Beatty Lecture: Bookwork
Bookwork:
Medium to Concept to Object to Art
a Beatty Memorial Lecture by
Garrett Stewart, James O. Freedman Professor of
Letters, Iowa University
Prof. Stewart is an international leader in the field of
intermedial studies today, whose work sits at the crossroads of the
disciplines of painting, literature, cinema and photography. His
landmark study, The Look of Reading (Chicago 2006),
provided the first full-scale interpretation of the place of text
in the western painterly tradition. His current project, from which
his talk will be drawn, concerns the increasingly compelling
position of the book within the field of contemporary art.
As Stewart will discuss, artists are drawn today with growing frequency to the book鈥檚 fragile medial presence as a source of great visual inspiration, in the process profoundly altering our understanding of the meaning of both the book and the work of art. In Stewart鈥檚 terms, the 鈥渂ookwork鈥� of such bibliobjets encourages us to reflect on the technological legacies of literacy and the critical contribution of visual representation to our understanding of the meaning of reading.
To be followed by a reception.
