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Poetics and Place: The Architecture of Sign, Subjects and Site
Poetics and Place: The Architecture of Sign, Subjects and Site
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How do artworks 'speak', and how do we 'listen'
and respond? These questions underlie the investigation here of Roni Horn's Pair Object
III: For Two Rooms, Emily Dickinson's later manuscripts, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Passages
Paysages, Fiona Templeton's Cells of Release and
Jenny Holzer's Lustmord. The tenets of critical performance, art-writing and site-writing inform the critical method used in Poetics and Place. Each chapter is dedicated to one of these five artworks, and is arranged in order to fulfil three main objectives: to understand how the artworks generate meaning through a material poetics in relation to place; to develop a critical methodology for engaging with them;
and to investigate their ethical potential and political imperative. All of this, ultimately,
facilitates the development of a triadic relation between theoretical concepts of sign, subject and site at the crossover between poetry,
art and spatial practices. This extends each artwork beyond the dyad of a critical encounter in order to offer – and allow others to grasp
– an appreciation of how the artwork figures meaningfully, as well as configures meaning,
in the wider world of objects and things. The book concludes with a discussion of the ethics of reading from the second person, opening up a debate concerning the role of empathy within contemporary, politically engaged practices in art and poetry.