Poetics and Place : The Architecture of Sign, Subjects and Site

How do artworks ‘speak’, and how do we ‘listen’
and respond? These questions underlie the
investigation here of Roni Horn’s Pair Object
III: For Two Rooms, Emily Dickinson’s later
manuscripts, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Passages
Paysages, Fiona Templeton’s Cells of Release and
Jenny Holzer’s Lustmord. The tenets of critical
performance, art-writing and site-writing
inform the critical method used in Poetics
and Place. Each chapter is dedicated to one of
these five artworks, and is arranged in order
to fulfil three main objectives: to understand
how the artworks generate meaning through a
material poetics in relation to place; to develop
a critical methodology for engaging with them;
and to investigate their ethical potential and
political imperative. All of this, ultimately,
facilitates the development of a triadic relation
between theoretical concepts of sign, subject
and site at the crossover between poetry,
art and spatial practices. This extends each
artwork beyond the dyad of a critical encounter
in order to offer – and allow others to grasp
– an appreciation of how the artwork figures
meaningfully, as well as configures meaning,
in the wider world of objects and things. The
book concludes with a discussion of the ethics
of reading from the second person, opening up
a debate concerning the role of empathy within
contemporary, politically engaged practices in
art and poetry.