Good Things

Following up on my previous post on ASL poetry, I recommend that you read H-Dirksen L. Bauman's article "Redesigning Literature: Poetics of American Sign Language Poetry."  Bauman employs the lexicon of film studies to discuss ASL poetry as a visual art.

"Whether flesh, celluloid, analogue, or digitized, the ASL text is always a human body, projecting its own visual-spatial-kinetic experience, awakening similar lived experiences in the minds and bodies of the viewers...The two bodies together, the poet's and the viewer's, ultimately combine to create the text which is more than a script of linguistic signs, but a lived cinesthetic experience."
...

"While many presume that film has introduced a uniquely modern means of perceiving the world, we can reasonably assume cinematic-like composition of Sign predated the cinematograph by a good 2500 years. We can speculate that the Deaf signers mentioned by Plato in The Cratylus conversed through a series of visual images that were constantly being framed, cut, and edited throughout the course of a narrative. In this sense, cinematic experience may be akin to aspects of Deaf epistemology that have been around as long as signing communities. Cinema is but one medium through which we can produce moving images; Sign is another such medium-perhaps even the ur-medium-for producing moving images."

Plato's The Cratylus:

SOCRATES:  ...Suppose that we had no voice or tongue, and wanted to communicate with one another, should we not, like the deaf and dumb, make signs with the hands and head and the rest of the body?

HERMOGENES:  There would be no choice, Socrates.

SOCRATES:  We should imitate the nature of the thing; the elevation of our hands to heaven would mean lightness and upwardness; heaviness and downwardness would be expressed by letting them drop to the ground; if we were describing the running of a horse, or any other animal, we should make our bodies and their gestures as like as we could to them.

HERMOGENES:  I do not see that we could do anything else.

SOCRATES:  We could not; for by bodily imitation only can the body ever express anything.

HERMOGENES:  Very true.

******

The Frick Collection is currently showing  "Antea," a beguiling portrait by Parmigianino.  It's a one work show, which made me think of the last one work exhibition I saw: Jay DeFeo's "The Rose" at the Whitney.  "The Rose" weighs over 2000 lbs and took DeFeo about eight years to complete.  It was featured on the main level of the Whitney in a space that seemed too small, too claustrophobic for a work that massive.  But the longer I spent in front of the painting, the less constrained I felt by my physical surroundings.  There were a few other drawings and paintings by DeFeo on display in that wing, but I still think of it as a one work exhibition.

Fans of John Ashbery may recognize the name Parmigianino.  It was his self-portrait that inspired the title poem of Ashbery's 1975 collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.

Paul J. Karlstom's 1975 interview with DeFeo is a first-hand account of the post-Depression history of fine arts pedagogy in California.  I wish I had taken more art history courses in college but, honestly, I never honed the skills necessary for retaining dates (my Achilles heel when it comes to history, in general, and birthdays, in particular).  But I found this interview to be a very engaging history lesson.  "...when I say that, when I went to the University of California, we were hanging on to the apron strings of Cubism, I mean I was hanging on for dear life. And I've never let go because I still love that period."

Comments

[Estate of Jay DeFeo]

For more information on the art of Jay DeFeo, you may consult the website of her estate:
www.jaydefeo.org

[eilihu]

oh, i love this description of ASL. i replied to your comment at AFSS. xo e

[Juliane Schwab]

dearest adriana, it is such a pleasure to read from you I like the new lay-out of your blog and for now many kisses before I am leaving the office for the weekend. but hope to talk to you soon - big hug, juliane