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C104
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Ecke
Bonk: Book of words. Random reading, 2002;
installation shot, Documenta11; photo © 2002
Werner Maschmann, Kassel;
courtesy
the artist
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Same difference:
word and image in the contemporary arts
Like an
Edenic fall from grace, word and image drifted apart as
society evolved. Here David Scott traces their diverging
paths, and looks at artistic efforts to engage with the
gap between the two.
The word
/image relation is one that has loomed particularly large
in the European or Western cultural context. This is because
in Europe, as a result of certain fundamental structural
features, the visual has never been synonymous with the
pictorial. To understand what is at stake in this distinction,
and how it continues to impact on contemporary art, it
is helpful first briefly to retrace the origin and development
of certain key contributing factors. The first is the
adoption by the Greeks of the Phoenician alphabet. Hitherto,
most of the dominant cultures of the world, whether Chinese,
Mesopotamian or Egyptian had been (in the case of Chinese,
still are) based on iconic forms of language: ideogrammatic,
pictographic or hieroglyphic. This meant that the language
sign had in many cases a more or less directly pictorial
relation to the object to which it referred. The same
instrument would be used to paint or to write on the same
surface or support (whether clay, papyrus or paper, the
latter a Chinese invention). The advantage of this was
that a more intense and integral contract operated between
object and sign, whether the latter were linguistic (visual/aural)
or iconic (pictorial). The alphabetic language sign on
the other hand refers to a sound, not to an object or
an idea: the word it forms stands, in most cases, in an
arbitrary relation to its object so that a reader or listener
must already be familiar with the symbolic equivalence
of word to object for meaning or comprehension to ensue.
While the disadvantages of the alphabetic system are obvious
in relation to the learning process, the advantages on
the conceptual and scientific level are considerable as
an alphabetic language can more easily appropriate and
absorb concepts or ideas from other cultures or languages
and more readily elaborate and transform knowledge systems.
To this already
distinctive situation, Europe, with the invention of printing
in the fifteenth century, added mechanisation to its scientific
and cultural base. The effect of this was both to increase
the gap between symbolic/visual and pictorial/iconic representation
and, in the process, vastly to increase the rational ordering
and dissemination of knowledge (cf Foucault, 19661).
In fact the Chinese had evolved printing centuries before
this, but had not adapted the process widely, in part
no doubt because of the difficulty of reproducing in terms
of wooden blocks the different Chinese ideographic characters,
of which there were thousands compared to the mere 25
or so letters of the European alphabet. The 'Gutenberg
Galaxy', as Marshall McLuhan2
described the early global world of western rationalist
and scientific knowledge, was thus to represent a crucial
stage in the separation or alienation of word from voice,
of letter from calligraphic gesture. It was the collapse
with the Renaissance of the old medieval audile-tactile
world that led to the crisis in word/image relations as
understood in the European tradition that came to a head
in the early modern period.
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David
Small, Illuminated Manuscript, Kassel Documenta11,
2002, paper and interactive video; courtesy the
artist
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Although
then alphabetisation and mechanisation were potent agents
of separation and difference in culture, empowering the
West to appropriate and dominate in scientific or colonialist
terms the larger part of the rest of the planet, they
nevertheless led, with the decline in Europe of the dominant
(Christian) religion, to a hollowness at the heart of
Western civilisation. Writers and artists would, from
the nineteenth century, increasingly see it as their vocation
to address this void. A key area of difference and separation
on which they would focus was that of language and pictorial
representation: how could the divorce between these two
different but complementary systems of apprehending and
expressing the same (i.e., the world, inner or outer,
as perceived by human consciousness) be resolved? The
answer seemed to lie in new strategies for interrelating
the visual and the verbal: with French Symbolism, poetry
would move from the discursive towards the spatial; with
Post-Impressionism, Cubism, and then Surrealism, painting
would begin to absorb the signs of language into its fabric,
thus restoring to a common surface or a common level modes
of representation that had since the Renaissance largely
been kept separate.
But this
did not solve the problem of the void or gap at the centre
of Western culture or resolve the question of the difference
between word and image as means of cultural expression.
It merely brought the problem out into the open. It has
been the vocation of twentieth-century art and writing
to confront difference and same, both within their own
medium and between media, in such a way as to evolve new
ways of integrating aspects of culture without pretending
that any ultimate solution to the problem of signs is
possible in the post-modern world. But why is it that
signs no longer work in the integral and seemingly authentic
way or command the authority that they used to in a distant
(and perhaps imaginary) past? - or only seem to in some
of the rare remaining so-called 'primitive' cultures of
the world?
The problem
is that, as Benjamin, McLuhan, Baudrillard3
and others have shown, through alphabetisation then printing
and mechanisation, then industrial production, and finally
the commodification of culture, the authenticity of the
sign in relation to its object has been seriously undermined.
Words and images have too often been mis-used, subjected
to untoward pressures, wrenched from their conventional
contractual relation with their object, inverted, subverted,
perverted. After a hundred years of political propaganda
and fifty of global advertising, nobody trusts either
language or visual images any more - least of all when
disseminated as they mainly are now at an exponential
rate through the word/image media of commercial TV and
video. In the light of this distrust, and the technical
sophistication of capitalism today, what can the contemporary
artist do?
A further
problem is that this split at the heart of culture is
not evident only in the West but has also been inflicted
on much of the rest of the world. For the irresistible
colonisation of the globe in the last decades by Western
commerce and media has tended to undermine semiotic and
cultural systems that were before then relatively homogeneous
and secure: once a sign system has been exposed to the
competition of another, the former often loses its pre-eminence,
its authenticating or unifying power: it becomes merely
one more in a range of possible cultural models. This
has made the challenge to artists in the Third World in
the light of the current hegemony of the global capitalist
economy greater even than that faced by Western artists.
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David
Small, Illuminated Manuscript, Kassel Documenta
11, 2002, paper and interactive video; courtesy
the artist
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In the light
of this, an important aim of the recent Kassel Documenta11
(2002) was to invite artists from both the Third and the
First World to address the challenges posed by cultural
confrontation and imperialism in the contemporary world.
A brief account of selected work exhibited at Documenta11,
will, I hope, show what strategies artists both from within
and without the Western tradition have developed to deal
with some of the key issues relating both to word/image
relations and the current global cultural crisis. I shall
concentrate in particular on artists concerned with a
critique of signs, an exploration of temporal relativity,
a return to a focus on production of image/text in whatever
media, and an emphasis on play.
First, the
problem of the relationship between alphabetically formed
words and reality is explored by the German artist Ecke
Bonk in his project based around the comprehensive German
dictionary compiled from 1838 by the Brothers Grimm. The
360,000 entries that constitute this work are projected
in a random computer-generated sequence, which underlines
for the viewer/reader both the arbitrariness and the potential
comprehensiveness of the western language model. The covers
of successive front pages of the dictionary's various
editions are displayed on the walls of the room, constituting
a kind of mausoleum to the language from which, nevertheless,
the potential for virtually infinite knowledge may be
activated. Second, the American artist Ben Kinmot picks
up in his work Moveable Type No Documenta on some
of the implications of the revolution instituted by Gutenberg's
invention of the printing press in 1448. In this piece,
responses by Kassel residents interviewed about what was
important in their lives and how this might relate to
art, were printed and distributed, drawing attention in
the process to the many implications of mass publication
in relation to knowledge, culture and communication in
the Western world. The centrality of the book or printed
page to Western culture is also underlined, though in
a radically new way, by the American artist David Small
in his work Illuminated Manuscript. Unlike the
medieval version of this genre, in which, typically, word
and image were inextricably interwoven in a richly coloured
and hand-produced unity, Small's work consists of an over-size
book onto which is projected an interactive text. With
each turn of the page, a new text is projected. In this
way we see how, increasingly in the modern media age,
it is a simulacral projection through digital electronic
media that produces the knowledge or communication that
formerly was inscribed from without.
Whereas the
above works were concerned to seek in both established
and new media a potentiality for positive developments,
the following works concentrate more on some of the resistances
to which differences between word and image as media or
between different cultural systems or languages tend to
give rise. In the work of the Argentinian artist Victor
Grippo, entitled Tables for work and reflection
(1994), a school desk becomes both the object of art and
the support for a text. The desks Grippo uses, inscribed
with the texts of Argentinian writers, come from elementary
schools associated with the first literacy campaign in
Cuba in 1959. For Grippo, the artist is equivalent to
the medieval alchemist, progressing obscurely through
a series of stages that, while effecting transformation
in the physical world, also bring about spiritual enlightenment.
Marginalised by the post-Renaissance scientific tradition,
the alchemist nonetheless subsequently reappears as a
metaphor for the post-Romantic artist for whom the business
of changing perceptions of the world becomes a symbolic
as well as a cognitive project. The use of a literary
text is exploited to comparable but different effect by
the American artist Glenn Ligon: a room full of large-scale
paintings using coal-dust incorporates text from the black,
gay American writer James Baldwin's essay Stranger
in the village, which deals with various problems
of discrimination. Since the text is stencilled rather
than printed, and is black on black rather than black
on white, the reading of the canvas is made doubly difficult,
a resistance, however, that is rewarding to viewers both
on the level of sensual challenge and of their enriched
appreciation of the cultural predicament addressed. A
comparable overlaying of a linguistic on a more purely
visual frame is explored by the London-based Palestinian/Lebanese
artist Mona Hatoum, in whose tellingly entitled work Measures
of Distance (1988), video images of a naked woman in the
shower are run across with a text in Arab script. This
has the effect both of caging the image of the woman and
also obstructing the entry into the image of the Western
or non-Arab-speaking viewer. In fact the image is that
of the artist's mother, the text that of letters to her
daughter, an English version of which is read out against
a background of conversation. This complex work thus offers
a palimpsest of Others - linguistic, cultural, medial
- the perception of which paradoxically enriches even
as it resists our understanding of what is at stake in
cultural exchange. A similar use of a non-western language
as a disorientating device is evident in the project of
the Danish artist Jens Haaning in which a loudspeaker
attached to a lamp-post broadcasts jokes in Turkish. The
voice is only audible if the listener stands under the
speaker and is of course incomprehensible to those who
don't speak Turkish. This work thus succeeds in playing
humorously with the presumptions of the dominant Western
culture and language.
What western
artists and writers concerned with word/image relations
have learned over the last century is that in the various
forms they take they necessarily presuppose and thus complement
each other, and that although the split between them is
ultimately irrevocable, various strategies can be devised
to ensure that they interact positively to the greater
benefit of the englobing culture. The advantages of the
split are also of course to be shared with the rest of
the world, on part of which indeed it has already been
foisted, and in particular with those cultures, like the
Arab, that still preserves a more unified system in which
religion exerts perhaps an excessive pressure. For the
split that is integral to Western culture allows for -
indeed presupposes - the possibility of difference within
the same, i.e., a certain freedom, a certain critical
distance. These factors are values in which the West can
take some pride, values indeed that are exercised perhaps
most fully by its artists. As all freedoms and all critical
perspectives are relative, we can all learn from the different
forms taken in contemporary art, whether of Western or
non-Western traditions, and prepare ourselves for the
infinite readjustments they imply for the cultures that
constitute the global village.
David
Scott holds a personal chair in French (Textual and
Visual Studies) at Trinity College, Dublin. He has written
widely on literature, painting, semiotics and textual/visual
studies, and has organised many international exhibitions
on visual arts and design.
1Michel
Foucault, Les Mots et les choses. Une archéologie
des sciences humaines, Paris: Gallimard, 1966
2Marshall
McLuhan, The Gutenburg Galaxy. The making of typographic
man, London: Routledge, 1962
3Walter
Benjamin, Illuminations (translation from German
Schriften, 1955, by Harry Zohn), London: Collins/Fontana,
1973; McLuhan, op. cit.; Jean Baudrillard, L'Echange
symbolique et la mort, Paris: Gallimard, 1976
Article reproduced
from CIRCA 104, Summer 2003,
pp. 31-34.
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