Question: are maps textual or visual? They are visual, but only the way everything we see, including text, is visual. Their main intent is to inform us, as words do, but they needn’t contain any words. I tend to think they are a third kind of thing, a cartoceptual artifact. Yes, this is an awkward synonym for “map,” but in my idiosyncratic understanding of the brain, which includes the idea that there is a major section of the brain devoted to telling us where we are physically—by use of maps it makes for us unconsciously to follow. If I’m right, and it is in the “cartoceptual awareness,” as I call this section of the brain, that our main reading of maps like Aycock’s “Garden of the Scripts,” then our experience of her map is importantly plurexpressive in a different way from a mixture of the textual and the graphic that Cy Twombly’s 1971 “Untitled” is, for example. Is that important? You got me. I never thought about it before I began writing the above, not having thought much about maps as art.

I do believe Aycock’s mapping seems to put us somehow aphysically in her garden, immersed in a knowing where one is without actually being there, if that makes any kind of sense.

Needless to say, text dramatically argues its way into the scene with so much text on display. So does the graphic due to so much of the map’s being pictures of the location’s physical details, some in 3-D, rather than a 2-D outline as a rigorously “professional” map would be. Surely we have a three-way argument going on among the visual, the unlike conceptualities of words and mapping.

Turning to Nancy Haynes’s drawing, “QR for WK by NH,” it seems to me that most people encountering it for the first time (in a museum devoted to visual art), without any special pre-knowledge about it or the QR code it technically is, would mostly likely think, “Labyrinth.” A picture, or map, of a labyrinth, but textless. Which brings us to my main question: how does a work’s seeming a map contribute to it as a work of art? Relatedly, what exactly does it contribute? In any argument between a work’s textual and graphic content, which side is it on?

What meaning can be derived from its position as the underlayer of the work? A sub-sub wholly sensual animal consciousness from which a human sub-conscious containing symbols has slid over, or emerged from? Or has it snuck under someone’s dying reason?

Is it the beginning of a fire, or the end of one?

What else might it be?

Note: I’m no authority, even week-end authority, on Twombly’s work–which is to say I know it mostly from magazines like ARTnews, and websites like the one we’re participating in now–and as the basis of more than a few visual poems by friends of mine. So I’d REALLY appreciate it if a few Twombly experts would chip in a few thoughts about his work to the discussion.

Meanwhile, anyone interested in visual poetry might take a look at Irving Weiss’s “Gloss Twombly” at http://poeticks.com/2012/10/18/entry-895.

To start with, the background is that the piece’s name is “102 boulevard Haussmann ,” which was where Marcel Proust mainly lived in Paris. It consists of simply the address, “Emerging from the scores of vertical graphite striations lining the surface of this drawing,” Dayle Wood tells us in his excellent short piece on the work in the catalogue (where you can also hear the artist say a few words about it. It is part of a series of similar drawings by Harwood Rubin, each representing, she tells us, “a residence or significant place-name from Proust’s book.”

I remember, without my notes, that I particularly wanted to bring up this piece because of the ways it contrasts with Twombly’s. For instance, Twombly’s markings scramble over the surface of his rectangle, they come ONTO it; Harwood Rubin’s come UP FROM it. Ironically, Twombly’s suggests a meadow while Rubin’s is entirely urban. The Harwood Rubin is far the quieter of the two–the slower, as well. But its bit of text entirely conquers the setting it emerges into, at least on the surface, since the address is about all that is visible. The work is entirely about it.

Once we know from outside the work (as we need to) that the address was Proust’s, and find out–if we don’t already know–how famous he was as a modernist novelist of memories, and that he’s long been dead, we realize that the background is not so small a part of the work, after all. It is, in fact, what makes it a visual poem about not just an author’s residence but a past turned to granite, but tagged with an address making it a permanent memory of a world real people like Proust lived in AND the second peopled world Proust made of that in his multi-volumed novel.

I feel I’ve only started–clumsily–to try to show you how I think Susanna Harwood Rubin’s work fits into my argument between textuality and visuality, Nathan. I hope we can get others to help me out, ’cause I’m worn out! Any Proust fans out there?

The question that will occur to some is what’s the point of dividing Twombly’s work into various kinds of textuality (and I have often been accused of carrying taxonomy to ridiculous lengths). Well, first of all, in a work of visual art, textuality in general will automatically “argue” with the work’s visual elements. Indeed, it may be that it argues with them so forcefully and successfully that the work isn’t even really a visual work! Look at Twombly’s “Untitled” without taking it for granted that it’s visual art. What in it besides the negative space any work of any kind of art on a page (or screen) will have is not textual, or seeming to be trying to be that? I think awareness of the work’s textuality primes us better to see and value what’s visual in it.

Moreover, the argument of the two or more elements, if aesthetically successful, will seem exciting to those not used to it in paintings or drawings, whether happily or threateningly exciting. I take it for granted that the two kinds of expressive modalities (if both prominent in a piece) will cause a viewer to experience their interaction (their argument!) in two significantly different places in his brain at the same time—significantly different because usually not activated together by an artwork. The viewer will suddenly SEE the visual elements from somewhere in his reading mind, and “READ” them from somewhere in his visual mind. In other words, he will experience two significantly different slants of it.

Eventually, the viewer will, it is hoped, become comfortable with experiencing a work of art in two of more significantly different parts of brain, but still find the experience fresh because while the activation of the two or more general parts of brain involved will be no longer be novel, the activation of the specific parts activated will be.

But I see I may not be thinking of “font” the way you are. In fact, I think I should consider it a visual aspect of any letter it is used for. Hence, for me, it would always be entirely visual. The letters of “kjgtt” are the same letters regardless of their font, and they are simply text for me regardless of font because they don’t spell any word. Whether a letter is verbal or not depends on whether it is in a word or not. A font will never be verbal, only something associated with the verbal.

Have I made any sense yet?

PS: This has been a VERY enlightening discussion for me and it’s only Tuesday!