Mixed Messages: American Correspondences in Visual and Verbal Practices

Mixed Messages presents and interrogates ten distinct moments from the arts of nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century America where visual and verbal forms blend and clash. Charting correspondences concerned with the expression and meaning of human experience, this volume moves beyond standard interdisciplinary theoretical approaches to consider the written and visual artwork in embodied, cognitive, and contextual terms.

Offering a genuinely interdisciplinary contribution to the intersecting fields of art history, avant-garde studies, word-image relations, and literary studies, Mixed Messages takes in architecture, notebooks, poetry, painting, conceptual art, contemporary art, comic books, photographs and installations, ending with a speculative conclusion on the role of the body in the experience of digital mixed media. Each of the ten case studies explores the juxtaposition of visual and verbal forms in a manner that moves away from treating verbal and visual symbols as operating in binary or oppositional systems, and towards a consideration of mixed media, multi-media and intermedia work as brought together in acts of creation, exhibition, reading, viewing, and immersion. The collection advances research into embodiment theory, affect, pragmatist aesthetics, as well as into the continuing legacy of romanticism and of dada, conceptual art and surrealism in an American context.

Remedios Varo's Feminine, Spiritual Quest

Remedios Varo occupies a marginal position in the Surrealist canon, despite her direct involvement with Breton’s circle and in spite of the fact that her work is attributed a universal significance. It has been interpreted as representing a journey towards identity and freedom, a search for female empowerment, and as a spiritual quest. Moreover, critical focus on the mythic/exoteric ‘female’ quest has been to the detriment of the mystical/esoteric significance of the paintings. This article argues that it is in the combination of these strands that Varo’s radicalism might be found. It shows that by presenting a female, spiritual quest for enlightenment—which exists apart from a traditionally male-dominated, western religious schema—Varo circumvented her ordained role within the artistic, spiritual, and political communities of which she was a part.