Call for Papers: Image Writing. Verbo-Visual Arts: From the Second Half of the Twentieth Century to Today
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“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”
– Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus, 1921
“Every word is a generalization.”
– Lev S. Vygotsky, Thought and Language, 1934
The source of an inexhaustible and controversial debate, the relationship between word and image is at the core of contemporary theoretical and aesthetic reflection. The film installation Finding Chopin (2005-2018) by artist Tris Vonna-Michell—a tribute to the great French poet and performer—Gianfranco Baruchello and Michele Mari’s sought-after dialogue between writing and drawing (Dreams, 2017), and Tauba Auerbach’s book Alphabetized Bible (2006)—whose typographical experimentation is rooted in the formal experiences of Concrete and Visual Poetry of the 1950s and 1960s—are just some significant examples of the fervent encounter between verbal and figurative arts in the 21st century. The exhibition cycle Poésie balistique (La Verrière, Brussels, 2016–2019), the editorial project Meta (Fondation d'Entreprise Richard / Art-Agenda, 2019) and the book The New Concrete: Visual Poetry in the 21st Century (Bean; Goldsmith; McCabe, 2015) focus on the complexity of this cultural context that is so varied and rich of exchanges between poetic and visual research.
Subversive and desecrating, the historic avant-gardes have placed us in front of pieces of sentences, words and letters inserted inside assemblages of urban debris, assembled with newspaper clippings and photographs or juxtaposed with objets trouvés. About fifty years later, the neo-avant-gardes, after having critically assimilated and reread the experience of collage, montage, and assemblage of signs, words and things, have fostered the verbo-visual research and exercise, once again celebrating the visual nature of the word, its ability to figure in space beyond just meaning.
Moving along the borders —and sometimes employing the expressive tools of the neo-avant-garde visual poetic—Fluxus adopted language as a critical and intermedia tool with which to rethink the meaning and role of art in society; Azimuth and the Zero Group found the means by which creating a "Zero-Zone" free from any informal and neo-expressionist residue; and conceptual artists the dimension in which to make the thinking on art tautologically coincide with art itself. Where concrete poets worked on the body and on the material elements of writing, on its physical and structural conditions, creating mechano-poems “to assemble and disassemble,” the exponents of international visual poetry have experimented intersemiotic relationships, introducing in the poetic body new political and social tensions through the use of photographic images and iconographic elements taken from mass culture. This is an extremely varied panorama, in which very distant operations can be traced, ranging from the alchemical distillation of Emilio Villa, Mario Diacono and Luciano Caruso, to the analytical, linguistic and anthropological cultural investigations of Martino and Anna Oberto, Ugo Carrega, Vincenzo Ferrari, and Luca Patella, to the incursions of the word in the works of the Italian Arte Povera, in the actions of Joseph Beuys, Ketty La Rocca, Vito Acconci, and Bruce Naumann, in the operations of Gianni Bertini, Piero Manzoni, Vincenzo Agnetti, Luciano Fabro, Giulio Paolini, and Alighiero Boetti, or in the works of a series of artists (e.g. Maria Lai, Louise Bourgeois, Irma Blank, Amelia Etlinger, Annette Messager, Mona Hatoum, Rosemarie Trockel, Ghada Amer) who have located in the relationship between text and the millennial tradition of weaving, one of the expressive means with which to draw their own images and personal memories.
Since then, what remains and what has changed of this hybrid and experimental heritage? How to reflect today on its multiple determinations and implications? What forms and meanings does the interrelation between writing and image take in today's artistic-literary production?
The purpose of this issue of the journal «piano b» is to stimulate and collect reflections on the theme of the interaction between literary and visual culture in the contemporary age, referring to the variety of means and expressive supports through which it manifests itself: from the neo-avant-gardes of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, throughout the experiments of the 1980s and 1990s, up to the current developments and declinations of the verbal-visual expression.
Academics, critics, and scholars are invited to propose original and unpublished contributions that analyze the link between writing and the visual arts in the light of a new historical, critical and aesthetic identity.
Possible, but not exclusive, topics for consideration:
Languages, tools, and processes
- pictorial alphabets: the word in the space of the canvas
- the artist's book as a tool for new narratives between image, word, and matter
- the alphabetical sign and its technical reproducibility: the contribution of photography, artist's cinema and video art
- conceptual attitudes of the use of the word in art
- writing as a process in performative and behavioral practices
- typefaces as constituent elements of the image: experiences of contamination between visual arts and graphic design
Contexts, subjects, and dialogues
- the recovery of historical avant-garde in post-war experimental poetry
- the international networks of the neo-avant-garde visual poetics as they emerge from magazines, editions, exhibitions, and private correspondences
- from the wall to the street: the public dimension of the border practices between verbal language and the visual arts
- the archives (physical and digital) of the research between word and image: questions of method
The proposals will be evaluated by the editors of the number and must be sent as an attachment to the following e-mail address:
Furthermore, in order to submit an article applicants must also comply with the following indications.
How to submit an articleNo later than the 7th January 2020 the applicants must send to the email address redazione.pianob@unibo.it as an attachment a text in a .doc format containing a short abstract (maximum length of 1500 characters, spaces included), no more than 5 keywords and a short biography of the applicant, the valuation of which is entrusted to the Guest Editors of the specific issue. In addition to the original language of the text, the abstract, the applicant’s biography and the keywords must be compulsorily submitted also in English. Once the abstract has been accepted by the Editorial Board, the author can proceed with the writing of the article (a monographic article or an essay) that must not exceed the maximum length of 30.000/40.000 characters (including footnotes and spaces). The drafting of the text, that can be written in Italian, English or French, must follow the editorial guidelines of the journal. All articles must be emailed to the aforementioned email address no later than the 19th April 2020, specifying the title of the article and the full name of the author in the body of the accompanying email. Each submission will undergo a double-blind peer-review process and the article will be anonymously send to two referees. If the judgments of the two referees are in contrast, the Editors (dialoguing with the Guest Editor or the Guest Editors) will decide whether to take responsibility and publish the article or send it to a third referee. The Editorial Staff will communicate to the authors the evaluation process results. The upcoming exit of the issue is planned for July 2020.
See also Author’s Guidelines.
