Poetics and Place

How do artworks ‘speak’ and how do we ‘listen’ and respond? These questions underlie the investigation here of Roni Horn’s Pair Object III: For Two Rooms Emily Dickinson’s later manuscripts Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Passages Paysages Fiona Templeton’s Cells of Release and Jenny Holzer’s Lustmord. The tenets of critical performance art-writing and site-writing inform the critical method used in Poetics and Place. Each chapter is dedicated to one of these five artworks and is arranged in order to fulfil three main objectives: to understand how the artworks generate meaning through a material poetics in relation to place; to develop a critical methodology for engaging with them; and to investigate their ethical potential and political imperative. All of this ultimately facilitates the development of a triadic relation between theoretical concepts of sign subject and site at the crossover between poetry art and spatial practices. This extends each artwork beyond the dyad of a critical encounter in order to offer – and allow others to grasp – an appreciation of how the artwork figures meaningfully as well as configures meaning in the wider world of objects and things. The book concludes with a discussion of the ethics of reading from the second person opening up a debate concerning the role of empathy within contemporary politically engaged practices in art and poetry.