Towards an iconology of the text: art history and the expanded field in Claude Simon's Triptyque

Abstract

Hybridity and heterogeneity are two of the more salient features of contemporary artistic production. Since the mid-1950s, in both the USA and in Europe, most of the artistic disciplines have opened themselves up to other forms of creative expression, each medium engaging its ontological ‘others’ in innovative and often provocative ways. Although earlier traces of this kind of inter-artistic cross-breeding can be located in the classic Horatian kinship between painting and poetry (‘ut pcitura poesis’), as well as in Wagner's later theorization of the ‘Gesamlkwzstwek’ (‘total work of art’), the rampant kind of artistic synthesis that occurs during the latter half of the twentieth century is far more complex and complete than during any preceding period. A typically postmodern ‘resistance’ towards those master narratives most usually associated with modern artistic sensibility may help to explain why this is so. I Notions of artistic purity, autonomy, beauty, originality, and genius - those pillars of Enlightenment aesthetics - were destined to be critiqued and ultimately repudiated during the second half of the twentieth century by a group of critics and thinkers who preferred a much less exclusive conception of culture, one that denounced the hierarchical foundations imposed by modernist critics and stressed instead the importance of concepts like pluralism, multiplicities, and tolerance. A wide variety of artists responded to this theoretical critique in kind. A number of painters, for example, began searching elsewhere for content, materially incorporating photographic techniques and everyday materials in their work, and looking often to mass-media images -- in television, advertising, and film, in particular - for inspiration. Sculpture became more ‘painterly’, more architectural, and, for some, more ‘theatrical’. Performance art looked to the theater, installation art often incorporated elements of design, and the birth of ‘new media’ comprised an amalgam of all of the above. Many successful artists, of course, were also well steeped in the latest and most fashionable of critical modes, and some chose to publish their own treatises alongside the work of their more academically oriented colleagues. Indeed, as the history of art has shown, throughout these years what were once considered traditionally distinct fields would seek to merge onto a vast plane of transitory images, techniques, and ideas, each discipline looking for inspiration in, and feeding off, each other.