Text-Picture Competition

Authors:

Pages: 141-154
DOI: https://doi.org/10.54664/MGXV8329

Abstract:

There has been a growing interest in works of fine art in German-language literature since the mid-1980s. The article traces this trend in the work of Patricia Georg and Bodo Kirchhoff in the context of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological aesthetics and Hans Hollander’s theory of the close relationship between the spatial and temporal arts, as a result of which each of them is able not just to recreate the other, but also to interpret it by recreating it. Both authors thematize in their works specific paintings by various artists, describing their characteristics by means of language. While Kirchhoff staged the competition between the two types of media (painting and text), transforming the pictorial into a linguistic equivalent and thus demonstrating the advantage of the text, with Georg this process proceeds in the opposite direction – again it is about ‘written’ pictures, however the word there to a large extent absorbs the aesthetic parameters of the pictorial and turns the text into poetic iconography.

Keywords:

‘written’ pictures; competition between picture and text; poetic iconography

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