Implications of Portrayal
Speculative Engastration: The Business of Eating and Being Eaten in Infinite Space
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Brent Everett Dickinson
This study of words and images tells a strange story that cuts between fact and fiction, utilizing the form of an academic conference lecture. This paper is techno-storytelling in its free and proliferated use of the nonlocalized, hierarchically flat, ahistorically organized Google Images. This work juxtaposes dubiously sourced images with dubiously sourced words and concepts, culminating in a narrativized, speculative journey into the nonlocalized, hierarchically flat, ahistorical technology that is the Inverted Turducken. Unlike a regular turducken, an inverted turducken impossibly gets bigger (larger birds stuffed inside smaller birds) as one eats their way inward, finally finding themselves standing inside a body cavity that is as infinite as it is aromatic. In this place at the center of this turducken, a speculative engastronomer finds themselves eating while being eaten, losing their object edges in an infinite body cavity that is both absolutely full and utterly empty. This study is contextually situated within the master project Marcel Maus Hermeneutical Think Tank. The MMHTT is a crypto-fictional arts organization created and operated anonymously by Brent Everett Dickinson for the purposes of self-deterritorialization as well as instigating discourse on philosophical concepts such as power, authorship, immanence and materialism. The mode of this instigation is a weird one however, for it is framed by a precise misconstrual of those very philosophical concepts resulting in the atmospherics of dark and deconstructive comedy. The MMHTT project is based on the production, organization and distribution of art-i-facts embodied in what the MMHTT calls goods and services.
Artists’ Books: Material, Aesthetic, Structural Forms Conveying Narrative Content in Image-texts
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Marion Arnold
Twentieth-century artists and writers used the book format to present text and image in creative dialogues in livres d’artiste. The genre defies neat definition but words and images manifest aesthetic materiality and verbal-visual information for viewer/reader interpretation. The "art books" negotiated with artists and writers by publishers are printed as "art" publications. The artist’s book acquired significance in the late 20th century when it diverged from the livre d’artiste. Originated by visual artists and conceived as sculptural forms with text and images, artists’ books were usually created as unique artefacts or handprinted in limited editions. This illustrated paper explores handmade, handprinted artists’ books and analyses the synergies between a book form and meanings inherent in image-text relationships. I discuss artists’ books published by The Caversham Press in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa to reveal the versatility of the sculptural book form as purveyor of story-telling in South Africa’s complex, multi-ethnic apartheid society. Selecting Exile (2001), an artist’s book by novelist-artist Ingrid Winterbach for detailed analysis, I argue that the visual, tactile form of this book develops a postmodern narrative. Winterbach consults South African history to empower Saartjie (Sarah) Baartman (1789-1815), a Khoisan woman who was taken to Europe to be exhibited as an exotic African curiosity, to tell her story. The accordion paper pull-out and bound pages of Exile enable different interactive sequences and palimpsests of printed pages, handwritten script and drawings to be handled, seen and read as composite ‘imagetext’ objects (T.J.W. Mitchell’s term), and image-texts with variable relationships.
The Forgotten Images of Immigrants Using the Public Library During the Early 20th Century
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Carl Antonucci
During the early 20th century, the typical printed images and photographs of immigrants portrayed a poor group living in crowded tenements that were located in the ethnic ghettos of the urban cities of the United States. The images in popular magazines of this era also portrayed poorly dressed immigrants working as laborers with picks and shovels or in factories. A forgotten aspect of the immigrant experience of the early 20th century was their use of the public library as a shelter from the harsh realities of working life or a place to borrow books that would assist them in learning the English language. Many immigrant writers, such as Pascal D’Angelo, used the public library to learn the English language to eventually write poetry and books about their immigrant experiences. Lewis W. Hine did take some photographs of immigrants using the public library, but they are largely forgotten. These photographs are not the images that are associated with the immigrant experience in the early 20th century. This paper tells the forgotten story and show the forgotten images of the immigrant and the use of the public library during this era.
