Slowing time down: Correspondences, ambiguity and attendance

Braund, Steve ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8099-3038 (2012) Slowing time down: Correspondences, ambiguity and attendance. Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, 4 (3). pp. 427-443. ISSN 17535190

Abstract / Summary

This paper interrogates the possibilities of forms that redirect content; how formal composition can indicate illustrations’ content and further meaning. Sue Coe remarks in Eye, ‘The future will not be static. The demand for visual imagery will be colossal. … the visual essay offers up a unique respite. Art is about slowing time down, not speeding it up.’(1999) This paper engages with the agency that pictures have over the text normatively delineating their meaning., I examine the emergence of meaning and its attendant orderings through a lens of ‘the making of the work.’ The paper will draw upon a wide awareness of the possibilities offered by the dynamics of picture-making and picture-presentation; connections are no less truthful if normative exposition cannot capture them adequately., I am interested in illustration that asks the audience to engage in meaning-making; how illustrators enable audiences to be able to make connective, interpretational leaps. Barthes describes the necessity of subjective engagement with the work – an immersivity of the image which creates validity in the viewer’s own response. I argue the true nature of a text is in the subjectivity brought to it by the reader/viewer. Meaning is unfixed and yet more specific for it; this paper attests to the validity and vitality of personal readings. As Luborsky suggests, ‘The picture does not relate to the text; it’s the reader who does the relating by attending to the fit between image and text.’ The formal particularity of my work’s making defines and is defined by its audience. I demonstrate the artistic potential of ‘audience’ in formal engagements which liberate spectatorship from the customary role of ‘market segment’ or outsider/other.

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