"Connessioni verbo-visive nelle collaborazioni interartistiche di Charles Bernstein"

Concerned with the evolution of word-image relationships within the long-lasting tradition of interart connections, this study investigates the new directions pursued by the joint work of Charles Bernstein and painters like Susan Bee and Richard Tuttle, who, among the others, have been working with the author more or less systematically. From the “total book” of the Bernstein-Bee creations to the release of words from paper as the exclusive medium of inscription (the Bernstein-Tuttle association and the “Poetry Plastique” project), it examines relations of the verbal and the visual that exceed the traditions of ekphrasis and illustration, embodying notions of intermedia (Higgins 1966) and imagetext (Mitchell 1994). Focusing on materiality and literalness, on the “actual conjunction of words and images,” how they are “juxtaposed, blended, or separated” (Mitchell 1994), as well as on the sites of their encounter and release (the book as artist’s book and the art gallery), it inspects the forms and effects of visions that demand new perceptions, cognitive modes, and poetic discourse.