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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