Dual Interactions
Between Ekphrasis and Illustration: Word and Image Dependence in Black Metal Music
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Alicja Sułkowska
Although black metal gained its popularity among audience and mass media as a consequence of its expressive symbolism and directness of the performative discourse, the central part in this process may be without a doubt assigned to the visual level of the genre communication, both in image and in form of stage presence, which serve as a direct materialization of the abstract genre’s ideology. Considering the ideological and metaphorical concept of genre’s progression, the article investigates the logic behind the mechanisms of dual interactions between image and text, pointing out and defining the aesthetic and rhetoric trends structuring the genre’s endo-medial transformation and evolution. Explaining such self-absorbed construction of black metal-scene with consideration of research of Goffman, or Fischer-Lichte, based on the description of image-text-dependences designated by Lessing, the text evaluates the communicative, performative, and medial dimension of the semantic image-text unification in genre and subculture. The article defines the manner in which the abstract ideological concept is being transformed by scene into the medium of word/image and which role does such re-worked topic play in the whole symbolic genre-constellation. On example of certain motifs, artworks or re-occurring symbols, the text offers an exemplary insight into the subcultural interpretation of genre’s textual and visual manifestations. The study’s aim is to develop a multi-dimensional network of connotations between performative/visual and narrative levels of the genre, analyzing black metal’s mechanisms of graphic communication and the way the constant reworking of text-image scheme affects the genre’s medial and subcultural presence.
Ekphrasis of the Formless: Writing in Response to Obscurity and Emptiness
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Patrick Wright
This paper investigates the formal response, in terms of both poetry and critical writing, to the formless, most notably visual art which is, at first glance, characterised by obscurity or emptiness (such as Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square). Writing poems about or alongside such images pushes, I suggest, most definitions of ekphrasis to breaking point, and any writing that emerges must in some way align itself with the formal properties of the artwork. I therefore look into framing and the rules which govern both the poem and the image, and how these correspond with or jar against each other. In addition, given that my poems which arise in response to formlessness are quite often dealing with issues of representation or aesthetics, they borrow the language of theory or critical discourse. Conversely, due to the nature of a PhD in Creative Writing, my critical writing will intersect with my poems, opening up the intriguing possibility of integrating literary devices within academic writing. I thus explore how visual, poetic and critical registers can blend or interweave through a book-length project. I am interested in how and under what circumstances each are defined and kept distinct, while allowing at the same time experiments in performative writing: a chance to test the limits of critical writing and what meets the basic criteria of scholarly work (e.g., are citations a prerequisite?). I end by proposing a series of possible formal responses to abstract or minimalist artworks.
Image-ning the Emotive Power of the Poetic Word: Multi-Layered, Multi-Faceted Images as Pathways for Understanding Our Singular and Collective Lives
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Samantha Earley, Nancy C DeJoy
Since August 2018, poet Nancy DeJoy and printmaker Samantha Earley have developed a collaborative project in which we explore ways to understand the singular and collective meaning of our lives through integrating poetry and lithography. In our endeavor, we concretize the emotive power of the poetic by connecting sensory words with images that are illustrative or abstract. Then, that poetic and visual artwork becomes a material artistic artifact. Our experiment thus moves poetry into the realm of the image/object and conversely makes the image/object an interpretive body that invites the viewer to experience the relationship between poetry and print in ways that make poetry an object of art and makes image a linguistic artifact. Our work invites viewers to read images and words as multi-faceted interpretations of both the mundane (renting an apartment, fixing a table, contemplating light reflected on a shirt) and the dramatic (birth, death, mass shootings). Our paper uses some of this work to illustrate the ways that this type of collaboration expands the empirical reach of the image and opens a space for accommodating multiple views of similar events across different lives. In this manner, we attempt to forge new paths for artists and viewers to understand our collective lives as individual experiences integrated within larger social communities and mores.
