Project 14 : News:
Dundee Contemporary Arts
 |
| 05.03.2011
– 01.04.2011 |
Poetry Beyond Text: Vision, Text + Cognition
Scottish Poetry Library, Edinburgh 14.05.2011
– 15.07.20
1
Touring from Visual Research Centre, Dundee Contemporary
Arts
Poetry Beyond Text: Vision, Text and Cognition
is a multi-disciplinary research project funded by the Arts
and Humanities Research Council and based at the Universities
of Dundee and Kent. The project uses methods from literary
criticism, aesthetics, experimental psychology, fine art
and creative practice to study how readers respond to hybrid
works which combine the textual with the visual, including
digital poetry, concrete and visual poetry, artists' books,
text film and poetry combined with photography.
This exhibition will include fascinating and innovative
commissioned works in all of these forms, as well as sculptural
and interactive works, records of the processes of collaboration
and creation, and other research findings. Contributing
poets and artists include Will Maclean, John Burnside, Robert
Sheppard & Pete Clarke, Thomas A. Clark, Marian Leven,
Robin Robertson, John Cayley, Simon Biggs, Deryn Rees-Jones
and Giselle Beiguelman.
Research Questions
In a culture marked by rapidly diversifying forms
of visual and textual presentation, the interaction of textual
and graphic forms is crucial to the development of critical,
creative and scientific thought. There is much relevant
research taking place within humanities, art practice and
psychology, but only a small body of work links all these
disciplines.
As an interdisciplinary project ‘Poetry Beyond Text’
addresses this issue, focusing on four key research questions:
1. When art works combine textual and visual elements, how
do the modes of attention specific to reading text and viewing
images interact and modify each other?
2. What factors determine whether the combination of textual
and visual elements in such works enriches or limits their
meaning and aesthetic value?
3. How are evaluative and interpretive responses to such
works affected by the development of enhanced reflective
awareness about the processes involved?
4. How can critical and psychological models of perception
and aesthetic experience inform and be informed by the creation
of new works of art?
The project will contribute to knowledge and the development
of new ideas within literary criticism, creative practice
and experimental psychology. The outcomes will be of interest
to scholars, scientists and practitioners in all these fields,
as well as to the wider public audience for poetry, visual
art and digital media.
The ‘Poetry Beyond Text’
project forms part of the wider AHRC programme, ‘Beyond
Text: Performances, Sounds, Images, Objects’ (2007-12),
which involves over 40 individual projects and aims to ‘create
a collaborative, multi-disciplinary research community’.
Why ‘Beyond Text’? The ‘Beyond Text’
programme is highly diverse, and different projects interpret
this term in different ways. For us, as the ‘Poetry
Beyond Text’ research group, ‘beyond’
does not imply transcendence, nor the non-textual.
Rather, it implies an exploration of the dynamic relations
(at the level of creation and reception) between poetry
as text and other elements of poetic works. These
other elements include visual images which may be combined
with poems (such as photographs, prints, drawings), but
also the visual and material properties of poetry itself:
the shape of the words on the page (especially in Concrete
and Visual Poetry); the feel and structure of the book or
other material form (notably in Artists’ Books); the
code and intermedial processes of poetry in digital media;
the temporal and material aspects of time-based poetic works,
including Text Film and Digital Poetry.
In another sense, ‘beyond’ also implies the
cognitive processes and constraints which enable and frame
our responses to poetry, as well as the imaginative and
creative processes involved in its making and its reflective
interpretation.
Pete Clarke moved to Liverpool in 1978
after studying at Chelsea School of Art, West of England
College of Art [Bristol Polytechnic], Burnley Municipal
College and living for a time on the Isle of Wight and then
London. He is MA Course Leader and Principal Lecturer in
Fine Art at the University of Central Lancashire, Preston.
He makes paintings, prints and installations, exploring
collaborative strategies within contemporary practice.
Robert Sheppard
Robert Sheppard and Peter Clarke collaborated
on three prints with poems: Forme, Lyric and Manifest. Each
of these prints contains poetic text on various scales,
some resembling ‘headlines’ or titles, others
reading as fragmented and repeated ‘body’ text.
There is a visual assembly of these component elements that
is suggestive of Russian Constructivist prints, combining
abstract colour shapes, blocks of text, and oblique angles
and these historical visual influences interact with a ‘poetic
of increased indeterminacy and discontinuity, the uses of
techniques of disruption and of creative linkage’,
to apply Sheppard’s own description of the ‘Linguistically
Innovative Poetry’ movement in which he has played
a notable part. The word manifest teases the viewer with
overtones of manifestos, of historical references and political
activism in its dynamic layout. There are visual overtones
as well of the dynamic aesthetics of Rodchenko and Popova,
whose work from the brief period from 1917-1925 produced
energetic and stylistically groundbreaking visual art with
text.
Robert
Sheppard moved to Liverpool in 1997 and works at
Edge Hill University where he is currently Professor of
Poetry and Poetics. Books include Twentieth Century Blues,
Warrant Error and Berlin Bursts.
Publication ISBN 978-0-9568371-0-3
www.poetrybeyondtext.org
