Emily Warner reviews the Image/Text - What/Next? conference held at the University of York
Image Credit: William Blake: Museum Whitworth Art Gallery Wikimedia Commons
On Friday 24 June, Nicholas Dunn-McAfee and Hannah McAuliffe, both doctoral research fellows at the University of York, organised a thought-provoking and insightful conference; Image/Text - What/Next? This was held in the Berrick Saul Building at the University of York. During the course of the day, a series of speakers and panels probed the ephemeral boundaries of their disciplines in English Literature or Art History, exploring often neglected questions about how image and text combine. A strikingly broad scope of history was addressed by the speakers, ranging from Medieval illuminated manuscripts to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to contemporary art. In all of these periods, the hand of art can be found within literature, and literature within art, demonstrating that if anything, tackling this interdisciplinary inquiry is long overdue. Despite the conference’s historical grounding, the second part of the title ‘What/Next?’ invites continued discussion and research into what is often a contested subject.
The conference began with the keynote speaker Dr Luisa Calè from the University of Edinburgh, whose research focused on William Blake and in particular his depiction of Pestilence. For most, Blake is usually associated with poetry but Calè’s examination of his artwork in conjunction with his writing sheds a different light on Blake. Calè guided the audience through different analyses of one of Blake's paintings, which depicts the plague of Egypt in the story of Moses as if it were a hybrid creature; half-man, half-reptile and definitely not something you’d want to find in your closet. What I found most fascinating however was her consideration of the art’s context. Over time it has been displayed in a sequence of paintings, as an illustration in a Bible and as a flat, static piece of art in a gallery, and for each form it takes, the piece accrues different meanings which can complicate, support, challenge or even alienate the text which it was painted to accompany. Calè also spoke about the dynamism of the book, and the fact that when art is printed on the page it gains a movement which cannot be achieved behind a frame - a book is made to be leafed through, folded, held. The transformation of Blake’s Pestilence from text into art therefore detracts from its kinetic function.
Discussion of Blake continued with Hannah McAuliffe in The Missing Image panel, but her attention shifted to Blake’s poem ‘The Four Zoas’ and its unfinished state. McAuliffe distinguished between the terms unfinished and incomplete, as incompletion suggests a lack, something to be completed, whereas unfinished seems more intentional. Instead of lacking something, Blake’s unfinished poem actually gains interpretative possibility from its erasures, revisions and marginalia because it is not yet ‘petrified into a final form’ as McAuliffe put it. Similarly to the movement of Blake’s art when in book form, unfinished or ‘non-finito’ works are elusive and undefined, showing how images are given dynamism by their media.
Egidija Čiricaitė and Dr Rachel Smith, both UK based artists and researchers, were next to present their research, which took a leap into the present day. Both spoke about their books ‘Looking for Poetry’/ ‘Tras La Poesia’ and ‘Promise the Infinite: Drawing out Babel’ respectively, which aimed to deconstruct the hierarchy between author and reader by challenging the way we read a text. This involved blurring the boundaries between text and image, making reading a visual process of ‘figuring out’ as opposed to a process of ‘understanding the writer’. English Literature students spend a long time trying to excavate the meaning of a text from mountains of critics and essays, but this panel completely overturned that idea, asking the controversial but essential question, what does it mean to make sense of a text? Is the meaning found not in the mind of the writer but in that of the reader, in their unique way of reading images and seeing texts? This fascinating discussion opens numerous diverse questions about women readers, neurodiverse readers and all those whose way of processing does not conform to the ‘conventional’ way of reading text.
Now, imagine a child with a pile of birthday presents, itching to get inside; they will likely rip off the gift-wrapping, discard the ribbon and rush for what is within. This is the metaphor that Dr Jonathan Ellis from the University of Sheffield used as part of the Reading-Viewing panel, to describe how critics approach letters. He invited the audience however to remember that letters exist in a visual form which is often as important as the text itself. Similarly, Prof Gillian Russell’s work on biography was not about the text but about the images, archival evidence and photos that transform it into a visual narrative as opposed to a textual one. In addition, the talk of journaling and ephemera returned to the question of form that Calè opened with. This led me to wonder if our modern technology and ability to preserve artwork changes its meaning. Are Emily Dickinson’s envelope poems read differently in a published book than on the scraps of envelopes where they were originally written? Is art supposed to be perishable and short-lived?
The final panel was Visual-Verbal exchange, in which three very different time periods were looked at. Dr Matthew J. Holman from UCL began with the series of poem pastels Joan Mitchell, a project which emerged from the poetry of James Schuyler and became a series of pastel artworks surrounding his text. During this discussion the question arose; Does the visual component obscure or create space for the text? I think that both possibilities are true, in that for some the art detracts from the words or changes their meaning whereas for others it creates a literal blank space for them, thus drawing attention to the poetry. Laurie Chetwood (PhD researcher from the University of York) followed on from this, highlighting some of the links between art and literature in Irish modernism, a period which is often seen as a triumph of text over the visual. Susie Beckham (PhD researcher from the University of York) then explored the PRB tag that the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood used to sign their paintings, concluding the conference on a stimulating note. This PRB tag, Beckham posited, is comparable to graffiti, which appears in very visual locations and is an inherently social act. Although it is a crime, graffiti is also a way of democratising art and declaring the artist's continuing presence in the dialogue they have with those who view it.
The conference demonstrated that image and text cannot be considered separately as text always has a visual component and art is always a form of storytelling. In combining the two disciplines, they transform one another and offer a greater multiplicity of interpretations. This can be an exciting and fruitful exchange which, at the very least, will make individuals think twice before labelling something as text or image.
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