Issue 5: LITERATURE
If literature is the art of the written word, it is also the art of reading. Whatever the intentions of their authors, books ranging from novels to memoirs, critical texts, political and philosophical treatises and even religious tomes are at their most dynamic – their most engagingly protean, contradictory and capricious – when they take on life in the minds of their readers, and then add new insight into the world that surrounds us. A good read, a profound read, inevitably evolves across time and space. Nowhere is this other vitality of the written word more apparent than in the field of contemporary art, where in recent years artists have rediscovered the potential of literature as a mechanism for reflection on the manifold dimensions of interpretation and the participatory experience.
Over the course of the next month, the October 2010 issue of ART iT explores the role that literature serves as a reservoir for artistic ideas and experimentation. In a double feature, the photographer Naoya Hatakeyama discusses the origins of the term “literary photograph,” used as a pejorative in photographic circles in Japan until the 1980s, as well as the ways in which discourse shapes perception, while the conceptual artist Cerith Wyn Evans addresses his fascination with translation and the differences between hypertext and quotation. Additionally, in her special contribution on Enrique Vila-Matas, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster weaves together the intersections between reality, fiction and the act of reading in the works of the Spanish writer.
Forthcoming contributions include Calcutta-based writer and editor Aveek Sen’s meditation on images inspired by literature including Jeff Wall’s reconstruction of a passage from Yukio Mishima’s Spring Snow and Francis Bacon’s triptych inspired by TS Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes, and the artist Sora Kim’s production notes on a new video piece, Abstract Reading (2010), currently on view in a solo exhibition at Atelier Hermès, Seoul, featuring actors reciting passages by authors Maurice Blanchot, Italo Calvino, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and Luis Sepulveda.
We also present the latest essays from regular contributors Dan Cameron, Hou Hanru, Hu Fang, Noi Sawaragi, Minoru Shimizu and Kyoichi Tsuzuki.
– The Editors
Related:
8 Rules for Writing Fiction: Heman Chong on Influence and Appropriation