Mellon Regional Faculty & Cultural Fellows
2005-2006, Word & Image
Project
Text, Webs, and the Time-Image
Roderick
Coover
Temple, Assistant Professor, Film
and Media Arts
Prof. Coover is working on an
essay that explores the use of text and language in
time-based work (film, video, flash animation, Quicktime)
and virtual reality environments (360-degree panoramas,
Quicktime VR, Caves). He investigates how formalist
works in language and film/media arts (such as the films
of Hollis Frampton), and studies in language and perception
(including the works of Nelson Goodman), can aid in
the conceptualization of language and art in digital
environments.
This essay coincides with a visual project that Prof.
Coover is recording in collaboration with author Debra
Olin Unferth, in Mexico. It consists of a series of
poems which overlap in 360-degree VR environments that
combine fragmented narrative moments and movements.
These works take place in urban environments, blurring
borders between narrative and nonfiction representation
and between text, sound, and imagery.
Project
Words and Images: Towards a
Materialist Account
Julie
R. Klein
Villanova, Associate Professor,
Philosophy
Prof. Klein investigates Spinoza's
thought as a pre-Kantian example of Philosophy's effort
to articulate what lies beyond conceptual representation,
transcendental subjectivity, and the opposition of freedom
and nature. Taking a broadly materialist approach, she
focuses on Spinoza's critique of language and his account
of the force of images, which includes a detailed account
of their structure and how words and images arise and
interact. Following Adorno and Freud, Dr. Klein plans
to analyze what is disclosed in aesthetic experience
to socio-political concerns.
In Spinoza's view, images are impressions in the body,
which register in our awareness as corporeal force or
impact, ideas, and affects. Words are images of images,
i.e., reports of experience. Where experience is singular
and fluid, language abstracts and universalizes, amalgamating
individuals in classes and categories. Images, records
of a body's fluid communication and interaction with
other bodies, are confused, but as actual impressions,
they may be taken up in terms of their causal, i.e.,
rational, structure. Both words and imaginative ideas
constitute actualities or habits in human individuals.
Thus, what Spinoza calls prejudice is the accumulated
force of words and confused ideas. The work of philosophy
is to investigate the hold of such ideas, thereby displacing
them.
Project
Visual Poetics
Jena
Osman
Temple, Associate Professor, English
and Creative Writing
Prof Osman's work, both
creative and critical writing, has always been engaged
with concepts of hybridity. She is currently involved
with two projects, a photo essay-poem entitled "Public
Figures" and a critical essay on visual poets entitled
"Is Poetry the News?".
"Public Figures" will be a long poem mixed with photo
essay. Incorporating photos of public sculpture in Philadelphia—primarily
figures carrying weapons—Dr. Osman will present
two points of view: that of the gazing spectator and
that of the sculpted figure itself. She hopes to awaken
the reader to the narratives that are often invisibly
situated in local public spaces.
Dr Osman's essay "Is Poetry the News?" is one in a collection
of essays on which she is currently working, tentatively
titled "Combinatory Poetics: Essays in Hybrid Forms."
In this piece, she begins with the contrast between
Alfredo Jaar, a visual artist who uses text, and Cecilia
Vicuna, a visual poet. While both look for a way for
art to function politically and "poetically" without
being deactivated by the aesthetics of their chosen
forms, Jaar and Vicuna offer strikingly different responses.
Dr. Osman concludes with an examination of four poets—Bern
Porter, Hannah Weiner, Kenny Goldsmith, and Kristin
Prevallet—who have created visual poems using
the newspaper as their starting point.
Project
Giorgio Vasari and the Campaign
to Create the Florentine Visual Vernacular
Patricia
L. Reilly
Swarthmore, Assistant Professor,
Art History
Prof. Reilly is working on a book
project entitled "Giorgio Vasari and the Campaign
to Create the Florentine Visual Vernacular." She
explores the visual and textual arguments made by the
Renaissance writer and painter Giorgio Vasari in both
Lives of the Most Excellent Italian Architects,
Painters and Sculptures of 1550 and in his revision
some 15 years later.
Beginning with an overview of the intensely competitive
court culture in which these artists work, Prof. Reilly
argues that Vasari sought to realize his agenda of promoting
Raphaelesque language by modeling his revised accounts
on the lives and styles of Michelangelo and Raphael
on those Dante and Petrarch. Dante and Petrarch were
themselves the subjects of a raging controversy in the
literary Accademia Fiorentina over which the literary
style of poets served as the best paradigm for the written
and spoken Tuscan vernacular. In the revised Lives,
Dr. Reilly argues, Vasari opposed a Petrarchan Raphael
to a Dantean Michelangelo and promoted the former as
a paradigm for what she terms the "Tuscan visual vernacular."
The controversy this sparked, and the written and visual
arguments it produced, provides insight into the momentous
importance the establishment of style in image and text
had for a group of talented, competitive and theory-driven
artists working in the court culture of mid-Cinquecento
Italy.
Project
Theses on Writing Sebald's Images
after Barthes
Nancy
Shawcross (Penn
Library Fellow)
Curator of Manuscripts in the Rare
Book & Manuscript Library at Penn
Dr. Shawcross is exploring
the nexus of word and image in the work of the late
German author, W. G. Sebald. Her text-and-image presentation
captions photographs taken from three of Sebald s novels:
The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, and Austerlitz,
with quotations from two books: The Empire of Signs
and Camera Lucida, by Roland Barthes."Thesis"
refers to the unstressed note in music or unaccented
mark in a foot of verse, thereby suggesting the proper
tone for the enterprise. The recontextualization exposes
the intertextuality at play between the two authors
and argues for the consideration of another narrative
thread within Sebald's novels beyond the well-noted
paths offered, for example, by Franz Kafka and Walter
Benjamin. The four imaged texts that Sebald wrote in
the last ten years of his life mirror Barthes's text-and-image
productions as well as his conscientious blurring of
genres in the books that were published in the last
decade of his life.
Project
Breaking the Frame: Oppositional
Gazes in the Commix of Lynda Barry, Phoebe Gloeckner,
and Ariel Schrag
Theresa
M. Tensuan
Haverford, Assistant Professor,
English
Parsing Art Spiegelman's term "commix,"
James Young explains that "the commixture of words and
images generates a triangulation of meaning—a
kind of three-dimensional narrative in the movement
between words, images, and the reader's eye." The multiplicity
of aesthetic strategies that a comic artist can employ
to create a connection between the frames that appear
on the page produces narrative trajectories and tensions
that move beyond the parameters of conventional novels.
In her project, Prof. Tensuan examines the ways in which
artists such as Lynda Barry, Phoebe Gloeckner, and Ariel
Schrag extend the idiom of comic strips as a means of
resisting the discursive formulations that inscribe
conventional histories, the teleologies in narratives
of nation, the expectations that shape individual memories,
and the norms that determine individual subjects. She
argues that these artists draw attention, literally
as well as figuratively, to the ways in which narrative
authority is constructed, mediated, and interpreted.
Project
Consuming Culture: Exploring
Word, Image, and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Fashion
Culture
Kathryn
Wilson
Director of Education and Interpretation
a the Historical Society of Pennsylvania
Between 1830 and 1880, Philadelphia's
commercial culture experienced dramatic change marked
by a shift from hybrid antebellum marketplaces to an
increasingly rationalized and ordered postwar commercial
landscape. At the same time, the economy changed from
one based on reputation and interaction to one founded
on spectacle, display, and image-making. These transformations
were reflected in representations of women's fashion
as well, which shifted from primarily textual depictions
to the plate image. Plates moved beyond the mere depiction
of clothing to include portrayals of postures and contexts
for wearing the clothing, often accompanied by descriptive
text.
Dr. Wilson is studying modes of fashion merchandising
and reporting in Philadelphia from the post-Civil War
period in fashion plates, shop displays, and trade cards.
What role did words and images play in addressing apparent
binaries such as the local and the national, self and
Other, and order and disorder? To what extent did the
use of words and images in Philadelphia's fashion scene
exemplify a new culture of order and spectacle, while
evoking the interactive features of an older market
(embodied by ethnic Others), thereby eliciting and containing
desire in the world of commodities?
Project
A Year in Paris: Edvard Munch's
Mermaid and its Narratives
John
Zarobell
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Assistant
Curator, Department of European Painting and Sculpture
before 1900
Edvard Munch painted Mermaid
as an architectural decoration for the Norwegian industrialist
Axel Heiberg in 1896. The unique format of this painting—long,
narrow, and trapezoidal—reflects its intended
placement in the topmost portion of Heiberg's house;
it was intended to be seen from a distance. During this
time, Munch was also involved in scene painting on the
set for a production of Henrik Ibsen's drama Peer
Gynt.
Dr Zarobell explores the nexus of psychology, literature,
and folklore in Munch's Mermaid, which is derived
from Norse mythology and Ibsen's play, The Lady
from the Sea, which begins with a scene of a painter
depicting a mermaid for a wealthy Norwegian family.
Munch's real-life task of portraying this mermaid for
a wealthy Norwegian family brings the play to life.
The representation becomes permanent, demanding an interpretation
that blends visual and textual analysis. Dr. Zarobell
argues that the literary nature of Munch's work (and
his connections to dramatists, poets, and critics) requires
that it be read through a textual lens. This project
is part of the Spring 2006 Munch retrospective at the
Museum of Modern Art, as well as a Philadelphia Museum
of Art dossier exhibition around Munch's Mermaid
and other Munch prints from this period, which highlight
the narrative characteristics of Munch's development
during this historically significant period.
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