Earthquakes and Explorations: Language and Painting from Cubism to Concrete Poetry

250 Pages·1997·13.613 MB·

by  Stephen Scobie

EARTHQUAKES AND EXPLORATIONS:
LANGUAGE AND PAINTING FROM CUBISM
TO CONCRETE POETRY
THEORY /CULTURE
Editors:
Linda Hutcheon, Gary Leonard, Jill Matus,
Janet Paterson, and Paul Perron
STEPHEN SCOBIE
Earthquakes and
Explorations:
Language and Painting from
Cubism to Concrete Poetry
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS
Toronto Buffalo London
© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 1997
Toronto Buffalo London
Printed in Canada
ISBN 0-8020-4141-8
Printed on acid-free paper
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Scobie, Stephen, 1943-
Earthquakes and explorations : language and painting from cubism to
concrete poetry
(Theory / culture)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8020-4141-8
1. Cubism and literature. 2. Art and literature.
3. Painting, Modern - 20th century. 4. Concrete poetry -
History and criticism. I. Title. II. Series.
PN53.S36 1997 759.0632 C97-930955-7
The illustrations in chapter 9 are reproduced with the permission of Ian Hamilton Finlay.
Figures 3-7 are taken from Yves Abrioux, Ian Hamilton Finlay: A Visual Primer
(Edinburgh: Reaktion Books 1985).
Lyrics from Bob Dylan's 'Visions of Johanna/ page 22: Copyright © 1966 by Dwarf
Music. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Reprinted by permission.
This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social
Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing
program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.
As the other guests had not yet come Miss Stein took me into the
atelier. It often rained in Paris and it was always difficult to go from
the little pavilion to the atelier door in evening clothes, but you were
not to mind such things as the hosts and most of the guests did not.
We went into the atelier which opened with a yale key the only yale
key in the quarter at that time, and this was not so much for safety,
because in those days the pictures had no value, but because the key
was small and could go into a purse instead of being enormous as
french keys were. Against the walls were several pieces of large italian
renaissance furniture and in the middle of the room was a big renais-
sance table, on it a lovely inkstand, and at one end of it note-books
neatly arranged, the kind of note-books french children use, with
pictures of earthquakes and explorations on the outside of them. And
on the walls right up to the ceiling were pictures ...
Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
This page intentionally left blank
Contents
PREFACE IX
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xiii
CHAPTER ONE
The Supplement of Language 3
CHAPTER TWO
'We Are a Man': The Narrativization of Painting 22
CHAPTER THREE
Apollinaire and the Naming of Cubism 35
CHAPTER FOUR
The Gospel According to Kahnweiler 57
CHAPTER FIVE
The Semiotics of Cubism 79
CHAPTER SIX
Metaphor and Metonymy in Cubism and Gertrude Stein 104
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Window Frame: Delaunay and Apollinaire 124
ENTR'ACTE
Signs of the Times 145
viii Contents
CHAPTER EIGHT
Gadji Beri Bimba: Abstraction in Poetry 153
CHAPTER NINE
Models of Order: Ian Hamilton Finlay 169
NOTES 195
WORKS CITED 219
INDEX 229
Preface
I remember when this book first began for me: it was on Pentecost (the
feast of the gift of tongues) in 1974, and it was in Paris. Maureen and I
were sitting at a cafe on the Boulevard St Germain. I had just come from
an exhibition at the Orangerie of paintings by Juan Gris, which I had
gone to because of the connection between Gris and the Scottish poet
Ian Hamilton Finlay. Finlay has created several poems in tribute to
Gris, and he had often spoken to me of the importance in his early work
of the massive study of Gris by Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, the Cubist
painters' most important dealer and theoretician. The earliest premise
on which this book was based, then, was that of the connection between
Cubism and Concrete Poetry.1
Sitting at that cafe, I began jotting down names on a piece of orange
paper - Gris, Finlay, Gertrude Stein, bpNichol - and drawing connec-
tions between them - a maze of arrows, broken lines, question marks,
overlapping grids. Over the years, as I have tried on several occasions
to write this book, much has changed in my own ideas and assump-
tions about both poetry and painting, but the basic configuration of that
first diagram has remained as its ground plan.
As it has now emerged, this book has a double focus. On the one
hand, there is a broad theoretical concern with the interaction between
painting and poetry, between the visual and the verbal. I want to argue
that this relation should not be seen as one of division or opposition,
but rather as one of mutual implication and interpenetration. In trying
to describe this interaction, I will evoke the notions of the supplement
and the frame (parergon), as these ideas have been developed by Jacques
Derrida. This relation is grounded, I will argue, in the pervasiveness of
language (in its broadest sense), and in the ways in which language