Session 11 – Pensive Images 4

Tilo Reifenstein
W.G. Sebald’s Words and Pictures: Propositions for Art History as Literary Practice

This paper embraces Sebald’s irreducible ‘writing with pictures’ as a proposition for art-historical practices. By exploring theoretical and philosophical approaches to writing’s epistemic capacity, the paper uses Sebald’s work to interrogate a history of art that often struggles to give up restraining the images it covets. The paper develops the characteristics of art-historical writing as a practice that necessarily not only negotiates the boundary of visual and verbal, but also manifests a literary fiction produced in the discursive framing of knowledge and meaning-making about artefacts, subjects, processes and their historic contexts.
In developing a methodological approach from Sebald’s word-picture combinations, we glimpse an art-historical practice that is necessarily already bound up in the liabilities of its subjects. Following Boris Groys’ suggestion that the writing of art history occurs in a literary space, which implies that the historian, too, is involved in artistic production and thus cannot approach the work (formally) under scrutiny from an external position, the paper reflects on the exigencies of writing about art. Recognising the limitations of what Derrida identified as teleological genre restriction and institutional pressures to preserve language as a transparent vehicle for ‘communication’, the paper advances a notion of art history as a literary pursuit that writes (with) pictures. Art history’s recursive self-reflexivity—producing image-texts in order to trace the words and pictures of artists—is therefore used to reflect on the creative practice of art-history writing, as well as the assumed division between writing’s own form, material and content.

Tilo Reifenstein is Lecturer in Critical Studies at York St John University (UK). He has recently co-edited the ‘Between Sensuous and Making-Sense-of’ special issue of the Open Arts Journal (2019). Other publications include ‘The graphics of ekphrastic writing: Raymond Pettibon’s drawing-writing’ in Ekphrastic Encounters: New Interdisciplinary Essays on Literature and the Visual Arts (David Kennedy and Richard Meek, eds, MUP, 2018) and ‘Drawing the letter’ in Drawing: Research, Theory, Practice (2018). Tilo is a trustee and the Hon. Secretary of the London-based Association for Art History (AAH).

Elena Carletti
Writing with Images: Porta’s Poetry of Trauma

In the field of literary visuality (Isekenmeier & Bodola: 2017), literature is considered to actively participate in visual culture. Moving from the premise that visuality exceeds pictoriality, this paper will explore the interplay between the visuality of words and the visuality of images in the written and visual poetry of Italian writer Antonio Porta (1935-1989). Partly triggered by the exposure to the Second World War during his childhood, Porta’s work stemmed from the early “trauma of existing and yet not being able to fully exist” (Porta: 1991) and centred around the violent relationship among human beings. While in the poem The Eyelid Inside-Out (1960) the poet’s eye continuously witnesses violence until its own dissolution, in Europe Mounts a Black Bull (1958), Porta verbally reproduces images drawn from the crime news, portraying murders, suicides and accidents of a cruel and sadistic society. The technique of collage underpins Porta’s poetic style: language, fragmented by the frequent use of punctuation and enjambment, is deprived of syntactical and logical linearity. Conversely, in Porta’s visual poetry, collage often follows the associative logic of language: the juxtaposition of images generates meaning by referring to figures of speech such as metaphor, or metonymy. As this paper argues, for Porta, both visual and written works can be shaped by a logic of combination and rearranged through a “mobile syntax”. Ultimately, in addressing the complex dynamics between words and images in Porta’s oeuvre, this talk aims to uncover new aspects of the exchanges between literature and visual culture.

Elena Carletti is Teaching Fellow and PhD candidate at the University of Sydney. Her project, The Photographic Eye. Photographic Writing in the Experimental Poetry of 1950s and 1960s Italian Writers, investigates the interactions of photography and post-war Italian poetry. In 2018, she obtained funding for and organized the Writing, Memory, and Visuality Symposium at the University of Sydney. She holds a BA in Translation and a MA in Italian Studies from the University of Bologna. She has published scholarly essays in academic journals and collected volumes. Her research interests include Contemporary Poetry, Visual Studies, Literary Visuality Studies, Comparative Literature, Translation.

Katarzyna Szymanska
Visual Arts Towards the Work of Thomas Bernhard

In my paper I would like to explore the subject of Sebald’s artistic heritage by reversing chronology and reaching for writings of T. Bernhard, one of the writers most important for him. Close relation between the works of these two German-speaking authors (despite numerous differences between structuring their texts) means that studies of topics such as memory, word or image in works of the author of Austerlitz will certainly be relevant for those who study Bernhard’s writing.
I will review the narratives by Bernhard in regard to how he approaches photography and what function it serves. I will also present photographs (and videos) of the author himself, his photo-(auto)biographies and manners of writing about them. The study of these attempts on auto-presentation and the texts benefits a lot from methods borrowed from visual arts and film studies. Choosing this interpretative context is additionally justified by presence of references to paintings in Bernhard’s prose – for instance, the entire novel Old Masters which became a basis for a comic by Nicolas Mahler. Other examples of modern art responding to Bernhard’s writing should be noted, among others an exposition of pictures by Armin Boehm titled Wald, Hochwald, Holzfällen (Berlin, 2012). Yet another example of coexistence of image and text in the Austrian writer’s creative work can be found in the collection An der Baumgrenze with drawings by Anton Lehmden. This speech will present various ways in which image, writing and author’s biography can intertwine, in particular as relating to remembrance and forgetting.

Katarzyna Szymańska (b. 5 VIII 1993, Poznań, Poland) – PhD student at the Institute for Research of European Culture, Faculty of Polish and Classical Philology, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, MA in Polish and Slavic Philology at AMU. Her main research area concerns writings of Thomas Bernhard and other german-speaking authors. Her other interests include modern poetry and Jewish literature. A co-author of Dydaktyczna szkoła doktorska edited by Maria Kwiatkowska-Ratajczak (Poznań 2019) and a co-editor, along with Katarzyna Kuczyńska-Koschany, of the book Ginczanka. Na stulecie Poetki (Kraków 2018). She published articles in journals such as Polonistyka. Innowacje, Miasteczko Poznań, Czytanie Literatury. Łódzkie Studia Literaturoznawcze, Narracje o Zagładzie. For the last few years she has been cooperating with Student Group for Jewish Culture and Literature „Dabru Emet” at AMU.