Interart Aesthetics

May 14, 2016 To date, the 2011 publication Videopoetry: A Manifesto has garnered more than 15,000 views from 64 countries. Notwithstanding the resultant benefits – clarification of its “territory”, its definition, constraints and categories, its influence on the evolution of artistic practice, academic study, festival program notes and submission instructions – the Manifesto could not avert the ensuing problematic development…

After having surmounted the initial obstacle of (avoiding) illustrating a pre-existent poem, new work inadvertently introduced questions about the form's mechanics, specifically (the lack of) evidence of the intentionality and self-reflexivity of image-to-text juxtapositions. In the interim five years, the majority of works in the ever-widening sphere of this genre of poetry became fixated on privileging the complete-in-itself state of the text (most pre-existent poems) over text that takes on a discernible new meaning when juxtaposed with a particular image (or sound effect).  In this essay, it is proposed that the selected constitutive elements (text, image and sound) possess collaborative properties, properties that reflect an element's state of incompleteness, in my view the only possible state that enables the emergence of unexpected meanings from image-to-text juxtapositions. As Owen Barfield put it, “What is the very essence of poetry if it is not this marking of the before unapprehended relations of things?”

The notion of interart translation is one that has hereto received very little academic attention. This may stem from the inherent danger of essentialising artistic qualities and assuming the presence of equivalences of particular themes and motifs within and across art forms/mediums that may be latent in this term. Here emerges the importance of ekphrasis as a middle ground or a stepping stone through which interart translation can function. Ekphrasis basically denotes the vivid description of a piece of visual art, real or imaginary, in a form of writing, thus the transformation of the visual into the verbal. But when can an ekphrasis abandon the confines of this description and become an independent translation of this work of art? This study aims to explore the possibilities, dimensions and limitations of translating sculpture to poetry- through the analysis of texts translating the Giza Sphinx sculpture into poems. The hypothesis here is that ekphrasis is the route through which interart translation can be conducted, in the case of translating sculpture to poetry, a point not touched upon in academic research. The lack of any comprehensive study on interart translation, and in particular the translation of sculpture to poetry, engenders a great deal of possibilities and challenges in achieving this task. Theorists over the years have been aware of the importance of the term ekphrasis. They have redefined and reformulated it in ways that are put to use in this study’s exploration of the possibility of interart translation: a notion that is only approached at a distance and with great trepidation in studies of ekphrasis. In the analysed examples, it is shown how the writers, in their verbal/ekphrastic representations/translations of the sculpture, make up for the silence and the static nature of this work of visual art, enabling it to transcend its boundaries is diverse ways. The various filters applied by the writers, including cultural and ideological ones, shape the renditions/translation of the sculpture in aesthetically diverse ways. This analysis paves the way for further studies on the nature of interart translation and suggests the possibility of tracing this process in more theoretically rigourous ways.

In Chapter 4 of the book, by rethinking the captain’s welcoming gesture as unconditional hospitality, I propose to read ‘The Secret Sharer’, which has so far been read mainly as the story of ‘a metaphorical journey towards knowing oneself’, less as a story of self-reflection, than as that of externally oriented desire to go beyond the self, to speak and give to the other. More than a story ‘about’ hospitality, ‘The Secret Sharer’ is a pivotal work among Conrad’s oeuvre in its enactment of welcoming the other – the very condition of community, or strange fraternity.

Published in volume "Provocation as Art. Scandal, Shock and Sexuality in Contemporary Cinema and Visual Culture". Proceedings of 2nd Ekphrasis Conference in Cinema and Visual Culture, 28-29 May 2015, Cluj-Napoca, Accent Publisher, Edited by Doru Pop.

By thinking the possible relationship between Conrad’s first novel and Magritte’s philosophical painting, La Folie Almayer, this paper aims to reassess the meaning of the folly in Conrad’s first novel less in terms of a foolish act of an individual person than in terms of a decision of reconciliation between the Arabs and the Europeans, or what Jacques Derrida calls a moment of madness (folie) that must move beyond rationality and calculative reasoning. René Magritte’s 1951 painting borrows its title from Conrad’s first novel Almayer’s Folly, based on a suggestion made by his surrealist poet friend. The image of the ruined tower and the uprooted tree in Magritte’s La folie Almayer is evocative of a grand mansion built by Almayer who dreamt of a splendid future and a scene from the beginning of Conrad’s novel in which the protagonist stands on the veranda of his decaying house and looks at uprooted trees carried away to the ocean by torrents of muddy water while meditating on his past failure. Similar representations of towers can be found in other works executed by the artist prior to La folie Almayer, and Conrad and Magritte, as this paper hopes to demonstrate, have lots in common in elusiveness and in their obsession with madness all through their lives. Francophone Conrad might have imagined Almayer’s ‘folly’ as something more than a foolish behaviour or even a psychological malady of an individual white man who is gone mad in a hostile environment far away from home; something that is ‘une folie’ (madness), the instant of decision, evoking a possibility of reconciliation between friend and foe.

Connected to our new exploratory research project " Rethinking Intermediality in Contemporary Cinema: Changing Forms of In-Betweenness " funded by the UEFISCDI, and following up on the topics of our previous conferences, we would like to bring into focus the idea of " in-betweenness " set in a wider context of contemporary visual culture, and to re-evaluate its relevance regarding the state of the art in researches on intermediality. Digital media have not only prompted a reassessment of the relationship of the " old " and the " new " through their extraordinary capacity for absorption and remediation, but have literally flooded our life with their ubiquity and sheer excess. The technological convergences of devices producing and displaying media, the fusions, expansions, relocations taking place have effectively challenged our perception of media differences. If the idea of intermediality is based on the assumption of a productive interaction of media, then there should be no more pressing issue regarding intermediality studies today than fine-tuning its core concept of in-betweenness to the phenomena of the so called post-media age, in the spirit of Raymond Bellour's concept of l'entre-images (i.e. images-in-between/inter-images), in which novel forms are continuously " hollowed out from within surrounded by the new forces that irrigate it " (2012: 21). On the other hand, however, as recent theoretical approaches imply by viewing media products embedded in their palpable, real-life environment (i.e. in the dispositifs we experience them, in their phenomenology that links them to our bodies, or in their concrete, historical and socio-political context), the relevance of intermediality is not limited to what happens to media, but it extends, even more importantly, to what happens through the in-betweenness of media and what is the agency of in-betweenness in our contemporary multimedia environment. Besides the analysis of new configurations, we should also examine what is inscribed and communicated through various intermedia relations and what new types of passages are established in-between art and life, in-between the emotional, spiritual and the material, as well as the imaginary and the real, and so on. We invite proposals to unravel the complex new relationships that define our contemporary visual culture, and to map new, relevant areas of in-betweenness that may enrich our knowledge of intermediality today.