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Explorations in (Post) Modern Thought and Visual Culture Christiane Treichl Christiane

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Explorations in (Post) Modern Thought and Visual Culture Christiane Treichl Christiane Explorations in (Post) Modern Thought and Visual Culture Christiane Treichl Christiane Art and Language: Explorations in (Post) Modern Thought and Visual Culture sheds new light on the symbiotic relationship between art and Christiane Treichl language by exploring how these cultured sets consociate on philo- sophical and art-historical levels. Against the backdrop of (visual) semi- otics the first section of the book considers the differences between art and language from various vantage points: meaning-making, asking if art is a language, Ernst Cassirer's symbolic forms, Jan Mukařovský's signs, and Gilles Deleuze's philosophy. The second section of the book deals with the works of (post) modern artists from diverse cultural backgrounds who unfasten traditional linguistic and artistic systems by destabilising the viewer and blurring the boundaries between art and language. The author argues that this is the most productive, cut- ting-edge aspect of the word-image relationship of that period. Lan- guage provides (post) modern art with its thrust and focus and offers a site for critical intervention. The artistic forays the author embarks on cover a wide range touching on Surrealism, Dada, Arabic Calligraphy, and Chinese Conceptualist Art. Explorations in (Post) Modern Thought and Visual Culture Visual Thought and Modern Explorations in (Post) ISBN 978-3-7376-0196-2 9 783737 601962 kassel university press ! " !#$% # & ' !#( # ) % #* *+++ , ' #+*+- #. % /, '#+*+ " * # !00 - 0123 4 #% !* 5 * 5 * 5 # 6 ' 7 88 + + + 9+( :& '+:*+0123 7,45;<=/>/<><3/12;3/0 7,45;<=/>/<><3/12;</; / *?788+% +821+2;0228(&;<=><><312;<; &@588 / ' + 8 1110/A12;<A '012<: ' ! C% $:( + + / + C % ! To my beloved son and everybody who made this thesis possible Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim Because it was grassy and wanted wear, Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same, And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way I doubted if I should ever come back. I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. Robert Frost (1874-1963) “The Road Not Taken” III IV TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................................... 1 2. ART AND LANGUAGE: A COMPARATIVE ONTOLOGY ............................... 4 2.1. By Way of an Introduction: On (Visual) Semiotics ........................................ 4 2.2. Meaning in Art and Language ....................................................................... 21 2.3. Jan MukaTovský: The Autonomous Sign vs. The Communicative Sign .... 29 2.4. Ernst Cassirer: An Examination of the Relationship between Art and Language via His Symbolic Forms ......................................................... 46 2.5. Art As Language .............................................................................................. 52 2.6. Affect and Order: Art and Language Deleuzian Style ................................. 65 2.7. By Way of a Conclusion: Cassirer, Deleuze, and MukaTovský: Unlikely Bedfellows? ....................................................................................... 72 3. WORD, IMAGE, AND THE DETERRITORIALISATION OF THE PICTURE PLANE ................................................................................... 76 3.1. Preliminary Comments ................................................................................... 76 3.2. Naming, (En)titling, and Signing: Puns and Word-Play in Selected Works by René Magritte and Marcel Duchamp ....................................................... 84 3.3. Signs of Deterritorialisation in “Oedipus”: Reintroducing the Excluded Word in Max Ernst's Une Semaine de Bonté ................................................ 95 3.4. Floating Signifiers: Arabic (Pseudo-) Calligraphy and Pseudo-Chinese Characters .......................................................................... 112 3.4.1. Introductory Remarks ............................................................................ 112 3.4.2. Hurufiyya: Freeing the Sign in the (Post) Modern Arab World ............ 115 3.4.3. Xu Bing's and Gu Wenda's Deconstructed Signs: Pseudowriting and Chinese Conceptualism .................................................................... 131 4. CONCLUSION ...................................................................................................... 148 V 5. BIBLIOGRAPHY.................................................................................................. 150 5.1. Works Cited ................................................................................................... 150 5.2. Works of Art .................................................................................................. 169 5.3. Table of Figures ............................................................................................. 171 5.4. Figures ............................................................................................................ 173 VI 1. INTRODUCTION “Art has always reminded us that all signs are merely signs, that they are arbitrary and provisional; it has always spoken both to our need for signs and to our deep sense of their ultimate insufficiency, to our need for a more self-conscious-liberated-relation to them” (Williams 265). “Language always says more than its unattainable literal meaning, which is lost from the very beginning of the textual utterance” (Eco The Limits 2). Art and language are cultured sets and as such are key concepts through which we can glean how we live and what moves us. We speak of the language of art and the art of language, metaphors that symbolise the interpenetration of these two realms. My thesis dissertates on the relationship between visual art and language and how they consociate on linguistic and art-historical levels. Thus it has two quite distinct, yet connected parts: a theoretical one and one with a visual focus, both of which can be subsumed under the semiotic banner. “Art and Language: A Comparative Ontology” (Chapter 2), consists of seven sub- chapters considering the differences between art and language from diverse vantage points. Chapters 2.3., 2.4., 2.6., and 2.7. interpret the relevant philosophical contributions pertaining to art, language, and semiotics of Ernst Cassirer, Jan MukaTovský, and Gilles Deleuze with a view to also reclaiming them for semiotics or semiotically inspired aesthetics. These thinkers were selected after extensive research because their theories seemed most comprehensive and conducive to a feasible clarification of the issue at hand. For Cassirer reality is shaped as symbolic forms (art, language, myth/religion, and science), which are sign-producing activities. The symbolic concept is a truly universal one and whatever the human consciousness takes hold of already possesses form. MukaTovský's key concepts of aesthetic function, norm, value, and structure are crucial to his understanding of the work of art as a sign, and therefore he will take the lion's share of this section of the thesis. Deleuze, whose ideas about affect and order (together with other primary conceptions) introduce an altogether novel mapping of the world, states that “[t]he work of art is born from signs as much as it generates them” (Proust 98). After the individual deliberations, a comparison of these three intellectuals will reveal some intriguing parallels between those otherwise discordant semioticians. In Chapter 2, I shall also be asking how the pictorial sign means in contrast to the linguistic sign (in Chapter 2.2.), and if art is in a way a language (in Chapter 2.5.). The former chapter will necessitate a close look at the channels 1 and modalities or modes through which these two types of sign make meaning, whereas the latter chapter proffers a comparative structuralist analysis touching on language's role as an interpreting system for art, minimal units, and the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes. The introductory chapter (2.1) provides a survey of (visual) semiotics, that is, the study of the sign per se and its general properties. As a methodology and bridging philosophy special attention is going to be paid to this discipline and a vital part of casting semiotics in these roles is questioning its validity in the first place. I hope to find that semiotics can not only help to explain the relationship art-language, but that it can also enrich our appreciation of art and that the study of art can in turn contribute to the formation of semiotic doctrine. “Word, Image, and the Deterritorialisation of the Picture Plane” (Chapter 3), offers case studies of (post)modern artists from diverse cultural backgrounds who have dealt with the relationship art-language in their art, and thus have contributed to elucidating this close affiliation. The dialogue between word and image is an old philosophical problem, a duality that is constantly being recast into new debates. The
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