What is it about?
This article discusses an essay by French poet and art critic Bernard Noël on the Franco-Chinese artist Zao Wou-Ki. Noël refuses to read images as signs, focusing instead on trace, gesture and the artistic materials themselves, and seeks in his criticism not to represent the visual, but rather to investigate the shared material basis of canvas and paper, and to involve the reader in the reception of his text as he believes the viewer to be engaged by works of visual art. He suggests that Zao Wou-Ki's ink drawings rise up from the page. In turn, he grants his text volume and produces a sense of unfolding instead of description or analysis.
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Why is it important?
Published as part of a special journal issue on new kinds of ekphrasis (writing that vividly represents the visual), this article contributes to a growing field that examines writing on art from a material perspective: it argues that by 'performing' rather than describing its object, such writing avoids dominating the visual images that are its inspiration.
Perspectives
The article combines my interest in the work of contemporary French poets with research into literary responses to art, which I pursued in the monograph 'Writing Art: French Literary Responses to the Work of Alberto Giacometti' (Peter Lang, 2011).
Dr Emma RH Wagstaff
University of Birmingham
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: 'Des matieres, non des images': Bernard Noel's Creative Art Criticism, French Studies, June 2010, Oxford University Press (OUP),
DOI: 10.1093/fs/knq034.
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