Session 8 – Pensive Images 3

Tine Melzer
Visiting the Site Twice: Aspectual Thinking in W.G. Sebald’s Work

Images and words are strong allies in producing aspect change. Aspectual thinking is a core methodological strategy in a long-term research on the interaction between images and literary texts, which desire to sculpt and display the interactions between both.
The literary oeuvre of W.G. Sebald is a core reference when it comes to the role of (photographic) images inserted into literary works. His work strongly exemplifies aspectual shifts of meanings when text and image meet. This paper links an introduction of aspect change to Sebald’s published works including images and desires to establish aspectual seeing into philosophy, literature and the arts. Hereby, issues on codes, framing and perspectival shifts are central and rely on key-instruments as Sebald introduces them.
This paper belongs to the proposed subject areas: Art’s responses to literature, Writing with images and Crossing disciplines to slow down reception.

Tine Melzer (PhD) is a Zurich-based artist and researcher with a focus on language. She studied fine arts and philosophy in Amsterdam, did postgraduate research at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten and a trans-disciplinary dissertation at the University of Plymouth on Ludwig Wittgenstein meeting Gertrude Stein in 2014. Based on her recent book Taxidermy for Language-Animals she examines language fragments from different practices—philosophy, literature, visual art—by exploiting some of our linguistic habits and tools. Her work has been exhibited and published internationally. Tine Melzer has lectured at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie Amsterdam and at various academies and universities across Europe since 2004. She teaches now at the HKB Bern University of the Arts, where she currently conducts interdisciplinary research on Aspect Change. http://www.tinemelzer.eu/

Uwe Schutte
Silent Dialogue: On Interplay Between Word and Image in Tess Jaray’s and W.G. Sebald’s For Years Now

This paper will look at Sebald’s most under-researched and under-valued book, For Years Now. This collection of his English-language “micro-poems”, which appeared just a few days before his death in December 2001, is a remarkable collaboration with the British artist Tess Jaray, whose monochrome patterns complement Sebald’s dense poetical vignettes.
Relying on my own original research, I will critically examine the interplay between word and image in this artist’s book, and I will reconstruct the genesis of the volume based on an interview I conducted with Jaray. I will demonstrate how this collaborative effort carried on and developed earlier work by Jaray, who combined fragments and excerpts from Sebald’s prose works in her screen-print series From the Rings of Saturn and Vertigo.
My contention is that the transmedial cooperation between Sebald and Jaray, as evidenced in For Years Now, is artistically superior to Unerzählt/Unrecounted, the posthumous work which combines Sebald’s short poetry with lithographs by his long-time friend Jan Pater Tripp. I will argue that Jaray’s highly abstract graphic art achieves what Tripp’s hyper-realistic portrayals of pairs of eyes does not: it provides a successful counterpart to Sebald’s enigmatic micro-poetry.
As I shall demonstrate, her monochrome patterns manage to establish a silent artistic dialogue with the poetological issues at the heart of Sebald’s lyrical compositions. In conclusion, I will argue that For Years Now is therefore not just an illustrated volume of poetry but constitutes a work of art in its own right.

Uwe Schutte transferred from the University of Munich to the University of East Anglia in autumn 1992 and completed both my MA and PhD on German Literature under the supervision of Prof W.G. Sebald. In 1999, he became a Lecturer and, in 2006, a Reader in German at Aston University. He has published fifteen monographs, (co-)edited seven volumes, and written approximately sixty articles and chapters. He has published six books and approximately twenty articles and essays on Sebald. His major work on him is Interventionen. Literaturkritik als Widerstand bei WG Sebald (2014), a comprehensive study of his critical writings. In August 2018, Liverpool University Press published his general introduction to Sebald. This past April, Böhlau published his volume of essays, Annäherungen, to mark the 75^th anniversary of Sebald’s birth, in May 2019. In autumn 2020, De Gruyter will publish a revised and updated version of his German-language introduction to Sebald’s work and life.

Bryan Gee
Images with Writing: Models for a Visual Novel

Images have accompanied written text throughout the history of books, but the inherent qualities of books to convey predominantly visual narrative fictions remain largely untapped. I’ll trace the various trajectories that have led to my current practice working on extended visual books. After reviewing published work where I exploited the object quality and cinematic-like sequencing of books to activate latent narrative possibilities of archival photographs, I will move on to present and discuss my current experiments and models, sharing my process as I develop the visual language for an image-based novel.
While my presentation will be essentially practice-based, the context of current theoretical discussions around narrative books that integrate text and image will be emphasized. I will touch on how the critical attention commanded by W.G. Sebald’s convincing work in this area has activated the discussion on the disruptive effect of the image in writing. James Elkins’ “Writing with Images” project in particular has provided both an historical context and a forward-looking taxonomy for new work that uses the image in primarily word-based narrative books. But what happens when the image moves into the foreground, where the emphasis of image and text is the reverse of what we find in Sebald’s work? I want to read a book like this but I haven’t encountered an example that has engaged me. I’m thus compelled to make one using images as my writing material in the immersive visual and textual space that is possible in books – another way of “writing with images.”

 Bryan Gee is a visual editor, designer, and writer specializing in editorial and book design.  He recently developed a new design curriculum for Fleming College in Ontario, Canada. Working as a senior designer at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Bruce Mau Design and his own independent practice, he has collaborated with clients such as The Museum of Modern Art, Gagosian Gallery, Deutsche Bank Art, Kunsthaus Bregenz, The Art Gallery of York University,  The Japan Foundation, Walther König Books and Zone Books. His work has been recognized internationally with magazine, newspaper and book design awards. He is currently an Art Director at The Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper.