Ideen-Maschinen – Klang-Figuren – Bewegungs-Bilder – Sprach-Barrieren. Ebenen poetischer Subjektivität in Texten schreibender Maler (Chirico, Dalí, Giacometti, Miró, Ernst, Duchamp, Picabia, Magritte)

Abstract

Summary: European painters’ writing activities may be seen as an intent of “heteropoetry” with the aim of revealing aesthetic experience in a linguistic mode that avoids the traditional problem of visual art as representation of external reality. Henceforth, poetry becomes a privileged medium of expression of an imaginary which in Renaissance and Baroque art and literature is centered on the Neo-Platonist concept of “idea” (cf. Panofsky, Hocke). Studying the texts of surrealist painters, four aesthetic levels to perform poetic subjectivity can be detected. At the early beginning of 20th century, the poems of Dalí and Chirico absorb the tradition of inner landscape as a medium to reflect the painter’s perception processes as a manner of scanning older aesthetic and rhetoric features. Along with this concept of lyric texts as mechanisms to reproduce the subject’s imaginary, we find the concept of acoustic sculptures, such as the poems of Giacometti. These are characterized by a highly inventive manner of deforming standard language by means of foreign language structures referring to the poet’s polyglot education. The concept of “moving pictures” which may well be inspired by the ascent of cinematography is to be found in the poetry of Joan Miró. This type of painter’s texts may be described by its pictorial volatility pouring in an imagery which is close to the aesthetic procedures of surrealism such as the cadavre exquis. As a last level of poetic features we analyze are the various types of “linguistic hurdles”, represented by different kinds of puns (Max Ernst, Duchamp), linguistic fragmentation (Picabia) and semiotic meta-reflection (Magritte) which finally deconstruct the old contract between inner vision and outward reality. [Keywords: poetry, vanguard, surrealism, synaesthesia, intermediality, painting, mannerism, idea concept, Chirico, Dalí, Miró, Duchamp, Picabia, Ernst (Max), Giacometti, Magritte]