Abstract

This lecture-form essay examines various orders of relation between visual art and writing focusing on Adorno’s propositions about art as écriture. Following introductory remarks concerning Adorno’s relation to recent and contemporary Conceptual, activist and multi-media practices and his brief descriptions of the “virtuoso” work of Pablo Picasso, it addresses the relational nexus between art and history mediated by names and titles (looking to the work of the German artist who christened himself Andy Hope 1930), the operations of methexis and Sprachcharakter, realism and abstraction, and ideas, both analagous and discontinuous, in the thinking Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard, each convened under the auspices of Adorno’s somewhat ahistorical understanding of écriture. The creatively elastic notion of écriture suggests that the defining quality of art as enigma is best comprehended “from the perspective of language.”