The Border between Word and Image

Abstract

Proceeding from Lessing's distinction between poetry and visual art, Boris Groys argues that language is not external to, but resides behind, the image. The image constitutes the scene of a frustrated linguistic desire. Modern visual art sought to avoid the obscenity of staging this unfulfilled desire by conducting a systematic ascetic repression of the linguistic impulse. This negation of linguistic desire culminated in Judd's 'specific objects'. Y et the modern image, Groys emphasizes with reference to Greenberg and McLuhan, still transmits a message, namely that of its medium bearer. Modern artists torture the image and put it into a state of emergency or exception in which it confesses its interior. In the image's sub-medium space, in turn, resides language. Avantgarde artists and modern media theorists share the wish to achieve durability by becoming the media of the media. The border between the image and language, Groys closes, can neither be stabilized nor abolished. A S IS well known, the rivalry between word and image has a long history. In my article, I would like to expand on a relatively new episode of this history^an episode which is still ongoing. I am concerned with the emergence of the word in the image, which occurred in the context of the art of the 1960s. It occurred in the form of explanations and theoretical considerations of the limits and the role of art presented in writing and integrated into the artwork in conceptual art; but also as sound recordings of spoken language, which one can hear in contemporary installations; and, moreover, as poetic citations surfacing amidst the image, like those that can be seen in the images of Anselm Kiefer. Yet how do these texts enter the image? Or how does the spoken word enter an artistic installation? One might think^and this is indeed how it is often

The word/image dualism revisited: Towards an iconic conception of visual culture

“…Relevant attempts are constantly being made. For example, a new, more integrative theory of seeing the 'border between word and image' has recently been set forth (Groys, 2011). Exploring this issue in specific empirical settings, sociologists have developed a visual sociology of knowledge that demonstrates in detail how 'knowledge is defined by circularity of speaking and showing' (Knoblauch, 2008).…”

Picturing power: the depiction of leadership in art

“…9-22). In addition to the work by Lee (1967), Steiner (1986), and Wendorf (1983), mentioned above, some of the most stimulating theoretical discussions of literature's relation to the arts, and useful entry points for those wishing to pursue this topic further, appear in Hagstrum (1958); Gombrich (1964); Krieger (1967); Nänny (1986); Mitchell (1987); Frank (1991); and Groys (2011). For parallels and divergences in music's relationship to literature and art, see Albright (1999).…”

Refashioning sociological imagination: Linguality, visuality and the iconic turn in cultural sociology

“…Others noticed that, while ‘many theories of social construction make some reference to sight, few offer sustained examinations of perception’ (Friedman, 2011: 187). Media theorists in the arts and humanities still feel obliged to remind social scientists that ‘language is not external to, but resides behind, the image’ (Groys, 2011: 94). In short, if visuality has eventually been thematized and identified empirically as a key site of society, it still remains under-theorized, tethered either to materialistic concepts of hegemony or to representational–structuralist legacies of cultural theorizing (Keane, 2005), and thus insufficiently developed.…”

“…One of the reasons why this is the case is precisely the persistence of the dualism and its multiple legacies. While the standard modern paradigms systematically marginalized aesthetics and materiality as either decorative or banal, and suspected image of being spurious, ‘repressing the latent linguistic desire of the image’ (Groys, 2011: 98), the critical postmodern currents tend to celebrate the fact that nowadays it is images that ‘take precedence over words as the most significant realm of meaning’ (Chaney, 2000: 112; Mitchell, 1995). Alternatively, they bemoan the fact that images are the instruments of hegemonic political practices (e.g.…”

“…Objects and buildings carry meanings through visual means just like images … Visual inquiry is no longer just the study of the image, but rather the study of the seen and observable. (Emmison and Smith, 2000: ix)Contemporary media theorists underscore that Gombrich, credited by McLuhan with being the first to treat the medium as the message, never really explicitly theorized this stance (Groys, 2011: 100). While judging Gombrich by the contemporary standards of social science may be unfair, the fact that sociologists still feel compelled to pit their conceptions of the visual against Gombrich’s speaks volumes not just about his accomplishment, but about the relative paucity and poverty of relevant theorizations in their own discipline.…”