1) Intertext (Eidetic Presence)
Exemplars
Outside Covers; (Make Ready cover);
20–23 ‘Introduction’ / ‘1997’ (The Bread and Butter Stone);
28/29 ‘Being There’ (On Being There);
46–49: ‘Everything is Something Else’ (Huts);
101 ‘MadonnaWarhol’ (Through the Eyes);
108–111 ‘November 2011’ (Hear the Drummer / Landfall);
113 ‘9 March 2012’ / ‘Silence’
If we accept that we are writing into a text that is already written (as suggested by Barthes), then all of my outputs are predicated on one or more Transtextual modalities, one of which is the literal quote or eidetic presence, but more often the material derives from many sources or is situated within an already existent discourse. Outside of the written word, on which Genette is basing his framing it is difficult to define what constitutes an ‘actual presence’ since in the visual, spatiotemporal, or (lived) experiential this is constituted of so many parts, and any recording device brings with it an ineliminable grain, a timbre, character or language, which informs our reception of the material. A stronger link to what I produce then is to say that it is firstly Hypertextual, i.e. a text having a unity with one or more previous texts, upon which as Genette puts it, it is ‘grafted’ + . I like the use of this word as it conveys the idea of a transplant of living tissue, that it does not attempt to assimilate itself into the original but is both conspicuous, and responsive, open to an interplay with the viewer-reader.
The Eidetic (for Genette, 1997:2 the ‘Intertextual’) presence of material from one of my outputs within another recurs in my practice. The quotation in itself seldom has great weight, instead its significance comes from its new context and reuse, a juxtaposition or détournement.>>> Genette says of an intertext that it is the ‘actual presence’ of one text in another and while this may formally be the case, the quoted material behaves differently in its new setting, disrupting or rerouting meaning through this collision, and bringing about its productivity beyond simple recall. They are each of course ‘authorised’ since I am drawing on my outputs but are none the less appropriations in that the shift in context is to exploit for new purposes meaning held within the material. The idea of a (self-reflexive) transtextual facet in my practice is introduced to this thesis on the cover of the Make Ready book, which not only makes visual reference to but eidetically depicts the cover of another book (Gerard’s Images or Shadows). There is though another dimension to this, since it is not only an image of the actual cover but of the cover in production, and alongside this quotation must be read all of the signals of this setting. Additionally the cover now has the presence of Byrne, or rather a fictional Byrne, since it confers on my book an association with Gerard’s artworld status. Bringing together discrete outputs through quotation grafts onto them my own authorial presence in a self-reflexive gesture that points to the longitudinal enquiry of my practice.+ This intertextuality continues on page 2 with the reproduction of a fragment of a make ready sheet from the publication Utopias (1999), which I designed for an exhibition at the Douglas Hyde Gallery and for which I was both a contributing artist and the publication designer. In the background of page 3 is an eidetic reproduction (it is reproduced from the original artwork file) of a page from An Anthology of Noise and Electronic Music, Volume 1 (2001). Here I am borrowing the page design (it is after all a monograph of sorts) but its quotation (if a slight-of-hand) is moreso of the image (of a phonautograph) that it carries.
As an example of more recent usage Hear the Drummer, my 2018 film is repurposed and intercuts Landfall.>>>18 18. Maybury, P. (2018) Here the Drummer can be viewed here: https://vimeo.com/287508607 [Accessed 19 July 2024]. There are five instances of its inclusion in Landfall found at these time: 22:17; 30:38; 41:19; 49:52; 57:48. These excerpts are eidetic (unchanged from the original film), but the shift of context brings about a shift in their reading. Firstly they function in a musical sense as a refrain – an identifiable point to return to during the course of the film. Secondly their new context moves the focus away from a single event and towards a more symbolic reading – meanings forged by their placement (détournement) adjacent to thematic concerns of the other footage. This eidetic inclusion is an example of how across my outputs I repurpose available material to accommodate my evolving needs. A further example of eidetic usage in Landfall (37:28) is found in the photographs I made at the Occupy settlement (one of which is reproduced on page 113: ‘9 March 2012’), which are staged as images on a screen in a my office. The footage blends these still images with filmed footage of the facade of the Central Bank shot on another occasion, thereby compositing images within an image as the camera pans across the screens in a low-lit room. The sound is a blend of a mouse-click – as if an unseen viewer clicks through the images – overlaid with fragments from an Occupy march, and these clash with the sound emanating from the adjacent screen (Landfall is a dual-screen work) on which we see in almost total darkness an image of a bus passenger scrolling their phone screen while the light from passing traffic intermittently flairs.
Exemplars
Describing its usage in the written thesis structure
Inside Cack Cover (Colophon)
Outside Back Cover, Spine, Outside Front Cover
2a) Paratext contains many of the surrounding conventions of a book (title, foreword, as well as footnotes, commentary, illustrations, marginalia, book cover, dust jacket etc.) and often a simple adoption of this term applies in relation to the books I make, while for a film or an exhibition I make a translation to corresponding considerations. In film it can apply to titles, intertitles etc., as well as to secondary ideas and imagery, while in exhibition this might be a wall text, exhibition checklist, posters, publicity, signage etc. Relating to the written component of this thesis the written typologies which surround the body text of this thesis (as noted in Rationale for Word Count) are Paratextual.>>>
2b) Foretext
Exemplars
42 ‘Summer Songs’
108–111 ‘November 2011’
In Genette’s construct Foretext functions as a subset of Paratext, and may include drafts and iterations. This has considerable significance for me as it helps to decentre any distinction between practice and publication, supporting an assertion of my practice as an ongoing condition of rehearsal, essentially an iterative process in which the publications are markers along a progression.
3) Metatext
Exemplar
106/107 ‘Of’>>>
Genette’s third type, Metatext, or ‘commentary’ may not refer directly to the original. The suite of photographs that I produced for Irlanda, (the publication which accompanies the exhibition of de Blacam and Meagher), explores aspects of their buildings as I encountered them, and as such are metatext. The photographs produce a subjective reading, amplified by the materiality of the exhibition armature which uses oak and paper as its primary materials, (materials central to the practice and outputs of de Blacam and Meagher Architects). Of (2012) is fundamentally a metatext to this exhibition, in which we reflect on our design and curation. As with Genette’s metatext which ‘unites a given text to another, of which it speaks without necessarily naming it’ (Genette, 1997: 4), Of does not make direct reference to the work of de Blacam and Meagher but instead is substantially an exploration of the underlying concerns and methodology through which to interrogate the dilemma of exhibiting architecture.
4) Hypertext
Exemplars
a) Transposition, 96/97 ‘/’ (Images or Shadows);
Transmodalisation: A late Evening in the Future (2018)
b) Amplification: Tuxedo Junction, 1960
c) Transstylisation: Tuxedo Junction, 1960
d) Condensation* (shortened versions of These Islands 1&2)
e) Augmentation* (footage added to These Islands diptych)
The writer is first a reader of cultural texts; writing is always rewriting in the ceaseless construction of ‘history and society’s’ intersecting textual surfaces.
(Kristeva cited in Friedman, S., 1991: 147)
a) Transposition
For Genette the Hypertext is ‘any text [the hypertext] derived from a previous text [the hypotext] either through transformation or imitation.’ (Genette, 1997: 7). It is Genette’s Hypertextual mode of Transposition (which he terms ‘serious transformation’, 1997: 212) that has most significance in the production of publications which have their origins in other instantiations (exhibition etc.). Transposition is developed with sub-categories, and each transposition (‘transpositional works’) generally belongs to several of these in its transformation of the Hypotext.>>>
Genette’s framing of Hypertextual ‘Transposition’ is removed and borrowed extensively in my thesis discussion of the underlying constructs in the publications I have made with artist Gerard Byrne, and two titles – Images or Shadows, and A Late Evening in the Future are looked at closely to reveal these theories as I apply them in my practice. Both are Transpositions, but approached in radically different ways. Images or Shadows formulates the book as exhibitionary space through transposition of the material, while A Late Evening in the Future, in a process I characterise (by way of Genette) as Transmodalisation (1997: 277) – a change in the mode of presentation. It has other transpositional characteristics but in particular I make a material and experiential translation of encounter from spatiotemporal exhibitionary encounter to a material encounter with the book, where light and movement are replaced by ink and paper. A Late Evening in the Future is hypertext to its hypotext; it is transpositional hypertext; and sizeably then it is a modal shift or transmodalisation. Transmodalisation is also applied to These Islands, as is Amplification. Here a found object (an unauthorised development on Achill Island) is appropriated and repurposed within another discourse, while the authorship and intent of the built structure are put aside (reserved as intertext). There is a shift of mode as the built structure is translated into filmic encounter, dematerialised, to be rematerialised through camera, editing and sound superimposition. The original ‘text’ of the structure is amplified through various self-reflexive filmic devices, juxtaposition, and its subsequent publication context (the Irish Museum of Modern Art), and the accompanying text which operates in parallel (although only published as a discrete entity in architectural journal San Rocco).19 19. The Everyday Experience, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 2013–14. Curator: Nathalie Weadick, Irish Architecture Foundation. These Islands, when exhibited at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, was displayed in a small room with a chair, a one person cinema. The chair was borrowed from the Venice Biennale, again raising issues of authorship. The sound from the film played in the room and was also relayed to the museum’s colonnades. Separated from the screen it is experienced as a series of dislocated field recordings, affected by the acoustics of the architecture in which it plays back, and merging with ambient noise. Cross reference The Everyday Experience, 112 ‘Undesigned’ This film is later substantially appropriated by me for use in the exhibition I See Earth, and the transtextual implications of this are also discussed.
b) ‘Transtylisation’ and c) ‘Amplification’ in Tuxedo Junction, 1960
‘The Minimalist Object and the Photographic Image’, an essay by Alex Potts is reproduced in its entirety in Tuxedo Junction, 1960, the first book I made with Gerard. The book from which it was reproduced was photographed (by Gerard’s assistant) staged on a table, eidetic (a literal form of Transtextuality which conforms with what Genette calls Intertextual [Genette, 2]), but also transformed – the text now appearing as image, cohabiting the same visual and technical plain as any other photographic material reproduced in Tuxedo Junction, 1960, including the ‘artwork’ reproductions. This hypertext ‘Transposition’ can be thought about as ‘transtylisation’ or ‘amplification’ (Genette, 1997: 226, 262), where its representation amplifies or foregrounds certain aspects of the original text.
d) Condensation and e) Augmentation apply to the various published versions of These Islands subsequently discussed here.
5) Architextuality
Exemplar
106/107 ‘Of’
While Genette’s Architextuality has limited function for me in discussing my outputs I include it here for completeness. Genette describes it as a taxonomy, such as ‘poems’ or ‘essays’ which may go unstated, and I make reference to it only in the book Of.
Further ‘Intertextual’ Modalities:
6) Political Intertextuality
7) Vertical Intertextuality
Implicit in all of this productivity of the text are the Political Intertextuality (Miller, Friedman) of both the reader and the writer. Miller’s feminist critical positioning refuses the anonymity of the author proposed by Barthes and Kristeva, and reveals a subjectivity in the act of writing, a political intertextuality or positionality in relation to dominant ideologies. Friedman argues for an extension of its application to all writers regardless of gender, race or social background, and this informs how I understand both my own operative position and that of the viewer-reader.20 20. (Friedman, 159) ‘… I want to argue, for reading the political in the textual and the intertextual not only in women’s writing, but also in men’s writing; not only in white writing, but also in the writing of people of colour…’ Fiske (2011) too has a multi-part formulation of Intertextuality – Horizontal, Inescapable, and Vertical. For Fiske, in the context of television and cinema Vertical Intertextuality includes commentary and publicity, while Genette differentiates commentary as Metatextual, and perhaps publicity might fit within Paratext. This differs and overlaps with Genette, however it is in regard to Fiske’s framing of the reader that I find most use. Fiske describes the productivity of the text as an extreme conception of polysemy, where ‘textual devices admit a variety of readings’ (Fiske, 2011: 118). The viewer-reader is ‘activating a set of meanings’, a sometimes unconscious action which brings to bear a combination of social and cultural experience. Fiske speaks of the television text as having ‘leaky boundaries’, where not just the originating text may be polysemic, but that it is understood also through its surrounding texts. Here he is speaking more specifically about commentary and publicity but I extend this to Riffaterre’s Intertextuality which is ‘the perception, by the reader, of the relationship between a work and others that have either preceded or followed it’ (referred to in my Notes on Structure. In approaching any of the bodies of work from which my outputs derive I am naturally meeting them with many conscious and subconscious perceptions and biases. Approaching them then as polysemic or discursive is one way of deflecting from unintended dogma or closure, and my approach here is in opposition to prevailing approaches in graphic design practice. Fiske also notes how the viewer-reader might shift between ‘involvement and detachment’ and this is surely interesting too, as we cannot assume the full attention of the audience at any time. Various tricks or devices are employed to disrupt the readers passive engagement (Brecht’s V-Effect is referred to here), but equally each output must trade on its material, haptic, or visceral qualities to immerse the reader or even to bring pleasure to the experience. Each of these things contribute to a particular arrangement of the material, a ‘preferred text’ (Fiske, 2011: 118), and any meaning derived from it by the reader is shaped by the reader’s bringing to bear their own personal text. Finally the reader themselves becomes a text, or media ‘at the level of his/her social relations’. (Fiske, 2011: 119).
Exemplars
These Islands, (Achill) 108–111 ‘November 2011’ as appropriation of discourse
Landfall 13 ‘9 March 2012’ / ‘Silence’ (as appropriation of discourse)
In discussing the intertextual modality of Appropriation I use These Islands Slievemore, Dooagh, Keel East, Co. Mayo (2013) as an exemplar, in which a ‘readymade’, the concrete henge, conceived and built by others serves as text and subject of my film. This modality is not part of Genette’s Transtextual model), but folds back on ideas of Authorisation and Authorship (since we appropriated the henge, say, as text), where the space of authorship is either seized or created through appropriation, and I subsequently ‘appropriate’ this material from my film in I See Earth. Landfall too is discussed for its appropriation of discourse, and of my own material, borrowed from my film Hear the Drummer (2018). As I have mentioned this footage is eidetically intertextual (although reedited as part of the whole, the footage and sequences are largely unaltered) so is both appropriated from another of my works but critically too is ‘appropriated’, taken as readymade, raw material, claiming authorship of the footage even as the footage is dependent on the authorship of the spontaneously unfolding events and musical performances it comprises.