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Von den Verflechtungen der künstlerischen Forschung mit dem Schreiben als Praxis
Full text linkIhre Legitimation findet künstlerische Forschung in der Regel immernoch durch einen verbalen Kommentar, der bürokratisch und institutionell scheinbar die wissenschaftlich Qualifikation der Arbeit erwirken vermag. Der Beitrag nimmt die vermeintliche Zweiteiligkeit des künstlerischen Wissens—ästhetisch und verbal—zum Anlass, um über das wissensgenerierende Potential des Schreibens selbst als ästhetische, kreative, künstlerische und wissenschaftlich immerwährend notwendige Praxis nachzudenken. In Anlehnung an das Werk Jacques Derridas und aktuellen Überlegungen von Juliet Fleming und Anne M. Royston behandelt der Vortrag das Schreiben als künstlerisch-epistemische Praxis, welche durch die Untrennbarkeit ihrer Materialien und Handlungen charakterisiert ist, und ihrer Reduktion zu einem neutralen Medium des Aufschreibens widerspricht
Writing (art history) as material practice
No full textThe recognition, or perhaps better: diagnosis, of a material turn in art history and visual culture studies, proceeded with the effect that the objects under consideration were seen from new perspectives and that the scholarly practices investigating them received further supplementation through new apparatuses of vision and inspection, increased computer processing power and digital interfaces. In turn, the new devices and software marked the disciplines’ self-recognition and channelled certain modes of their enquiry. Thus, to beg the question of the relations between art and its materials also shines a light on the self-same relations concerning the enquiry and the contraptions or materials related to its practice.
Yet, one of the fundamental material practices of art history—writing, whether on paper or on screen—emerged seemingly untouched and unquestioned in view of the reconsideration that objects and modes of enquiry had undergone. The aim of this paper is to develop the characteristics of art-historical writing as a material practice in relation to conceptual artistic practices.
Art-historical writing necessarily not only negotiates the boundary of visual and verbal, but also manifests a particular material effect produced in the discursive framing of knowledge and meaning-making about artefacts, subjects, processes and their historic contexts. The paper explores theoretical approaches to writing art history as an epistemic practice that is necessarily marked by the contingencies and affordances of its materials like those conceptual practices that are primarily writing-based.
Setting out from the philosophically much-discussed phrase ‘this paper here’, the presentation follows a trail of assumptions about writing on paper and screen that often render both impossibly blank and infinitely inscribable. In a self-reflexive movement, the paper shows the written mark as neither able to refer to itself exclusively, nor detachable from its ground. And similarly, it positions the drawn lines, which are so often the objects of art-historical enquiry, as always repeatable and thus illimitable to any singularity on a particular sheet. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s conception of writing and Vilém Flusser’s phenomenological understanding of gestures, the paper asserts that narrow medial limitations are placed on the understanding of writing practices when they are detached from the contingencies of particular implements and materials.
Art-history writing is here developed as an epistemic practice that insists on the inseparability of its materials and their ‘acts’. Just as art history does not reduce the artworks of its investigations to mere material objecthood or transcendent idea, so the practices of its scholarship cannot categorically divorce the mute scribbles on screen or paper from the transparent discursivity of its logos. The propinquity between the material work of the artist and that of the historian is explored through, among others, Jaś Elsner, Boris Groys, Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes and Hayden White, who have indicated that far from being ignobled by the comparison, the discipline is perhaps ennobled to deliver on the irreducible multiplicity of its ‘objects’ which hitherto sat uneasily with a scientistic pursuit of linearity, resolution and teleological determination that also treats writing as a neutral expedient. Ultimately therefore, the paper promotes a disciplinary self-reflection that seeks to avoid that the objects of the enquiry become incomparable to the objects left by the enquiry
The graphics of ekphrastic writing: Raymond Pettibon's drawing-writing
No full textThis chapter focuses on ekphrastic writing in the work of the American artist Raymond Pettibon – mostly pen-and-ink drawings with varying amounts of written texts – in order to explore and question the implicit opposition between the verbal and the visual that underlies many critical definitions of ekphrasis. It demonstrates how Pettibon introduces textual fragmentation and non-linearity through his complex responses to and paraphrasing of ekphrastic authors, which opens up writing to the contingencies usually associated with drawing. Similarly, Pettibon’s texts are surveyed for typographic, orthographic and chirographic characteristics, which emphasise writing’s status as simultaneously visual and verbal. The artist’s texts thus appear as though they have been written twice – graphically and verbally – marking them both inside and outside of language. This transgressive power of the graphic in writing is traced via Jacques Derrida’s notion of the trait, that stroke or feature crucially linked to the gaze, which marks the space between the visible and invisible. The chapter proposes that this quality makes Pettibon’s work reducible to neither the discourse of language nor that of the image
The sense of the line between drawing and writing
Full text linkWhilst categorical distinctions between writing and drawing practices often separate cerebral sense-making from the sensuous encounter of bodies and materials, they also rehearse hierarchical, if not straightforward class-based, values. 'The sense of the line' develops what Jean-François Lyotard calls the 'energetics' of the line, its capacity to touch us, by reading and looking at two drawings by Raymond Pettibon. Insisting on the inseparability of the line in writing and drawing, the essay not only explores the deep intervolution of both lines on a material and bodily level but also traces the drawing-writing distinction to a desire to see-as, not see, thus the imposition of categories to limit an otherwise complex and irreducible encounter. As the line's graphic and plastic qualities cannot be neatly separated into distinct writerly and drawerly practices, looking at art and the reading of words are already intervolved with one another
Reading between the lines: W.G. Sebald’s words and pictures as propositions for art history as a literary practice
No full textThis paper embraces Sebald’s irreducible ‘writing with pictures’ as a proposition for art-historical practices. By exploring theoretical and philosophical approaches to writing’s epistemic capacity, the paper uses one example of Sebald’s word-image combinations to interrogate a history of art that often struggles to give up restraining the images it covets. The paper develops the characteristics of art-historical writing as a practice that necessarily not only negotiates the boundary of visual and verbal, but also manifests a literary fiction produced in the discursive framing of knowledge and meaning-making about artefacts, subjects, processes and their historic contexts.
In developing a methodological approach from Sebald’s word-picture combinations, we glimpse an art-historical practice that is necessarily already bound up in the liabilities of its subjects. Following Boris Groys’ suggestion that the writing of art history occurs in a literary space, which implies that the historian, too, is involved in artistic production and thus cannot approach the work (formally) under scrutiny from an external position, the paper reflects on the exigencies of writing about art. Recognising the limitations of what Derrida identified as teleological genre restriction and institutional pressures to preserve language as a transparent vehicle for ‘communication’, the paper advances a notion of art history as a literary pursuit that writes (with) pictures. Art history's recursive self-reflexivity—producing image-texts in order to trace the words and pictures of artists—is therefore used to reflect on the creative practice of art-history writing, as well as the assumed division between writing's own form, material and content
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