The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts

voi Ces

The reader/viewer’s engagement with delangrage’s text likewise deepens with
discovery, is orchestrated through choice of mouse click and eye, and results in an
individualistic encounter with and simultaneous experience of, arrangement. The
author of this visual/rhetorical text notes that the:

making of knowledge through arrangement and visual analogy in a

Wunderkammer is a process of analogical manipulation that is deeply rhetorical.

each arrangement of objects creates new taxonomies – based on materials,

or seasons, or humors, or the four elements, or even size – that carry with

them unique ways of seeing and understanding the world. designing these

arrangements calls for visual tropes that connect in a material way habits

of mind required to engage with the verbal rhetorical devices of metaphor,

metonymy, synecdoche, hyperbole, anti- stasis, and catachresis.

(delagrange 2009)

Text and visual interact, movement draws the eye away from the words and vice
versa, the hand participates in a tactile performance of rhetoric in the making.
The application of rhetorical vocabulary and theory for art practitioners and visual
researchers, has become at times interchangeable, the same, and complementary. if,
as Kevin delucca defines it, rhetoric is ‘the mobilization of signs for the articulation
of identities, ideologies, consciousnesses, communities, publics, and cultures’ (deluca
1999: 17) the material nature of those marks – by letter, image or a combination of
sensory stimulations – becomes both subordinate to, as well as the substance of, the
vision of the artist- rhetorician. There is much more research for arts practitioners to
explore, and scholarship to create, that would meet the current criteria for original and
rigorous knowledge- making for postgraduate production.

Notes

1 The term ‘text’ has evolved to include any material artefact that can be read (a landscape, social
group, painting, etc.). in this chapter, ‘alphabetical’ or ‘written’ text will refer to words, sentences
or paragraphs in print or digital formats.
2 ‘discourse’ indicates here a communication that can be written, performed, heard or viewed by
others or by the self.
3 http://www.issotl.org/index.html (accessed 12 January 2010).
4 While assessment of the interviews is still in process, many of the results appear in mullin (2009).
5 This is not to ignore the necessity of any of these, especially since the act of sketching can be
instrumental in producing an allopathic perspective. Within the West especially, the analytic
perspective can complement the allopathic and vice versa; vocabulary of both provide artists a
larger palette.
6 ‘language’ here may be alphabetical, visual, or what is suggested here as even more productive,
multimodal.