‘Twenty-six things at once’: Pragmatic perspectives on Frank O’Hara and Norman Bluhm’s Poem-Paintings

Created over a couple of Sunday mornings in the Fall of 1960, the twenty-six collaborative Poem-Paintings of the artist Norman Bluhm and the poet Frank O'Hara represent what Bluhm later called a spontaneous 'conversation' between the painter and the poet. In this essay, Catherine Gander adopts a number of pragmatist positions to reconsider these overlooked works as essential examples of verbal-visual interaction that extend their 'conversation' to greet and involve us in a relationship that is at once interpersonal, integrated, and embodied. The works, Gander argues, constitute what John Dewey terms 'art as experience'; in their back and forth exchange of verbal and visual gesture, abstraction and denotation, the Poem-Paintings are the 'cumulative continuity' of 'the process of living', dramatising the shifting, spontaneous and multiple dimensions of interpersonal conversation, and in so doing, indicating a new path toward interconnective and equal exchange between word and image.

Truth at 24 frames a second? A working dialogue between a film-maker and a historical consultant about the making of The Enigma of Frank Ryan

We employ a practice-based methodology based on a ‘live’ film project to explore the different ways that film-makers and historians narrate the past. Through a case-study of the production and exhibition of a drama-documentary feature-film, The Enigma of Frank Ryan, on which both authors (film-maker Bell and historian McGarry) worked respectively as director and historical consultant, we explore a range of critical issues arising from our collaboration. Through a dialogue between a director and a historian, a model of good practice between historians and film-makers emerges.