This collection investigates the methodological problem of how to see, or read, art that references literature through a series of object-focused chapters on post-1960 artworks. Variously eccentric, playful, reverential and procedural, the diverse range of works engage with literary history by testing the limits of artistic form.
Cases of citation presents a history of artists who incorporated literary references into their work from the 1960s onwards.
Through a series of object-focused chapters that each take up a singular ‘case of citation’, the collection considers how literary citation emerged as a viable and urgent strategy for artists during this period. It surveys eleven artworks by a diverse group of artists – including David Wojnarowicz, Lis Rhodes, Romare Bearden and Silvia Kolbowski – whose citations draw on works as varied as Karl Marx’s Das Kapital and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
The book also features an interview with pioneering feminist artist Elaine Reichek that discusses her career-long commitment to working with text. Together, the artworks and cited texts are approached from various critical angles, with each author questioning and complicating the ways in which we can ‘read’ textual citations in art.
Introduction
Cases of citation: On literature in art Michael Green, Matthew Holman,
Chloë Julius
Citations after the death of the author Chloë Julius
Part I: Hauntings and returns
1 Gothic: The return of the repressed Laurie Rojas
2 Was there anything so real as words? Allen Ruppersbergs The Picture
of Dorian Gray Jennie Waldow
3 That monster Ivan Knapp
Part II: Collage and influence
4 Swarming city, city gorged with dreams: Sound, sight and text in
Paris Blues Kalvin Schmidt-Rimpler Dinh
5 Criminal, loner, drifter: metonymic citation in the collages of David
Wojnarowicz Louis Shankar
6 A language of recalcitrance: Lis Rhodes, Gertrude Stein, and
syntactical play Hannah Kahng
Part III: Transformation and substance
7 'What, I wonder, does love have to do with an irregular rectangle?' On
Words & Drawings by Mario Schifano and Frank OHara (1964) Matthew
Holman
8 My Funny Verlainetine: Queer citations in Ray Johnsons mail art
Brian Leahy
9 Written honour: Wagner, Beuys, and Stendhal in Marcel Broodthaerss
Magie: art et politique Andrew Chesher
Part IIII: Between the Needle and the Book
10 Elaine Reichek in conversation with Michael Green and Chloë Julius
Index -- .
Chloë Julius is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Nottingham Michael Green is an independent scholar and works in arts publishing Matthew Holman is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Hertfordshire -- .
