The Form of the Thing: Word and Image and the Scholar

The complexities and contingent nature of the word-and-image relations of artistic and literary practices are frequent subjects of (inter)disciplinary inquiry. Yet, the scholarship responding to such works rarely explores and investigates its own potential as and participation in verbo-visual productions. On the contrary, it asserts a classificatory difference between scholarly and creative ‘uses’ of words and pictures. The formality of scholarship submits, at least tacitly, to a formless neutrality of language and images whose workings may be contained. Yet, the proximity or overlap of the work of artists and scholars is not only integral to the forty-year history of artistic research within art schools, but has also been explored theoretically within different disciplinary settings. Hence, Hayden White lamented the historian’s ‘lack of linguistic self-consciousness’ (1978) if they failed to acknowledge the similarity between their work and the poet’s. Jaś Elsner, similarly, planted art-historical practice firmly in the purview of poetry, literature or fiction, though be it ‘fiction with footnotes’ (2010). More broadly, Saidiya Hartman (2008) calls for ‘critical fabulation’ to write against the limitations of existing histories.

The session seeks to explore scholarly work as a word-image practice that necessarily needs to negotiate the boundaries of visual and verbal production rather than, by default, appeal to formal conventions. Through case studies—perhaps of scholarship disguised as artist’s books, literary essays, experimental writing or conventional examples—or theoretical approaches, the imbrications of the form of scholarly practice with its content, as well as its methodological and ethical implications will come into focus.