WORD & IMAGEPub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/02666286.2021.1941655
L. Vuong, J. Bates
{"title":"At home with the artist: exploring the Louise Bourgeois Archive","authors":"L. Vuong, J. Bates","doi":"10.1080/02666286.2021.1941655","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2021.1941655","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This special issue on French-American artist Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) brings together essays by curators and scholars who have spent time in her Archive, located next to the artist’s home in New York. This article presents the special issue and how it regroups contributions by authors who share the same object of study but who are rarely brought into dialogue with each other. They range from museum and gallery professionals to academics in art history and literary studies, who have written their contributions in French or in English. An interdisciplinary and bilingual space for established and new critical voices on Louise Bourgeois, this special issue is a scholarly état présent of the research undertaken at the Louise Bourgeois Archive. It brings to light interactions between word and image, literature and visual art in her work, and the importance of writing and words for Louise Bourgeois. This article also reflects on some of the risks faced by researchers in the Archive. It defines some of the tactics that such archival research requires, notably how distance, in order to assert an objective reading, can complement rather than cancel the seductive and feverish intimacy of archives and the interpretative gains they contain.","PeriodicalId":44046,"journal":{"name":"WORD & IMAGE","volume":"48 1","pages":"1 - 10"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87630612","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
WORD & IMAGEPub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/02666286.2021.1941666
Marie-Laure Bernadac
{"title":"Les archives de Louise Bourgeois: ‘J’ai besoin de mes souvenirs. C’est ma documentation. Je veille sur eux’","authors":"Marie-Laure Bernadac","doi":"10.1080/02666286.2021.1941666","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2021.1941666","url":null,"abstract":"Résumé Cet essai offre une vue d’ensemble des archives de Louise Bourgeois et développe une typologie des différents documents qui s’y trouvent. Des journaux intimes, que l’artiste Louise Bourgeois commence à utiliser à l’âge de onze ans et qu’elle continue à écrire durant toute sa vie, aux écrits psychanalytiques des années 1952–1966 découverts au début des années 2000, aux papiers administratifs, photographies, documents sonores et (audio)visuels: la majeure partie des archives est ici listée, classée, décrite et commentée. Ce regard exhaustif est porté sur une ressource désormais incontournable pour les chercheurs et curateurs qui se penchent sur l’œuvre de Louise Bourgeois, mais aussi sur les mouvements artistiques et périodes historiques dont ses travaux et ses écrits sont à la fois témoins et acteurs. Cet essai propose également une réflexion personnelle sur la portée des écrits intimes sur l’œuvre de l’artiste, les enjeux à la fois biographiques et symboliques de l’attachement de Louise Bourgeois à l’écriture, et à la manie conservatrice qui l’accompagne. Deux axes se croisent ainsi dans cet essai: une première approche méthodique, qui propose pour la première fois d’indexer les archives de Louise Bourgeois et fait de cet essai une ressource documentaire et didactique. Un second axe amorce une réflexion nouvelle sur l’œuvre de Louise Bourgeois, définissant les archives comme à la fois un lieu de documentation, de création et de conservation: les archives comme mémoire, atelier et musée.","PeriodicalId":44046,"journal":{"name":"WORD & IMAGE","volume":"358 1","pages":"19 - 29"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76520575","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
WORD & IMAGEPub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/02666286.2021.1941665
L. Vuong, J. Bates
{"title":"Interview with Maggie Wright, Louise Bourgeois Archive, The Easton Foundation","authors":"L. Vuong, J. Bates","doi":"10.1080/02666286.2021.1941665","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2021.1941665","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The Louise Bourgeois Archive (LBA) was established by The Easton Foundation, a charitable and non-profit organization put in place more than thirty years ago by the artist Louise Bourgeois. Since her death in 2010, the Foundation exists as two spaces that are simultaneously distinct and interlinked: one is the former artist’s home and studio and the other, housed in the building next door to Louise Bourgeois’s townhouse, is the LBA. A research centre aimed at academic and art-world scholars, it is directed by Maggie Wright, who is also leading ongoing efforts to catalogue Louise Bourgeois’s vast collection of personal documents, a monumental enterprise in both scale and ambition. Academic and curatorial research into a late artist’s work requires dialogue and collaboration with the artist’s estate. The way scholars and curators interact with an institution set up to protect and promote the work of an artist is central to guaranteeing independent research work. Yet, the nature of these relationships is rarely commented upon, and the role played by artists’ estates often remains out of sight. Wright has agreed to be interviewed as part of this issue devoted to Louise Bourgeois’s archival writings and documents. The interview was carried out by email exchanges between January and April 2019. Wright’s description of the LBA details this emerging archival corpus ripe for scholarly exploration. The interview also provides a clear and extensive overview of the predetermined functions and roles of the LBA, giving an insider’s view into the workings of an artist’s archives and some of the ambitions and challenges that have determined the focus of this particular archive.","PeriodicalId":44046,"journal":{"name":"WORD & IMAGE","volume":"275 1","pages":"11 - 18"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76376335","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
WORD & IMAGEPub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/02666286.2021.1941671
Ulf Küster
{"title":"The edition of Louise Bourgeois and Robert Goldwater’s letters: work in progress","authors":"Ulf Küster","doi":"10.1080/02666286.2021.1941671","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2021.1941671","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This essay focuses on a current project: to publish a selection of letters between the artist Louise Bourgeois and her husband, art historian Robert Goldwater. A detailed account is provided of an archival object of study, describing a corpus of letters in quantitative and material terms, as well as reporting on the various personal circumstances and historical events to which they refer. The essay also examines specific passages from letters by Bourgeois addressed to her husband, and from letters by Goldwater to Bourgeois. These letters, for the most part hitherto unpublished, offer an unprecedented glimpse into the inner workings of a marriage, which Louise Bourgeois, despite the self-constructed autobiographical nature of her work, kept mostly aside and private. Arguing that a publication of the Bourgeois–Goldwater correspondence enriches the scholarship on Louise Bourgeois and provides new research leads, this essay also instigates a subjective approach to the edition of Bourgeois’s and Goldwater’s letters as a work in progress, reflecting on the technical and ethical challenges it creates. The essay poses a wider interrogation of the possibilities and difficulties of archival research and the recasting of archival documents into published pieces of writing","PeriodicalId":44046,"journal":{"name":"WORD & IMAGE","volume":"1 1","pages":"39 - 47"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78100506","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
WORD & IMAGEPub Date : 2021-10-02DOI: 10.1080/02666286.2021.1892450
Sunny S. Yudkoff
{"title":"The Joys of Yiddish in the work of Mel Bochner","authors":"Sunny S. Yudkoff","doi":"10.1080/02666286.2021.1892450","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2021.1892450","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article explores the evolving manifestations of Yiddish in the work of contemporary artist Mel Bochner. A founding figure of American conceptual art, Bochner has continuously re-examined the unstable nature of language. Yet, as the following paper will argue, Bochner’s postvernacular invocation of Yiddish calls into crisis this central contention of his work. Beginning with an analysis of selected works from his post-2000 Thesaurus Paintings, I suggest that Yiddish first served Bochner as a tool to confirm the instability of language by highlighting the futility of the idea of the synonym. I then turn to the multi-site work The Joys of Yiddish, which was mounted in Chicago (2006) and Munich (2013), to demonstrate the shift that occurs in Bochner’s subsequent Yiddish-themed art. Analyzing The Joys of Yiddish, I show that Bochner deploys a vision of Yiddish that is based on a set of received assumptions and stereotypes promulgated in twentieth-century American popular culture. As will become clear, Bochner’s conception of Yiddish produces a surfeit of questions not about the language’s complexity or instability but about its superficiality and anticipated signification. Extending Bochner’s painterly assertion that “language is not transparent,” this article asks: What about Yiddish?","PeriodicalId":44046,"journal":{"name":"WORD & IMAGE","volume":"27 1","pages":"337 - 352"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77974438","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
WORD & IMAGEPub Date : 2021-10-02DOI: 10.1080/02666286.2021.1922854
Shirly Ben-Dor Evian
{"title":"Writing with pictures and depicting with words: a diachronic study of hieroglyphs from pharaonic times, through the Renaissance era to the present","authors":"Shirly Ben-Dor Evian","doi":"10.1080/02666286.2021.1922854","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2021.1922854","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article presents a cross-cultural, diachronic, and comparative analysis of the representational aspects of picture-writing through the use of hieroglyphs in ancient Egypt and their revival in early Renaissance Europe. The two phenomena will be discussed with a focus on the functionality of the sign within the non-textual sphere, highlighting such similarities as the glottographic nature of the word-signs and the subsequent unified visuality of text and image. It is suggested that the similarities are the by-product of picture-writing: when words are expressed with pictograms rather than with letters, the following step is to benefit from their dual function, as both text and image. The current use of pictograms in digital media—namely the emoji—is a process that already exhibits similar traits.","PeriodicalId":44046,"journal":{"name":"WORD & IMAGE","volume":"103 1","pages":"390 - 397"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83893237","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
WORD & IMAGEPub Date : 2021-10-02DOI: 10.1080/02666286.2021.1897771
Erika Mihálycsa
{"title":"‘Art of confinement’: Samuel Beckett, Alberto Burri","authors":"Erika Mihálycsa","doi":"10.1080/02666286.2021.1897771","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2021.1897771","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The essay attempts to draw a parallel between the ascetic, negative late modernist aesthetics of Samuel Beckett and Alberto Burri, tracing their post-humanist poetics and artistic practices of impoverishment, achievementlessness and their responses given to the crisis of humanist European culture and of a modernist ethos of mastery in the wake of WW2. It attempts to show how Burri’s works in the late 1940s–1950s converge with the articulation of Beckett’s visual aesthetics in his coeval essays on art, and how the artistic procedures of both move from prewar modernist models toward an embodied aesthetic of finitude, toward an ethical rupturing, scarring of frameworks and structures of mastery, by privileging a material imagination of indigence that is grounded in detritus, and finally, by creating forms of an art of melancholia that stage the ongoing disaster of contemporary history.","PeriodicalId":44046,"journal":{"name":"WORD & IMAGE","volume":"29 1","pages":"353 - 370"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75716549","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
WORD & IMAGEPub Date : 2021-10-02DOI: 10.1080/02666286.2021.1884822
Elizabeth Lastra
{"title":"Confronting premature death: Cluny, Arthur Kingsley Porter, and the tomb of Alfonso Ansúrez","authors":"Elizabeth Lastra","doi":"10.1080/02666286.2021.1884822","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2021.1884822","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Since the early twentieth century, the carved sarcophagus of Alfonso Ansúrez has been considered a central work of Spanish medieval art. Nonetheless, its singular imagery remains enigmatic and its contentious modern history largely unexplored. The late eleventh-century sarcophagus of the young noble Alfonso Ansúrez is both exceptionally clear and frustratingly enigmatic. Inscriptions label every detail, down to a cup labeled calix, and large carved figures signal the viewer through pronounced gestures, but the tomb’s details diverge from developing norms in funerary iconography. Unlike the common medieval representation of the deceased as a nude androgynous soul, the young Alfonso, while plainly identified by the inscription “deceased Alfonso,” is shown fully dressed and animate. This article argues that the tomb depicts Alfonso’s reception of last rites, which may not have been observed before the young noble’s untimely death. The carefully marked details actualize a ritual indispensable for the salvation of his soul. The article also elucidates the little-known role played by Arthur Kingsley Porter — probable victim of another premature death — in the Spanish monument’s clandestine and controversial appearance in the United States.","PeriodicalId":44046,"journal":{"name":"WORD & IMAGE","volume":"6 1","pages":"323 - 336"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90855076","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
WORD & IMAGEPub Date : 2021-10-02DOI: 10.1080/02666286.2020.1868279
L. Freese
{"title":"Hungry minds: the visual and verbal language of taverns and coffee houses in early American periodicals","authors":"L. Freese","doi":"10.1080/02666286.2020.1868279","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2020.1868279","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Eighteenth-century American periodicals utilized depictions of taverns and coffee houses to aid subscribers in their navigation of complex political environments. Many eighteenth-century artists and publishers drew upon public knowledge of the significance of small variations in drinking habits, imported beverages, and tavern life as a communication strategy. Public knowledge of, and interest in, tavern and coffee-house culture made this subject matter a particularly legible and engaging vehicle for discussions about politics, class, and identity. Editors and artists built on public knowledge to affirm the status of a socioeconomically and geographically limited readership. As connective spaces for the performance of norms and distribution of knowledge, magazines, coffee houses, and taverns served as hubs for knowledge distribution. Depictions of taverns and coffee houses, in contrast to other popular subject-matter in early American periodicals, worked to reaffirm the status and ideals of subscribers during this tumultuous period in American history.","PeriodicalId":44046,"journal":{"name":"WORD & IMAGE","volume":"79 7 1","pages":"299 - 310"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87952599","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
WORD & IMAGEPub Date : 2021-10-02DOI: 10.1080/02666286.2021.1910463
Jakub Lipski
{"title":"Meta-pictorial discourse and the early theory of the novel in eighteenth-century Britain","authors":"Jakub Lipski","doi":"10.1080/02666286.2021.1910463","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2021.1910463","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The first half of the eighteenth century saw a tendency among early British novelists to frame their fictional narratives with theoretical deliberations that helped to situate their texts within the complex network of fictional taxonomies and conventions. Typically in the form of authorial prefaces, these commentaries were implicitly or explicitly intertextual, invoking other texts and authors by way of contrast and/or comparison. Given the unstable taxonomy at the time, referring to other literary projects proved a relatively efficient strategy of self-definition. If purely literary meta-discourse may be taken for granted, the peculiarity of a number of authorial commentaries in the eighteenth century was meta-pictorial content. This article traces the uses of two types of meta-pictorialism. The first type is metaphorical: the use of painterly vocabulary with reference to literary aspects. A mere rhetorical device at first glance, this type is also revealing of generic issues. The second type is meta-pictorial naming, that is, a meta-commentary using the name of a painter.","PeriodicalId":44046,"journal":{"name":"WORD & IMAGE","volume":"17 1","pages":"383 - 389"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86005018","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}