Reading Material: Literary, Picturing, and Representational Strategies in the work of Carol Laing, Sue Lloyd, Andy Fabo, Sharon Switzer, Jane Buyers, and Allyson Clay

To employ a critical process that draws upon the network of relations and associations between works of art and literature, that generates different ways of reading and viewing that are inclusive and meaningful, and that introduces new strategies for visualizing what is possible, requires breaking away from reading for historical precedents, styles, genres, and discipline. This process entails working between and across the literary and the visual as if there are no power relations between the two. The following chapters explore these issues, beginning with the literary strategies that the artists use to resist the limitations of language and genre. Foucaults concept of rupture and the formalist-informed interventions Woolfs later essays and fiction suggest, and Steins formal experimentation with writing and genre guide my semiotic analysis of sites of rupture in the work of each artist. Stein resists mimetic portrayals of the subject and her incorporation of a shifting perspective follows Picassos cubist portraits. My attention shifts to the chapter Textual Strategies that the artists adopt to resist the limitations of language and genre as well as to consider the conventions of representation and traditions of ekphrasis imitation and description with which each artist struggles. Advising his readers/viewers to search for structures of signification in works of art, not sources and origins, Crimp asserts that processes of quotation, excerption, framing, and staging constitute the strategies of the work in the 1977 exhibition Pictures he organized at Artists Space, New York City (87). The next chapter, Semiotic Vocabularies, employs a reading practice informed by semiotics to investigate the meaning-making processes at work in the material practices of the artists. My readings of their work are informed by shifting my own viewing position in relation to the work. The concluding chapter closely examines the artists practices of picturing in relation to their strategies for representing silence and the unseen, citing Blanchots The Writing of the Disaster and Benjamins writings on aura. This chapter is concerned with the artists struggles to find effective strategies for representing absence, catastrophe and the void, and it grapples with the challenge of confronting the unknown.