The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts

voi Ces

Mash- up: rhetoric becomes physically performative anew

‘mash- up’, the mixing of the already made to create something new, follows the
tradition we call art – the building upon, the mixing of elements, materials and tools
to create a new visioning. mash- up also signifies the multimodal, a widening of the
alphabetically formed picture with additions of tactility, sound and movement (and
their absence), all made possible by technology. as ‘art’ has expanded beyond bricks,
canvas and ink, so too have applications of rhetorical methods expanded to include
the same elements that comprise art: the visual, tactile, aural or kinaesthetic. Robert
miltner takes up the rhetorical term ekphrasis, the act of vividly describing a work of
art so a reader/listener can see it. starting with early modernist writers’ responses to,
and collaborations with, artists miltner traces the practice of exchange of writer- visual-
artist up to the contemporary poet Robert Creeley, who ‘uses this dialogue as a means
of collaboration in which his writing extends the art rather than merely responding’
(miltner 2001: 1). Citing his own ‘ekphrastic collaboration’ miltner examines how his
dialogues with printmaker Wendy Collin sorin has stimulated his rhetorical readings of
image and word, expanding his own visioning ability.
Carol Wiest applies rhetorical methodology to a tactile alphabet book, exploring
the ways in which tactile pictures represent objects in the world and the strategies the
pictures use to enact interactive- represented participant relations. in this sample of her
rhetorical reading of a tactile children’s book, Wiest demonstrates the interactivity of
text, the reader and author, to tease out the affective- cultural response produced by
arrangement.

objects represented at a 45 degree angle, such as the lollipop and Key, seem

most within reach while objects at an upright angle, such as the house and

Rabbit, seem less so. i suspect that the physical position of a reader’s hands has

a great deal to do with this sense of ‘within reach.’ The angle of the reader’s

Figure 9.1 delagrange. Wunderkammer (2009)