paper became cheaper and more accessible to everyone.

Canvas replaced the use of wooden panels between the 16th and the 17th century, and since then it is the most

46

common medium used for oil painting.

I am aware that there are plenty of exceptions. For example: ENDE, M. (1997):The Never ending Story. Dutton

47

Children's Books. which is printed in two colours: usually in green and red or in blue and red ink.

WELLBERY, D. (1984): Lessing’s Laocoon: Semiotics and Aesthetics in the Age of Reason. Cambridge University Press.

48

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In conclusion, this argument classifies art as a spatial arrangement of figures and colours, and literature as a temporal arrangement of units of sound, which means that literature’s ability to narrate is the key factor that differentiates it from art:

Furthermore, in chapter twenty-four, Lessing talks about another important difference between painting and poetry: the representation of ugliness:

[…] painting and poetry are not in the same position. In poetry, ugliness of form loses its repulsive effect almost entirely by the change from coexistence to the consecutive. From this point of view it ceases to be ugliness, as it were, and can therefore combine even more intimately with other qualities to produce a new and special effect. In painting, on the other hand, ugliness exerts all its force at one time and hence has an effect almost as strong as in nature itself. 49

This distinction between the perception of poetry and painting that Lessing stresses is particularly interesting in combination with the ability of narrating or not. Ugliness loses its repulsive effect in literature precisely because of literatures ability of narration: the ugliness which is described becomes disguised in the narration, depicting it slowly as the text proceeds. Whilst in art, ugliness presents itself bluntly to the public and resembles more the ugliness as we can find it in nature itself, which is why the repulsive effect is practically as strong as it would be in real life. This analysis of the differences between both disciplines has provided a foundation for many further discussions regarding the nature of art and literature. It has been both agreed and questioned abundantly, and for the sake of my study, it is essential to at least take into consideration these differences between both disciplines in order to define the line which separates them from each other.

ABLE TO NARRATE NOT ABLE TO NARRATE

UGLINESS LOSES ITS REPULSIVE EFFECT UGLINESS EXERTS ALL ITS FORCE AT ONCE AN EFFECT ALMOST AS STRONG AS IN NATURE

ITSELF

LESSING, G. (1984): Laocoon an Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry. The Johns Hopkins University Press.

49

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II.

In the previous section, David Wellbery’s quote about Lessing, mentioned the common imitative nature of poetry and painting . Meaning that, despite all the differences which have been 50

mentioned in the previous pages, in theory, art and literature do share the same fundamental principle of mimesis. Mimesis is one of the central questions in the discussions regarding art which equally concerns literature, and is attributed originally to Plato. For Plato, all art, including poetry, is an imitation of nature, a mere copy of those objects that belong to the physical world. But those objects in the material world, according to Plato’s idealist philosophy, are only mutable copies of timeless universals (forms and ideas). This distrust of mimesis is grounded in the idea that a copy leads away from the truth rather than toward it. In short: for Plato all art is a mere copy of a copy . 51

Book 10 of the Republic contains the infamous critique of mimesis , which illustrates how the 52

world that we perceive through our senses, the world that poetry imitates, is merely illusory. Plato considers all art and poetry to be representations of what is already an inferior representation of reality. In this book, Socrates dialogues with Glaucon and classifies poets and painters as creators of illusions that are far from the truth:

So shall we classify all poets, from Homer onwards, as representers of images of goodness (and of everything else which occurs in their poetry), and claim that they don’t have any contact with the truth? The facts are as we said a short while ago: a painter creates an illusory shoemaker, when not only does he not understand anything about shoemaking, but his audience doesn’t either. They just base their conclusions on the colours and shapes they can see. […] And I should think we’ll say that the same goes for a poet as well: he uses words and phrases to block in some of the colours of each area of expertise, although all he understands is how to represent things in a way which makes other superficial people, who base their conclusions on the words they can hear.

50

Page 103. (Quoted previously on page 19)

LEITCH, V. , CAIN, W. , FINKE, L. , JOHNSON, B., McGOWAN, J. , SHARPLEY-WHITING, T. and

51

WILLIAMS, J. (2001): The Norton Anthology of Theory & Criticism. Norton & Company. New York and London.Page 41.

Ibid. Page 43.

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According to Plato, the poet and the artist are grouped together as creators of illusions that do not have any contact with the truth, a critique which has been argued abundantly.

However, what happens with this principle of mimesis when referring to non-representational art, abstract art or conceptual art? How does the idea of mimesis apply when the representation is deliberately non mimetic? The very notion of abstract imitative does indeed seem 53

contradictory, so it is interesting to consider this idea of mimesis in the light of an age which has chosen to represent the visible world in an abstract and conceptual way. “Why is it that different ages and different nations have represented the visible world in such different ways?” What does 54

the principle of mimesis tell us if abstract art were intended to represent the visible world? And furthermore, why have many contemporary visual artists chosen to represent our world today by including verbal elements into the visual art and why have many contemporary writers chosen to represent our would by including visual elements into the literature? What is the role of visuality and language nowadays? Images are everywhere and text is everywhere, so maybe abstract and conceptual artists are still somehow being imitative by including these elements into their representations. Summing up, chapter two has aimed to mention the discussion which differentiates literature from art. Furthermore, chapter three will examine the possibility of encircling artistic and literary production together, and explore the shared elements instead of stressing the places in which they differ.  

Allow me to specify that I got this idea from Garry Hagberg’s book Aristotle’s Mimesis and Abstract Art in which he

53

puts it this way:

“Does non-representational art itself constitute a refutation of any theory of art based upon mimesis or imitation? Our intuitions regarding this question seem to support an affirmative answer: it appears impossible to account for abstract and non-representational art in terms of imitation, because, to put the problem simply, if nothing is copied in a work of art then there can be nothing essentially imitative about it. The very notion of abstract imitative art seems self-contradictory.”

HAGBERG, G. (1984): Aristotle’s Mimesis and Abstract Art in Philosophy. Cambridge University Press. Page 1 Despite this book being about Aristotle, I found the question particularly interesting for the sake of this thesis, in which most of the art that will be approached is not imitative. Most of the examples of art which defy categorization are abstract or conceptual art.

GOMBRICH, E. H. (1960): Art and Illusion. A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. London.

54

Phaidon. Page 3.

CREATE IMITATIONS OF REALITY:

“REPRESENTATION AT THE THIRD REMOVE FROM REALITY”

POETS ARTISTS

USE WORDS AND PHRASES TO BLOCK IN SOME OF

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CHAPTER 3

REDRAWING THE LINE BETWEEN 55

VERBAL AND VISUAL

I.

Joseph Hillis Miller argues that we can think of lines in two ways: as dividing lines and as connecting lines . The preceding chapter aims to provide a view of the dividing line between art 56

and literature: by defining the inherent differences between them. It intends to show how it has been common to focus on the relation between art and literature, but how most of the reflections on art and literature have begun with an inquiry into the specific nature of each of these two entities : stressing the line which separates one from another. Until now, I have put out on the 57

table a few of the most important differences which have commonly been listed to differentiate art from literature , and the dominant subject in the previous discussion, was Lessing’s 58

differentiation between painting and poetry in his Laocoon. Nevertheless, I deliberately chose Lessing’s views on the subject in order to question these systems of knowledge, and put them into perspective with contemporary art and literature in which the differentiation from one another becomes less clear. So, this way I have defined the line which delimitates art from literature as two separate, independent, isolated disciplines; and now, in this chapter, I will explore the connecting line: a line which can join them together as similar, creative processes which are very much intertwined with one another.

Reference to the title of chapter two: Redrawing the Lines in CLARKSON, C. (2014): Drawing the Line: Toward an

55

Aesthetics of Transitional Justice. Fordham University Press. New York. Page 46.

I have not found the exact quote in J. Hillis Millers book Ariadne’s Thread: Story Line , but I did come across this idea

56

in Richardson’s review of the book: RICHARDSON, B. (1993): Review of “Ariadne’s Thread: Story Lines” by J. Hillis Miller in Studies in the Novel. The JohnsHopkins University Press. Vol. 25, No. 4. Page 495.

Echoing ROCKHILL, G. (2014): Radical History and the Politics of Art. New Directions in Critical Theory. Columbia

57

University Press. New York. His point of departure is “Reflections on art and politics commonly begin with an inquiry into the specific nature of these two entities, as well as into possible connections between them”. Page 3.

Scheme from Page 18.

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What would it look like if instead of separating literature from art with a line, we would re-draw the line in a way that both are encircled together? Or change the angle of the line in a way that art and literature are connected to each other?

It is of particular interest to leave aside the line that separates them, and focus on the lines which bring them together. “Straight lines become parabolas” , which makes it possible to change the 59

point of departure, in order to approach artworks which defy strict categorization. As shown in the introduction, there are plenty of works of art in which both words and images play a major role: so one could ask why do artists stop representing actual things and decide to represent text, language and letters? According to Túa Blesa, these artists belong to the Gutenberg era : an era 60

in which the omnipresence of writing is prevalent in both the public and the private space. And era in which writing has become another object of representation in their works of art.

Words no longer belong to the domain of logic: they no longer possess any other logic other than their sonority and the associations that they convey. But this logic of sonority and associations has nothing to do with the logic of spoken language. 61

What happens when these works of art do not stick to arranging figures and colours in space ? 62

In particular, what happens when these works of art represent language, text and writing?

KENTRIDGE, W. and BREIDBACH, A. (2006): William Kentridge Thinking Aloud: Conversations with Angela Breidbach.

59

Verlag der Buchhandlung. Walther König, Köln. Page 110.

Note: this idea of straight lines constituting a circle can also be seen in physics with the centripetal force. Whenever an object moves in a circular path, the force is directed toward the centre of the circle: the object is accelerating because the velocity is constantly changing direction. These changes of directions are the reason form a circular path, but they are initially straight forces.

See more: http://www.regentsprep.org/regents/physics/phys06/bcentrif/default.htm

BLESA, T. (2011): Lecturas de la Ilegibilidad en el Arte. Editorial Delirio. Salamanca, España. Page 12. Johannes

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Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg introduced printing to Europe. He implemented the mechanical movable type printing in Europe which started the Printing Revolution

GIMFERRER, P. (2005): Rimbaud y nosotros. Publicaciones de la Residencia de estudiantes. Madrid. Page 28. My

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translation.

62

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Literature, language, the book,… they all become the object of artistic representation in itself. In

Image, Text and Music, Roland Barthes distinguishes between the terms ‘work’ and ‘text’ by stating

that “the work is a fragment of substance, occupying a part of the space of books (in a library for example), the text is a methodological field” . This opposition is based on Jacques Lacan’s 63

distinction between ‘reality’ and ‘the real’ in which one is displayed and the other demonstrated. Similarly, the work can be seen and held in the hand, whilst the text is a process of demonstration which speaks according to rules, it is language that only exists in the movement of discourse . 64

This reflects an idea about the materiality of the book as a physical object in contrast to the indeterminate status of the text.

This materiality of the book has been included in art, constituting the raw material for contemporary artists such as Alicia Martin, who created an instalation which required 5.000 books, and is titled Biografías . 65

Fig. 14. Alicia Martin, Biografías (Madrid) Fig. 15. Alicia Martin, Biografías III (Córdoba)

BARTHES, R. (1977): Image, Music, Text. Fontana Press. An Imprint of Harper Collins Publishers. London. Page

63

157.

HALSE, J. (2006): Framing the Text: An Investigation of Collage in Postmodern Narrative Illustration. Master Thesis at the

64

University of Stellenbosch. Page 1.

Alicia Martin is known for the big installations made out of books, pouring out of buildings, and most of her

65

works play with the same idea. “She is particularly fond of using books because of their universality: as an object which is stored and contains different times and spaces, and it becomes a testimony of human though throughout time. The book has as many readings as people who read it.” - Interview with Alicia Martin, http:// nicolamariani.es/2013/05/21/el-libro-me-eligio-a-mi-entrevista-con-alicia-martin/

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The books in Alicia Martin’s works are symbols of culture, of memory and of communication which end up being at times restless, at others ironic, poetic or even aggressive. But they always intend on forcing us to think about certain central issues of contemporary life: the instability of knowledge, the fragility of memory and the need for it, the information Babel of the mass media, the difficult relationship between cultures. No longer shut away in libraries or reduced to a furnishing accessory, the books/work of this artist turn into a shapeless incumbent concretion that tenaciously clings to the walls of the gallery and seems to elude the laws of gravity. The works of Alicia Martín manage to turn books into animated objects, full of symbolisms that act as powerful but ungraspable echoes.66

The idea of animating an unanimated object is characteristic of Alicia Martins works: she plays with the metaphorical use of objects and materials, and she introduces a sense of movement which conflicts with the stillness and inertness of books. This contrasts with the notion of text as “language that only exists in the movement of a discourse” that Barthes described previously; suddenly the work which can be held in the hand also is displaying an idea of movement. While the work is a “fragment of substance, occupying a part of the space of books” it also becomes constitutive of an idea of movement which flows out of the buildings in Alicia Martin’s works. II.

As explained in the introduction, the central task of this thesis is to study art and literature in an articulate way. Literarture is the fusion concept which allows a transversal approach towards art and literature. Since there are many connections between literature and art which can be seen in an articulate and interactive way, this new concept is coined with the purpose of deleting the existing barriers between art an literature. Due to the creation of a new concept, a new theoretical space is also created: a space which enables an analysis of the shared structures which are relevant to both disciplines.

Contributions from different disciplines are not unconnected but are engaged with one another. This remains key to any interdisciplinary search. But connections need to be harmonious and blending. I propose to see them, where applicable, as a dialogue, an interaction. 67

Galica Art Gallery’s description of Alicia Martin’s work. See more: http://www.galica.it/projects/alicia-martin/

66

BAL, M. (2012): Interdisciplinary Research. Sage Publications. United States of America. Page 95.

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Art and literature are disciplines which are connected and engaged with one another, and Literarture is the harmonious and blending concept between both disciplines. The different ways in which we experience written language and visual art have important implications for the ways in which we try to understand heterogeneous artworks. The hybrid nature of these artistic creations causes a tension between the impulse of looking at the pictures and the impulse to continue reading. And that is where literarture comes in: it is a gateway for interpreting verbal art or visual literature. Laura Lizarazo, a PhD scholar student at Gießen University in Germany, also investigates the correlation between visual and verbal: the materiality of literature and the legibility in art:

By focusing on the visual and material dimension of literature and literary texts, the very written words, as medium of literature, are more than just graphical fixation or reproduction of spoken language: they become a visual body by its own means; an autonomous form of meaning-making of literary texts. 68

Contemporary literature draws the readers attention to its visual and material dimensions with the purpose of acknowledging literature as more than just a textual configuration. An artist who plays with the graphical fixation of literature and its materiality as if visual art, is Johanna Drucker . She is both a book artist and a theorist and according to her, there is “no doubt that 69

the artist’s book has become a developed art form in the 20th century” and she goes on to describe the artist’s book as the “quintessential art form of the twentieth century” . This is 70

because the artist’s book challenges the conventional textual foundations by adding visual elements to existing literature and challenging the book form with variations and flexibility. According to Renée Riese Hubert, the artist’s book shares postmodern culture’s preoccupation with the “absence of traditional generic distinctions and its questioning of reading conventions.

LIZARAZO, L. (2016): Iconic Writing: Illegibility and the materiality of literature. (Text for Panel 1, Day 1, European

68

Summer School For Cultural Studies in 2016 about Legibility. Page 1.

DRUCKER, J. (1998): Figuring the Word. Essays on Books, Writing, and Visual Poetics. Granary Books. New York.Page 2.

69

The avant-garde illustrated artist’s book (livre d’artiste/livre detourné) came into being in the mid-1890s in Paris. This trend was initiated by Ambroise Vollard, an art dealer at the time, who saw the opportunity of marketing deluxe editions of books. These books were produced in larger sized formats and were produced with colourings, printings and rare materials. It was considered a sideline in books which could gain popularity according to the artists who worked on the books to be made.

For more information on Johanna Drucker’s artworks see http://www.johannadrucker.net/

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This is evidenced in the indeterminacy of the text (is it to be read or seen?) and its relationship to illustrative elements, as well as in its shape ”. 71

Figures 16 and 17 are two examples of her work, in which she takes “quotes about the value of books from authors of credibility and substance, then she prints them out and then she defaces the book obliterating the word "book" in every quote. The watercoloring resembles blood spattered into the pages, and the damage increases as the pages progress towards the end. The book is a record of damage, distress, pain, and woundedness” 72

Fig. 16. Johanna Drucker, Rives Lightweight. Fig. 17. Johanna Drucker, Rives Lightweight.

By focusing on the visual and material dimension of literature, and specifically by focusing on the materiality of the book and the written words, these representations confront the viewer with works which are more than just graphical fixations or reproductions of spoken language: they become an work of both visual and verbal art.

III.

Plenty of other artists have worked with books as the raw material for their artworks besides Alicia Martín and Johanna Drucker. It has become a popular means of visual practice, and artists play with the ideas that books represent for the viewer of the artworks. Although, returning to the concept of text, Roland Barthes, in Image, Music, Text makes the following observation:

71

University of Stellenbosch. Page 5 (Quoting HUBERT, R. (1985): Readable - Visible: Reflections on the Illustrated Book. Visible Language. Page 519.)

DRUCKER, J. (2013): http://www.bookarts.uwe.ac.uk/projects/al-mutanabbi/653.htm , California, USA.

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The text is not to be thought of as an object that can be computed. It would be futile to try to separate out materially works from texts. In particular, the tendency must be avoided to say that the work is classic, the text avant-garde; it is not a question of drawing up a crude honours list in the name of modernity and declaring certain literary productions 'in' and others 'out' by virtue of their chronological situation: there may be 'text' in a very ancient work, while many products of contemporary literature are in no way texts. 73

Considering this last sentence from Roland Barthes, how does this apply to these contemporary works of art/literature which play with the materiality of the book?

Fig. 18. G. A. Charvel and H. Falcón, This is (not) an artist book. Fig. 19. Lucille Moroni, Folded Book.

Figures 18 and 19 are quite similar book sculptures which somehow create a three-dimensional volume out of the two-dimensional pages of the book. By folding the pages of the book, Charvel and Falcón create a wall of open books with shapes bulking out of the pages. Moroni does a similar thing, although she uses a more complicated pattern and only uses one book. Interestingly, these products of contemporary art are made with old books, meaning that these old products of literature are no longer texts, but become the basic material for contemporary visual art. These book sculptures confront the public with questions regarding the textuality of these literary works, once they have been transformed into visual artworks. Is it still possible to consider these literary works in terms of their textuality?  

BARTHES, R. (1977): Image, Music, Text. Fontana Press. An Imprint of Harper Collins Publishers. London. Page

73

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PART 2

The creative process involves a moment of composition, projection and reception.

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CHAPTER 4

COMPOSITION

I.

“Why compose? Human beings […] have an inherent need to arrange things and organize them: we do not place our furniture haphazardly in our rooms, but organize it into a pleasing and functional arrangement” writes M. John Angel in his introduction to Pictorial Composition. The Art 1 of Creating Expression in Painting. Then he goes on to summarize Pietro Annigoni’s view on the 2

compositional principles of art and how these are applicable to all the arts:

Annigoni said that there is only one art, and it manifests itself in different forms: music, painting, literature, etc. In an abstract form, identical compositional principles apply to all the arts and to all times. Simon and Garfunkel are using the same principles in their Six O’Clock News as many Classical composers have done: the introduction of a quiet background element that grows and grows until it becomes the dominant sound. This principle is employed in the colour composition of many paintings, and we find it, too, in novels where in a seemingly minor incident encountered early in the book takes on more and more significance as the story develops and, finally, shows itself to be a major theme. 3

According to Annigoni, identical composition principles apply to all the arts and to all times but M. John Angel’s text only pays attention to the principles of composition as they are found in the visual arts. In paintings, composition is the placement or the arrangement of the visual elements or ingredients within the work of art.

The term ‘composition’ derives from Latin: com- means ‘with’ and -ponere means ‘to place’, so in other words: 'putting together’. The discussion in this thesis deals with the interstitial zones of art

JOHN ANGEL, M. (2009): Pictorial Composition. The Art of Creating Expression in Painting. Page 1.

1

https://www.artrenewal.org/articles/2009/PictorialComposition-MJAngel.pdf

Pietro Annigoni (1910-1988) Italian portrait and fresco painter, famous for his painting of Queen Elizabeth II.

2

JOHN ANGEL, M. (2009): Pictorial Composition. The Art of Creating Expression in Painting. Page 3.

3

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and language , so Annigoni’s view is particularly interesting: the idea that the principles of 4

composition can apply to any work of art, from music to writing to photography. In his Pictorial

Composition: an introduction, Henry Rankin Poore makes the following statement: “a painting's

technique, colour, and perspective may all be excellent, yet the painting will fail unless its composition succeeds. Composition is the harmonious arranging of the component parts of a work of art into a unified whole” . When it comes to visual art and photography, the basic 5

compositional rules are quite similar; there is the rule of thirds, lead-in lines, framing, and finally patterns and interrupted patterns . I will only focus briefly on a few of these compositional rules. 6

The rule of thirds is probably the fundamental building block of all of the rules of visual composition. What you do is you draw two imaginary, vertical lines on your image equally spaced apart, thus dividing it into three sections, then you draw another two horizontal lines equally spaced apart, and you have another three sections. By placing points of interests or your subject along or near those lines, in particular were they cross; you will get a much more pleasing composition.

The lead-in lines, are the lines which your eye can follow into an image. They create the compositional distribution within the painting: contributing (if it is a good composition) to the arrangement of the components into a unified whole. Framing is another essential factor in composition: elements should be placed on the page/canvas in a way that the left and right

margins are equal to each other and the bottom margins is the largest of the four.

Finally, patterns and interrupted patterns. These two compositional elements are the ones that are most interesting for the sake of this discussion. In particular, because the written page is a

Echoing a sentence by CLARKSON, C. (2014): Drawing the Line: Toward an Aesthetics of Transitional Justice. Fordham

4

University Press. New York. Page 66 “The discussions in this chapter play out in the interstitial zones of art and justice, justice and the law, law and language, language and art”

RAKIN POORE, H. (1903): Pictorial Composition: An introduction.

5

http://www.icsarchive.org/tp/1730-1947_pictorial_composition.pdf

KELBY, S. (2012): Crush the Composition Class Live. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpHMuK7Htic

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good example of a pattern, and it is interesting how some cases of visual art have adopted the patterns which are characteristic from literary texts. For example, Figures 20, 21, 22 and 23 on the following page are artworks by two Spanish artists: Ramón Bilbao and Esther Olondriz. 7

They both play with their compositions by attributing an idea of scripture into them, making them somehow similar to a written page. The visual pattern of the literary text is used as a means of visual composition. Figure 20, Notas de una Exposición by Ramon Bilbao, is very comparable to Figure 3, Verskanste Openbaring by Willem Boshoff, which I discussed in the introduction . Both of 8

these artworks by Boshoff and Bilbao play with the darkness of a text when it is written over and over again. There are small differences between these two works, but the underlying idea of them is the same: and they both create a visual art work with the repetition of writings over itself. In Figure 22, Ramon Bilbao does not use actual letters, but he does distribute the symbols and signs in a style that imitates the page in a book (horizontal alignment on a white background). Nevertheless, by choosing different colours and formats, he confronts the viewer with this idea of illegibility of the language. The use of graphics, letters and other types of lines and strokes which, in contrast to actual “pure” literature, represents both an illusion of a narrative and at 9

the same time the lack of textual discourse in the painting. Esther Olondriz on the other hand uses real legible language as the base for her art works, and then she works on top of the text, making it (partly) illegible. Both Figures 21 and 23 are from her collection of Dona dóna works. Figure 21 is a painting titled Dona dóna… Tassó ple de paraules, that is made on top of a text by Leopoldo Maria Panero which she then covered with red lines, and Figure 23 is a collage, titled 10 Dona dóna… A poc a poc i bona lletra, which is made with different newspaper cuttings, and covered

with black lines. In both of these works Olondriz is deliberately covering up legible text and making it hard for the viewer to read the underlying text of her artworks.

See on page 34.

7

See on page 7.

8

MITCHELL, W. J. T. (2005): There are no Visual Media. Journal of Visual Culture, Vol. 4. No. 2, Page 258. Reference

9

to the inexact notion of purity of media.

Leopoldo Maria Panero (1848-2014) was a Spanish poet who has commonly been classified in the Novísimos group.

10

He is well known as the “crazy poet” because he was admitted to a psychiatric centre, and he spent there over 40 years but continued writing poetry. For more information about Panero, see El desencanto (1976), a movie by Jaime Chávarri which documents his and his families life during the disintegration of Franco’s regime in Spain.

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Fig. 20. Ramón Bilbao, Notas de una exposición. Fig. 21. Esther Olondriz, Dona dóna... Tassó ple de paraules.

Fig 22. Ramón Bilbao Esperanza. Fig 23. Esther Olondriz Dona dóna... A poc a poc i bona lletra.