Author’s Roundtable: Thomas A. Bredehoft, “The Visible Text: Textual Production and Reproduction from Beowulf to Maus”
Response by Allyson Purpura
Thursday, October 31, 2013
posted under
Allyson Purpura
,
Thomas Bredehoft
,
visual and textual art
,
William Kentridge
by Unit for Criticism
"An Art of Recalcitrant Words"
Written by: Allyson Purpura (Krannert Art Museum)
In 1995, art historian Griselda Pollack insisted, “We need not a history of looked at objects, not vision with its seeming autonomy, but a history of the politics of looking.” Among other works in visual culture studies written since then, Tom’s book does just that by writing a history – or creating a genealogy – of visible texts – one that confounds the very premise of texts as primarily readable, medial things. In particular, he does this by exploring how technologies of (re)production bear on the object-hood of the text – and on their reception by those who encounter it.
I wanted to bring Tom’s project into conversation with a number of visual artists who use text in their work that, like the Frank’s Casket and comics, “subverts the norms of writing, and challenges the conventions of seeing and reading” (as Simon Morley once put it.) Fragmented, heaped, or tumbled across the picture plane, their renegade script slips easily between word and image. Upsetting the relationship between signifier/signified, it flourishes in the space between legibility and opacity – precisely, I think, what Tom identifies as Derrida’s gap or deferral between written text and its content. [If time allows, we can have a peek at the work of Robert Smithson, Wosene Kosrof, Fathi Hassan, and Willem Boshoff.]
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| Fig. 1 |
First, a brief introduction to the artist. Born in 1955 in Johannesburg, South Africa, William Kentridge is internationally acclaimed for his animated, stop-action films and the ethereal charcoal drawings upon which they are based. His prints, projections, and collaborative theatre productions reflect his exquisite skills not only as draftsman, but also as storyteller, artistic director, and social critic. Much of his work constitutes an oblique and deeply imaginative commentary on the pathos and devastation wrought by apartheid and its reckoning in the post-apartheid years. Inspired also by absurdist trends in the literary and dramatic arts—and by his own distrust of claims to certainty—Kentridge's work is often satirical, irreverent, yet never lacking in empathy.
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| Fig. 2 |
For Kentridge, the whole thing adds up to mistranslation, and, in his words, “the pressure that imperfect understanding gives to the act of imagination... Deconstructing sense, but also taking nonsense to see if sense can be made from it.” Indeed, given Kentridge’s affinity for absurdist aesthetics, this recalls the Dada concrete poets for whom the meaning of a poem emerged not from the content of its words, but from their physical appearance and arrangement in space—words that were not to be “read” but “perceived” as objects in their own right—as well as the sound poets whose response to the ravages of the First World War and the corruption of language in the service of the state was to divest words of meaning altogether, and reduce them to their most elemental forms.
But in these last few minutes, a return to drawing – it is a supremely indefinite practice. Gestural, expressive, intimate, a preparatory sketch or an end in itself, drawing is both spontaneous and disciplined. As has often been said, the hand-drawn line reveals the process of its own making. This is what drawing is best at – encoding authorship. In comics, Tom shows that when drawing is deployed, quite literally, as writing, it participates in the creation of an alternative form of literacy. There is, though, a rather fetishized attachment to drawing today, due in part to its immediate connection to the body, to the speed and pressure of the hand – and to the perception that it has become an endangered practice our digital age of (re)production. But Tom’s approach to comics texts as productions-in-reproductions – an idea that (as I understand it) seems to pivot on the graphic nuances that are “born” in the instance of their mass printing – seems to me a way out of this facile opposition of real and reproduced. Maybe comics are the new “third space” for drawing!
Finally – at the most meta level – a word on curatorial practice. While reading Tom’s chapters, I began to think about label copy, and the practice of writing exhibition text more generally. Does it function like the “paratext” of a book? Or does it more approximate the collapse of paratext into text as in comics? While artworks may perform the latter, as I think the Kentridge example shows, once placed on view, the presence of a label – certifying the work’s authorship among other things in good paratextual fashion – converts the entire gallery into a text. Or does it? And what are the consequences of each? Either way, thinking through comics – and even through the cryptic and retrograde letters on the Frank’s Casket—throws new light on the relationship between text and image, words and pictures – indeed, artist and curator – in the immersive, flexible space of an exhibition.
Fig 1
William Kentridge
Second-hand Reading, 2013
HD video, Installation view
7 minutes
Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York
Fig. 2
William Kentridge
Second-hand Reading, 2013
Still image from HD video
7 minutes
Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York
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