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Paragone Gone Gone
You, I and the image/sound make up a triangle in which the three angles are connected by our interpretations
Room S7, Konstfack
Wed, 19/3 12-8PM
Thurs, 20/3 12-17PM
Part one: a leaflet with a trilogy of short texts connecting to three selected source materials: a film, an image, a song. The leaflet also includes a background essay. Outside S7.
Part two: these three materials displayed. Inside S7.
A project by Johanne Nordby Wernø, WIRE MA, Konstfack
Course: Word & Image (MA elective). Tutor: Rolf Hughes
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Part two, source materials:
”Grey Gardens” (excerpt), dir. A. & D. Maysles, M. Meyer and S. Froemke
Features mrs Edie Beale
1975
”Scum” by Cornelius
39 seconds
Taken from the album Sensuous (Warner)
2006
”Letter” by Vija Celmins
Graphite on acrylic ground on paper
1968
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The reading station outside room S7
Part one
Text trilogy: film
Little Red Riding Hood dances her stiff marching dance on the terrace. But this Little Red Riding Hood has got big breasts, she is at least three feet too tall – perverted! – almost splitting the little red suit she has gotten all dressed up in. The hood sits tightly wrapped around her head. Without makeup, she looks dough-faced and her eyes miss their framing. Her laughter is uninhibited as she starts singing the patriotic song over again. Cackles at him who is taping. She is close up, her facial shape gets distorted through the lens, but he doesn´t back up, he laughs with her. A self-confident little roll of thunder he laughs with her.
Or at her.
”…march together / united we die…”
The terrace is the space between the inside and the outside. Both-and, neither-nor, just like her who wont ever fit in neither out here is the crisp daylight of the real world nor in there in the dusty air, among the newspaper clippings, the memories and the cats. Now she is determinedly marching to a steady beat towards the back of the picture space, parading for him, while he stays where he is. Her desire may be to recruit him for the part of the lusting and voracious Wolf, but the only one devouring her is the eye of the camera; he stays where he is. Enclosed with live, green leaves from the garden eating their way in on a white wooden terrace, a middle aged woman is walking around in circles.
Text trilogy: song
(0,5 sec into track:)
She– Hey, how have you been? Hi. Hi.
Neurotically repeating herself.
He– Hey. Fine. You?
Deadpan. On top of things. Sits down
She– Uh, fine. I have been gardening, mostly.
Puts sunglasses down on café table
He– Gardening, schmardening. Why did you want for us to mee-
Suddenly sees item on sidewalk by her chair
(7 sec:)
He– What the…?!
Points angrily to item
She– What? Oh… please, don´t start with that again?
Begging. Picks it up, puts it in bag hastily, shameful
He– Don´t tell me it´s back from the dead?!
She– It´s just for a few weeks.
(12 sec:)
He– Jesus… ! Wake up and smell the coffee, will you? They´ll just take itaway from you again!
Kicks the bag to prove his point
(18-26 sec:)
She– Weeps
(27 sec:)
He– Listen, I- I´m sorry.
(32 sec:)
She– It wasn´t even that I came here to talk about….!
Interrupts herself, abruptly stands up. Sees blood pumping before her eyes, feels a nausea, sways, walks away towards City Hall. Leaves the bag behind.
Text trilogy: image
(See the image on Hammer Museum´s webpage: http://www.hammer.ucla.edu/exhibitions/119/work_647.htm)
The letter from mom to daughter has been opened and read. The rectangular envelope is ripped open – not the common way along the top, but on the right short side (V opened it using the letter knife with the mother of pearl handle, so small it could have been a toy, but with a blade so shiny she can see her reflection in it). The ripped side is dog-eared and uneven while the other three remain perfectly square and straight. The letter has been read, put carefully back in place and then (immediately) pulled out for a second and third reading.
Horrible scenes are played out in microcosm on the front of the envelope. The two rows of postage stamps make up an area that seems to be at war. On the rest of the letter, it´s snow-covered and peaceful, but on the five stamps, thick black smoke is rising, the land is bombed out and there´s not a person in sight; it smells of gas. A wooden home, still white, waits its turn. Ten, nine, eight, seven, where is this building located, she wonders. Six, five, is there anyone in there? Four, three, ”10 February 1966”, the circle writes. That´s when mom went off to the post office and paid thirty cents for the postage.
The leaflet containing a trilogy of short texts and a background essay
Paragone gone gone
A background essay
1
Prehistory
Paragone is the traditional term for the competition between the various art forms, from antiquity on. Through history, advocates of painting or of poetry have claimed the superiority of their respective medium. But at the same time, the notion of ”sister arts” has been alive, in which one instead stresses what the art forms have in common. The famous phrase ut pictura poesis translates to ”like the image, so also the poem”.
But with the 18th century philosopher G.E. Lessing, it was settled that the pictorial arts existed in space and the written arts in time and that this made them essentially different; this view lived on in the art critic Clement Greenberg in the mid-20th century. To him, it was crucial that each art form stuck to its essence. For example, the painting should go for its flatness and never try to tell stories, since stories entail a span of time.
2
Like a Rorschach blob
When you read the trilogy of short texts, you will not yet have seen or heard the three pieces of source material I had in mind when I wrote it. Your mind will produce its own images while you read. When you do see/hear the source material on display in room S7, you will probably encounter works that differ from your mental images. You may in your mental ones have included something that you don´t find to be conspicuous at all in the material. Or find included in the source some detail that was not at all represented in your image.
You, I and the source material make up a triangle in which the three angles are connected by our subjective interpretations. You will compare your mental image both with my written one and with the visual/auditive one that you see before you or hear in the headphones.
3
”Writing about music is like dancing about architecture”[1]
When an art critic is describing artworks, s/he is faced with the impossible task of ”translating” an expression from one medium (e.g. drawing) to another (words). But the dream of carrying the totality of a piece of art into language is utopian, since images have tools at their disposal that writing lack (just like the other way around).
This is partly because they are different kinds of signs[2]:, some are iconic, some indexical and some symbolic. (We understand iconic signs because they resemble their referent in the world; indexical signs because they are traces of their referent, like footprints; symbolic signs because of our knowledge of the social/linguistic convention motivating it). So the alphabet is made up of symbols while a figurative painting is an icon.
Another relevant pair of terms is density versus differentiation[3]. Images are dense, meaning that everything that´s included in the image ”counts” – it is a potential bearer of meaning. In opposition, language is differentiated: we ”count out” the space between words, and ignore the colour of the letters – it doesn´t matter to the meaning of the word. And there is no continuum between the different components; for example, there is no letter ”between” e and k, while there is an infinite number of nuances between yellow and green.
4
Ekphrasis
One way of dealing with these differences is via the literary genre of ekphrasis. The form is known from antiquity on as a text which negotiates the word/image conflict by talking about an object in such a detailed or vivid way that it almost becomes visible before the reader´s eyes.
In the trilogy, I have wanted to try to find ways to get my words to collaborate with images, sounds and moving images, respectively. I was wondering if I could write not so much about art or music as from, with, around, or through it. Investigating the ekphrasis has been one means of doing so.
5
Pollution!
So art is often thought of as ineffable, impossible to put into words. What then when the art works themselves contain words?
- One of my source materials contains no spoken or written word at all (music by Cornelius).
- The second contains spoken words, but in the form of a song, which makes us interpret the words differently than if they had been spoken lines. The character is not uttering the words to share her thoughts or opinions, but to make music. She didn´t conceive of the sentences herself, she is reciting someone else´s lyrics (film clip of mrs. Edie Beale directed by the Maysles brothers)
- The third contains written words in the form of a postage stamp and a few hand written lines which form part of a figurative drawing (book reproduction of drawing by Vija Celmins)
6
Voyeurism
Ekphrasis and pornographic or erotic texts share some properties. In both, an image of something visual/physical (in the latter, the naked body) is evoked as vividly as possible so that the reader can enjoy it like s/he would enjoy the real something, had it materialized.
Literary history shows that in ekphrasis, it is often the male subject who sees a feminine object and who in words caresses-consumes-devours it. The object that gets the attention of the poem may be a piece of art, but in many cases it is in fact a woman.
7
Ekphrasis as a social practice
This is how our before mentioned triangle may work: First, I interpret and convey in words some visual experience I had. Then, the viewer reads my words and decodes them into a mental image – s/he imagines that which I described. So the content of the source has gone from visuals to text and back to (mental) visuals. But strictly speaking, does s/he experience the source image through the text, or is s/he making a brand new one? And later, when seeing the source for herself, will s/he discard her mental image for the ”real” one? Suddenly, we have a question of power.
8
Strike a balance
Speaking of power and hierarchies, we sometimes see that an art critic with some authority shapes the audience´s reception of a work so much that the text seems to subdue the work and determine what it´s really about. On the other hand, it is the work of the artist, not the critic, which enjoys a status of nucleus in our common field.
In my work, I want to investigate what the ideal role and function of the critic could be. To inform about art, to educate, to judge – or to be an interesting writer in her own right, co-existing with (but not hierarchically different from) the artwork? I wish to find out how the two can be successfully combined.
[1] Attributed variously to Elvis Costello, Laurie Andersson, Frank Zappa and others – but always to a musician.
[2] In the words of semiotician C.S. Peirce
[3] Coined by the philosopher Nelson Goodman
The installation of source materials for short texts were installed in S7. Here: reproduction of Vija Celmins drawing; Maysles brothers film clip.
Here: Maysles brothers film clip; listening station to hear the Cornelius song.
