WORD. ARTWORK. MIRROR. MULTIPLY: THE VIS

In Teresa Margolles’ Aire/Air, 2003, two air conditioning units cool an otherwise empty exhibition space. Exhaled by the air conditioners, inhaled by gallery audience, the water once washed the bodies of unidentified murder victims in Mexico City’s public mortuaries. Invisible, yet tangible. Permeating. A year prior to the first installation of Aire/Air, 2003, Jenny Boully published The Body: An Essay—a book of largely blank pages, articulated through footnotes. In 2016, Solmaz Sharif’s poetry collection Look examined the physical and linguistic devastation of anglophone imperialism in a lexicon of erasure, redaction, and rupture. What can be understood from approaching Margolles’ Aire/Air, 2003, Boully’s The Body: An Essay, and Sharif’s Look not as individual entities but as constellation, as works in orbit. What insights—critical and craft-based—might emerge in this triangulation of visions, subject matter, and techniques? If artworks and literature are positioned as mirrors, not to reflect but to multiply one another infinitely, how will each illuminate, complicate, and expand the other?

By examining literary nonfiction and poetry through the lens of the visual arts, by travelling the critical and formal “vocabularies” of one medium towards another, Word. Artwork. Mirror. Multiply: The Visual Arts as a Poetics of Sentence, Line, and Form invites students to radically rethink how they approach the sentence or line. Working from the premise that an exploration of one artform’s genres, methods, shapes, and traditions better clarifies the mechanisms, possibilities, and even boundaries of another, the course asks that students consider those material “impossibilities” of the written word and page, not as endings, but as beginnings, as opportunities for experimentation, originality, and the strange. How can writing walk us around, above or beneath its subject matter? How can an object of study imperceptibly permeate the “room” of the page? How can it rupture, correlate, multiply, map across dimensions?

Each week, students will receive a generative prompt (either to complete in class or after) specific to the themes and concerns of the relevant reading materials. These are opportunities to experiment as the work will not be workshopped or critiqued. Twice during the semester, students will lead discussions on assigned books, artworks,