9

RheToRiC: WRiTing,

Reading and

pRoduCing The Visual

Joan Mullin

Rhetoric, lodged in the ancient art of oral presentation, is commonly described as
the study or implementation of a process of invention, arrangement, and production
of words to create a planned effect on a particular audience. For art practitioners,
rhetoric’s study of human discourse with this presumed focus on words might most
closely align it with research in art history. however, studying art historically is not the
only use of rhetoric; in its study of how communication takes place and is received,
rhetoric is relevant as a useful tool for research in all arts practices since, in addition
to the medium of language, the original components of ancient rhetorical practice
included the purposeful use of voice, tone, performance and visual effect. Therefore,
rhetoric already has for art practitioners a vocabulary for examining and naming
their multimodal or single medium processes as well as a set of strategies that can be
employed to create effective ‘communication.’ Together these provide two supports
for defining and engaging in the production of art scholarship that would measure
up to academic standards for postdoctoral production. scholarship in art practice
can include studies and examples of ‘invention’; it may examine but also articulate
creative ideas as rhetorical, that is, as communicative practices. however, the use of
such rhetorical approaches in artists’ scholarly activity can also help make a case that
postdoctoral research can be just as rigorous when the ‘texts’ are multimodal or largely
non- alphabetical.^1
When art practitioners engage in research in their respective areas, they can
use rhetorical analysis as a bridge between the academic expectation that defines
‘scholarship’ in terms of word- based documents and the visual, aural and kinaesthetic
reality of art practitioners’ knowledge production that occurs in forms other than
alphabetic language. By drawing on the word- based ‘canons of rhetoric’ (e.g. invention
and arrangement) for their own creative (knowledge) production, arts practitioners can
employ language devices to argue for the efficacy of knowledge that is not alphabetical,
but still communicative. already some rhetoricians have challenged the very idea that
rhetoric need be word- based and they use its methodology to examine any ‘languages’
whether physical (dance), auditory (music) and/or visual (e.g. sculpture, painting,