rhetoriC: writing, reading and ProduCing the visuaLwall or ceiling lines, slowing the pace of its occupants and creating collaborations
among them. While these analyses may appear too cerebral, it is only because they are
being explained here in words rather than in the media of artists who would employ
rhetorical reflection by joining the vocabulary of their practice with that of rhetoric.
as this chapter will later show, even the predominance of words has changed in some
rhetorical research.
pertinent to this initial discussion are recent acknowledgements of ancient rhetorical
practices that included all aspects of the communicating body, for in the ancient forum
the rhetorician was physically present. Therefore, effective communication included
the ability to see that which ‘is’ before one (what one gazes upon), to hear words
(sounds), to witness movement or images in order to respond to the entire performance.
such ‘seeing’ points to the emphasis on deiktikos – ‘exhibit’ – or, as others claim, on
the sophistic use of epideictic rhetoric (ceremony, commemoration, display). in each
instance, narrative pictures conveyed through the performance of oratory displayed in
the forum were visual and performative necessities, created as part of the whole effect of
a speech. such thoughtful use of rhetorical strategies parallel not only the movement of
body, sound, line or image in an artistic performance, but also is mindful of placement:
where the body stands, how it gestures, when it moves, where it projects a sound, how
loudly and in what space all this occurs.
Where and how artistic productions are exhibited or performed are just as essential
within our own culture, and whether an artist analyses others in order to inform her
own work, or whether she observes her own work in order to move it elsewhere, her
use of the principles of deiktikos or her understanding of how to infuse her imagistic
language with concepts of ceremony, commemoration and display may help her push
her work further towards an effect of which she wasn’t previously aware. observation
and reflection of the effect of a communication (with oneself or others) is key to
rhetorical/creative production and itself demands some kind of articulation in some
kind of medium: words might cross with paint or sound, but from the ancients onwards,
the intricate play of word and image [articulation and result] were not only recognized,
but required and essential to a construction of a world view (Fleckenstein 2007: 1–7).
i am suggesting here that rhetoric brings to art practice another lens with which
to examine work produced and that the work produced becomes in itself scholarly
production because of the application, movement, refraction and implementation of
knowledge that then produces new knowledge – new art.
That alphabetical language has a role in this is maintained throughout recorded
history for there is a continual ebb and flow between word and image. The medieval
absorption of the visual and iconic emerged again in the Renaissance, where the close
tie between the painting of verbal pictures produced through written descriptive
narratives for moral good, and the visual art produced at the time, is most evident in
references to horace’s ‘ut pictura poesis’ (as is painting, so is poetry). Both the speaking
picture (the poet’s pictura, or verbal exemplary narrative) and the silent poetry (the
painter’s istoria, or visual narrative) are conceived in terms of making visible idealized
images or patterns audiences could ‘gaze upon’ to communicate moral, philosophical
or ethical lessons.
‘Renaissance humanists presumed that all aesthetic displays are rhetorical
performances before audiences capable of appraising the virtuosity of their execution’