b e t w e e n l i n e s a n d a i r
words image and space
“At the moment when I concentrate and reflect, I find myself again, always, in this garden, at this hour of the evening, in your august presence, though I continue, without a moment’s pause, moving up a river green with crocodiles or counting the barrels of salted fish being lowered into the hold”
Italo Calvino, The Invisible Cities
A person who loves poetry and has read Fernando Pessoa might know Portugal without ever phisically being there. Their eyes know it through words and sounds which were once the poet’s. Once familiar with it, they might see bits and pieces of Portugal in their own space, in their own paths. They own the experience of visiting a foreign country although they might never leave their own. Not long ago I read The Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. Not long ago I went on a long trip with Marco Polo without leaving one room, just as he might travel to distant unknown lands never moving from one garden, describing one city as if it were many, one after another. The selected words used by Marco Polo to fill the garden and amuse Kublai Khan are a gathering of symbols which transform the space. And even when the words are Italo Calvino’s as a narrator they are just words which allow some greater change to occur whithin the space of the reader.
Words, however, being just the elements of a much more complex system, which is verbal communication can be transformed through the way they are spoken, written or the context in which they appear. Words in Fiona Tan’s “The Changeling” were spoken through a warm motherly voice which invited the viewer to spend a long time looking at still pictures on a wall as if they were familiar from ancient times. She challenges the white space of a gallery and transforms it into a confortable space for meditation as she says:
“My text sets out a tentative line like a drawing. Carefully negotiating the space in-between the words, feeling out the contours of the character. This slight smile, this reluctant chin. I would like with words to create the image, to make it visible. And when that succeeds my voice will sink into the image; word and image entwined and impossible to disentangle.”
She talks of drawing with words of transforming the own phisicality of the words into objects of communication. She talks of using the words as a whole in all its possibilities. Words are graphic symbols, they occupy space and through their forms and usage they can create meaning different from that which has been established by convention, that which we find in the dictionary. As we think of these possibilities we are establishing two different aspects of the same verbal language. There is the abstract conventional meaning, or further even, the possibility of building a descriptive or reflective argument which we understand by our knowledge of what words signify and the physical aspect which is the characters, the space between them, the way they are arranged or delivered in space, those are the signifiers.
Through the reading of The Invisible Cities we interact with the words in their first aspect. In the discourse we encounter sets of meanings which lead us into building our own mental images. The same occurs with Bachelard in the The Poetics of Space, although in this second case, he departs from images which are already familiar to us and develops it through his own understanding of physical spaces. This second example is interesting for Bachelard analyses different spaces and the way they have been perceived by other authors, the way many different authors have used text and language to communicate sensations of being within a certain space, their choices of verbal images to create sensorial experiences for the reader.
The words in this case can be used to describe in a very simple way and allow the reader to create images in very simple ways, however, it can also reflect upon the same first description, or with the minimum elements of description, allow the reader to wonder and create very complex, diverse and ellaborate images, such as poetry does. Roland Barthes, in his book Camera Lucida, when analysing photography and its representations writes:
“... contrary to the text which, by the sudden action of a single word, can shift a sentence from description to reflection...”
The second aspect, words as visual material, has been used not only by poets, but by many artists, through videos, sound recordings, neon, paintings and so on. Ofcourse this second usage of the words does not deny the first in any way, it uses the conventional meaning of the text in order to emphasize a visual idea, or uses the visual idea in order to emphasize its conventional meaning. Fionna Tan recreated the white impersonal gallery room through her narrating of soothing words about herself and the others, Bruce Nauman filled up the Turbine Hall with sounds and words creating a sense of confusion in an actually vast empty space in his Raw Materials, Sonia Lins, a Brazilian Artist, created various spaces and transformed them through writings, as she did in Zumbigos, with handwriting occupying a cavernous space which ressembled the insides of a body, and so many others have explored these visual aspects of verbal language.
Verbal discourse can therefore transform space through the creation of new images for the viewer and by actually visually interfering in space through its material presence. However, how much is it able to affect the space around it? What other artifices can be used in establishing the text’s presence within the space? How can it interact with all the images that might exist on its surroundings? In performances there is commonly the use of text in order to establish a narrative or a context, especially in theatre. Is this text affecting the space around it?
In The Poetics of Space, Bachelard refers to one of Baudelaire’s text in which he describes a quiet and confortable house by opposing its image to the winter outside. Bachelard underlines all the words used by the author to suggest the feeling of confort within the house, and as the reader uncovers this passage he can sense the feeling of being in this place, which he makes his own as if momentarily being there, this experience than changes the way he feels about the space he physically occupies. We could question ourselves how would image be able to evoke the same atmosphere without the use of adjectives and the nouns which through words become as personal as the reader’s dearest memories.
Finally, in a performance the words interact with images and movement. These words can be used to enphasize or call attention to a certain action that is taking place, at the same time the words could deny all that the audience can visually perceive, they could add irony to a piece and reveal themselves in many different ways. This has been done in arts for a long time. Just as René Magritte painted a pipe and wrote beneath it “this is not a pipe” so have many other artists worked with the ways image and text can interact.
This project is an attempt to look at what various artists and philosophers have experimented and written about the interaction of words with images, the phisicality of language and the changes in perception through text and then link it with the study of performance and more especifically the usage of text in performatic arts and theatre. This project is an attempt to understand how the use of verbal language can transform the space in which it appears.
