A smarter stroke upon the fancy

Catalogue essay for mind, matter, thoughts on form, curated by Shannon O'Hara and Stella Hancock, POP Gallery, Fortitude Valley, November 21-December 2, 2023.

In the sixth volume of Laurence Sterne’s The Life & Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-67), the titular character draws the plot-line of his life story’s preceding fifth volume thus:

.'.....'.

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,,,''. .. ''..............,;'... .........'. .;. .,.

.,'.'

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Tristram’s summation of volume 5.

Recognising with some consternation that this serpentine route has not, so far, kept him to schedule — Tristram was born only at the beginning of volume four and is writing his life slower than he is living it — he borrows a ruler to shape his narrative course ———————————————— directly towards its conclusion.

This acknowledgment of the shape of ‘Tristram Shandy’ is one of the many visual moments that occur in a novel published two centuries years before conceptual art and concrete poetry’s engagement with language as a visual phenomenon. Indeed, one of its most remarkable features is Sterne’s idiosyncratic use of various typographic devices that suggest an early awareness of the limits of verbal language within writing. Amongst dingbats, shifting character weights, alternate typefaces, and storms of asterisks, Sterne manages to employ a terrific 9560 dashes. Ranging in length between three and 30 millimetres, these dashes largely serve “rhetorical rather than grammatical purposes” [1] in their implication of words, phrases, and entire paragraphs that literary or societal taste deemed unprintable. Although these dashes also serve a conceptual purpose as a visual expression of the novel’s narrative impetus — the word ‘dash’ means “to move somewhere with haste” and it is this straight line which the novel follows along its route of progression through digression — we nonetheless try, and are largely able, to read these dashes through their surrounding context.

Entirely unburdened by language are the black, blank, and marbled pages of ‘Tristram Shandy’. The black pages immediately follow the Shakespearean lament, “Alas, poor YORICK!”, to visually mark the passing of Sterne’s textual alter-ego, Yorick. Printed using a flat woodblock rather than movable type and inserted later such that the facing pages did not blot, the so-called ‘black pages’ precisely fill the text-areas of a single leaf’s recto and verso with two black, solid rectangles [2]. In these pages it is difficult not to see Kazimir Malevich’s ‘Black Suprematist Square’ (1915), particularly so when the later blank pages of ‘Tristram Shandy’ — alluding to verbal and sexual impotence — seem to foresee Malevich’s later ‘White on White’ (1918).

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Kazimir Malevich, 'Black Square', 1915.

But, rather, it is the legacy of Alexandr Rodchenko’s mistaken pronouncement of painting’s death via ‘Pure Red Colour’, ‘Pure Yellow Colour', and ‘Pure Blue Colour’ (1921) that provides a more illuminating art-historical lens through which to consider the visual moments of these black, blank, and marbled pages.

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Alexandr Rodchenko, Pure Red, Yellow & Blue Colours, 1921.

Rodchenko believed that his reduction of painting to its three primary colours had attained the medium’s logical end point. However, despite his claim that “it’s all over” [3], the monochromes instead served to articulate (some of) the basic principles through which modernist abstract painting was able to rethink itself. Through the black and blank pages of ‘Tristram Shandy’, Sterne was similarly able to reduce language as a visual phenomenon to the relationship between the figure and the ground drawn by the printer’s ink. But this was not his end point. Appearing in each copy of the first edition as a unique print, the marbled pages immediately sought infinity by exploding the written word. These “motley emblems” [4] of Sterne’s work are neither referential nor deferential to verbal language, but, nonetheless, are inextricable from the body text. The marbling fills the text-areas with the raw materials of the written word — swirling them together with a flourish not unlike that used by Corporal Trim to describe a life of freedom — yet cannot be read, only seen.

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Tristram Shandy's marbled page.

Sterne-via-Tristram opines that “of all the senses, the eye [...] has the quickest commerce with the soul,— gives a smarter stroke, and leaves something more inexpressible upon the fancy, than words can either convey — or sometimes get rid of” [5]. That is the risk of this essay and the challenge that Shannon O’Hara and Stella Haycock have presented to the artists within ‘mind, matter, thoughts on form’: to strike a smarter stroke upon the fancy in their explorations of the common ground between abstraction and text-based art.

[1] Peter J. De Voojd, Tristram Shandy as aesthetic object, ‘Word & Image: A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry’, 4(1):386.

[2] Peter J. De Voojd, A singular stroke of eloquence: Tristram Shandy’s typography, ‘Nordic Journal of English Studies’, 17(1):74.

[3] Alfred H Barr, Russian Diary 1927–28, ‘October’ 7(1978):14.

[4] Laurence Sterne, ‘The Life & Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman’ (London: Vintage Books, 2013), 248.

[5] Sterne, ‘Tristram Shandy’, 131.