A to Z of Artists Writing and Writers in Art

An A to Z of Artists Writing, and Writers in Art. 

Earlier this year, the Nottingham based Staple Magazine published an issue on the theme of writing in relation to visual art, with writings by artists (including Mik Godley, Simon Withers and Errol Lloyd) set alongside artworks by Ellen Bell, an interview with Cornelia Parker, and poetry and short fiction on themes connected to visual art by Mark Czanik, Mel Fawcett, Peter Porter, Robert Vas Dias and Fawzia Kane, among many others. The following A to Z attempts to fill in some further background to that issue’s interests, expanding the territory beyond the pages of the magazine, and deliberately avoiding any attempt at comprehensiveness. Many key names are omitted (how can it be otherwise when ‘B’ alone could have been Breton, Bourgeois or Barthes?) and many minor and lesser known figures included in the hope that the range and richness of the field is somehow represented in a relatively small space. More information on Staple 71: The Art Issue, and future publications, can be found at: www.staplemagazine.bigcartel.com     

A is for…Apollinaire 

Guillaume Apollinaire was born in 1880 and died in 1918, but in his 38 years of life he packed in a great deal, consolidating the foundations of modernism as we know it in poetry, fiction and art with a stream of works including Zone, Calligrammes, Alcools and the stories and short plays gathered in the collections The Poet Assassinated and The Wandering Jew. Besides his own work as a writer, Apollinaire was also a friend and collaborator with Picasso, Braque and the Dadaists, all the while, as a critic, turning his hand to explaining the works of these artists to a wider audience in the French press of the time: he coined the word ‘sur-realism’ and the premiere of his play The Breasts of Tiresias in 1917 was the occasion for one of many proto-surrealist riots. Andre Breton’s Anthology of Black Humour includes an untitled  five-line poem (“He enters/He sits/He pays no attention to the pyrogenic redhead/The match flares/He leaves”) that reads in hindsight like one of the instructions beloved by Fluxus artists in the 1960s, while in Calligrammes - a collection largely written in the trenches during World War One - he frequently arranges his words into shapes that echo their content, from cannon and horses to rain and abstract landscapes.

B is for…Blake  

William Blake was born in 1757, lived and worked as a printer in London, and although largely unsung during his own lifetime, is now known equally as a visionary painter/printmaker, and one of the most accomplished poets of his age. His writings were marked by an elaborate and very personal symbolism, and his illuminated books - from the Songs of Innocence in 1789 to Jerusalem in 1820 - presented his words on ornately designed and coloured pages, like medieval illuminated manuscripts fed through both political radicalism and an idiosyncratic Christian mysticism. His sole public exhibition in 1809 was dismissed as the work of an ‘unfortunate lunatic’ and a reconstruction of that display, including several poignant spaces where now-lost paintings were once hung, is currently on show at Tate Britain. His paintings draw on the same elaborate iconography as the poetry, which can seem deceptively transparent, as in Songs of Innocence and Experience, or - as in Vala, Or The Four Zoas - become so hermetically personal that entire sections border on the incomprehensible. Despite this, even Blake’s most obscure writings are animated by a startling energy, and his body of work is unique in English for its total fusion of written and visual mediums in pursuit of a singular and very influential vision. 

C is for…Carrington  

Leonora Carrington was born and raised in England, the daughter of a wealthy Lancashire textile family, educated at convent schools and presented at court in 1936, an experience later transformed into her savage story The Debutante, in which Carrington’s protagonist tears off her own face and takes on animal form at an elegant society ball. Her subsequent life marked a complete break with these early privileges, after a viewing of the International Surrealist Exhibition in London led her to travel to Paris, and at the age of 19, elope with the German painter Max Ernst, a relationship that was ended by Ernst’s arrest as an enemy alien at the start of the Second World War. Her account of her subsequent breakdown and mistreatment in a Madrid asylum are the subject of Notes From Down Below, and following her escape, recovery and move to the United States and Mexico, Carrington went on to develop a distinctive take on surrealism in stories, novels and paintings that fuse personal, alchemical and animal symbolism with meticulous presentation. Her startling, fable-like stories are gathered in The House Of Fear, while her novel, The Hearing Trumpet, set in an absurdist version of an old people’s home, is an established classic of surrealist writing. She continues to write and paint, and after a period of relative neglect, has exhibited widely since her first retrospective at London’s Serpentine Gallery in 1991. 

D is for…Darger  

Henry Darger was born in 1892, and between 1931 and 1973 worked mainly as a janitor while living in a small Chicago apartment. Following his death, Darger’s landlord discovered that his room contained bound books full of highly accomplished, if very strange, paintings and text, amounting to a completely unknown life’s work. First exhibited in 1977, the fragments of this project - centred around a 15,000 page illustrated allegorical novel known as In The Realms Of The Unreal, in which the prepubescent Vivian Sisters lead an often violent struggle against the child torture and slavery of the Glandelinian Empire - have only slowly come together, as the sometimes disturbing content of his epic account of a confrontation between good and evil has been endlessly debated. Do the naked hermaphrodite Vivian Sisters in Darger’s watercolours reflect a naive anatomical innocence, or more disturbing psycho-sexual interests on the artist’s part? His lifelong, rather intense Catholicism, and roots in the later nineteenth century, suggest the former, though it’s indisputable that to contemporary eyes, coloured by intimations of abuse, his imagery can be deeply unsettling, with one commentator suggesting that his depictions of cruelty are sufficiently graphic to suggest a kind of serial-killer mentality, others countering that such images are standard fare in depictions of Catholic martyrdom. However viewers choose to read him, it seems unlikely that much more than is already known will be uncovered concerning Darger’s real motives for creating his extraordinary work.   

E is for…Emblem Books 

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a format combining images, texts and layers of quotation from Biblical and classical sources gained widespread popularity across Europe, usually drawing together poems by a single author on a particular subject in a series of themes and variations, exploring a single idea from multiple angles. The Mirrour of Majestie by Sir Henry Goodyere deals in heraldic symbols, Philip Ayres’ Emblemata Amorata explores love, and Francis Quarles’ Emblemes Divine and Moral explores the various temptations and pitfalls faced by men during their attempts to live virtuously. In its strictest form, the Emblem Book is mainly a product of the early seventeenth century, at its height between around 1610 and 1640, though it is arguable that the form changed rather than disappeared over subsequent centuries, with the Illuminated Books of William Blake and present-day collaborations between poets, artists and photographers all seemingly designed to work in the same layered way as their early modern predecessors. Some have even made a case that these Emblem books were essentially the internet of their day, using the relatively new technology of printing to collate a variety of sources, viewpoints and languages within their pages.

F is for…Foundation and Empire 

Published by the Birmingham based Article Press in 2004, and styled to resemble a sixties paperback by Isaac Asimov (an author chosen because the artists had used a copy of one of his books to press flowers during an expedition in Mongolia) Foundation and Empire is a gathering of documents by Heather and Ivan Morison. Prefaced with an essay by Nigel Prince, and including a catalogue of projects like Chinese Arboretum, in which the duo documented trees selected by people met by chance in China, and Still Lives, a series of photographs referencing Dutch vanitas paintings of the sixteenth century, it seems at first like a conventional enough catalogue. But the Morisons also create a full length pulp-parody novel entitled Divine Vessel as the book’s centrepiece, a version of their own journey from Shanghai to Auckland aboard a cargo ship. Deliberately ludicrous, alternating between purple prose, factual data and knowingly silly humour, it’s a disjointed science-fiction yarn in which the Morisons are disguised as the characters Seth and Ruby, and encounter naked Filipino seamen, Captain Nemo and an extraterrestrial rabbit en route from China to New Zealand. 

Next week, G to K....