The Image and Language research hub proposes a study and practice of the image as representation. Whether still or moving, the image here embraces practices within photography, film, and visual arts in general, but also literature, philosophy and the study of language and signs.
Our research asks questions about visual representations and their effects. We are interested in how language apprehends the visual and how visual representations challenge articulated language. We aim to question received notions of the visual and the verbal as separate entities, promoting instead a mutual dependency between language, vision and representation. Specific research themes include:
1. Translating Images into Language
The hub interrogates the relations between image and language. To account for art practices necessarily confronts the question of language. Thinking about an image, text or object demands an act of translation, where signs are translated into other signs, thus constructing, displacing and altering meaning.
2. Images in Language
What is the link between literature and the image? The question addresses the place of the visual within the activity of writing, and attempts to explore the link between description and depiction, from the classical novel to the modern text and after.
3. Image as Language
What do we mean when we talk about a language of images? Whether such expression means anything or not depends upon our definition of language. And if language is a structure, is there a homology between the way in which an image signifies and the way in which language signifies. What is the place of rhetoric within the theory and practice of image making, and can we account for images in terms of visual rhetoric?
4. Language as Image
How a linguistic sign is also a visual sign, an inscription. Researching the role of typography as visual inscriptions with specific rhetorical and aesthetics effect, from typography and visual space in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy to current art practices using a linguistic model.
All programmes of the School of Fine Art as well as the Curating Contemporary Art programme have so far contributed to the hub and convened colloquia on the following themes: Literary Images; Architectures, Inventions and Fictions; Technologies of Vision; Curating as an Image/Text Relation. Presentations to these colloquia have included specific research papers as well as research components of specific artworks. The presentations have sought to demonstrate different approaches to research in fine art practices and theories: how research is a material practice in its own right, and how art practice may be informed by research questions. Papers presented at the Literary Images colloquium addressed the relation between photography and literature. They will appear in 2011 in a special issue of the journal Photographies (Routledge).
Although the hub foregrounds research in fine art, it does not necessarily represent a school or a programme: it is wholly cross-disciplinary. The hub aims to provide an intellectual framework for collaboration between programmes at the RCA and between researchers from other institutions, both nationally and internationally.
Constituency
The hub sets out to attract artists, philosophers, art and cultural historians, as well as writers who wish to address the relation between image and language. We aim to disperse our outcomes primarily in the form of publications, seminars, colloquia and exhibitions.
Researchers from Goldsmith’s College, Manchester University, Birkbeck College, University College London and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago have contributed papers and presentations to the group. A research student exhibition, entitled The Seven Day Week End was held at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts de Paris in February 2010 and another show, Shadow of a Doubt, took place in autumn 2009 at the Galerie Michel Journiac of the University of Paris 1 Sorbonne, at the invitation of their Fiction and Intermedialité research group.
Future colloquia and themes for Image and Language include: Negation with the Fine Art Department of the University of Leeds; Deforming Narrative Forms with presentations from researchers of Paris 1 Sorbonne; Aby Warburg’s Library; and Analytical Animals with the writer Deborah Levy.