James Williams, Professor of English Literature at the University of York, will be giving a research paper entitled 'The Rorschach Text: Adrian Stokes and the Associative Imagination'. Here is his abstract for the talk:
Writing about visual art involves a funny kind of contradiction. As T. J. Clark notes in Heaven on Earth, “Painting does not have anything to say.” But, he adds, it “has at its disposal kinds of intensity and disclosure, kinds of persuasiveness and simplicity, that make most feats of language seem abstract”. In insisting on the fundamental muteness of visual art, Clark stands in a tradition dating back to Lessing (and, through Lessing, to antiquity) which recognizes “that in its imitations painting uses completely different means or signs than does poetry” (Laokoön). Art writing, then, involves a paradoxical leap across incommensurable and often mutually resistant media. The best art writing, I want to claim, is that which keeps this fact most alertly and creatively in mind, which makes of it a resource. In this paper I want to think about the prose of the English art critic Adrian Stokes (1907–1972) less as a vehicle for description or analysis than as a kind of creative and reasoning association, in a Freudian (or not not Freudian) sense. Stokes's is an associative imagination, I argue, both in its reliance at a fundamental level on verbal choices that are not fully conscious or rational, and in its implicit defence of the possibility of psychological collaboration between things that are radically different. I will offer a brief introduction to Stokes for those unfamiliar with his work, before focusing on his early masterpiece Stones of Rimini (1934).