Crossing the textual frame and its transmedial effects
Abstract
The year 2022 marks the 100th anniversary of Juri Lotman’s birth. On this occasion, I propose to return to one of Lotman’s concepts, namely that of frame. The term was proposed in The structure of the artistic text (1970/1977), in the traditional understanding of a limit that separates a text produced in any kind of medium from extra-textual structures (other texts) or non-text (real-life contexts). This notion of frame comes close to its understanding in literary studies, as well as the theory and philosophy of art and should not be confused with a well-known concept of frame propagated in AI Studies (Minsky 1975; Petöfi 1976) and which refers to a global cognitive pattern of storing common-sense knowledge about particular concepts and situations in memory. Lotman returned to the discussion of the textual frame in Universe of the mind (1990), mainly in application to the fine arts. He also elaborated there a more inclusive concept of boundary (proposed in Lotman 1984/2005) as a demarcation of the semiosphere and of its internal subsystems, which necessitates constant translations between particular codes and languages. Lotman dubbed transgressions of textual borders transcoding, which in contemporary parlance is a clear manifestation of transmediality. Therefore, I propose to analyse the concept of frame in relation to Intermedial Studies (cf. Elleström, 2014). Such crossings of boundaries between different media/modes/modalities are simultaneously creative and potentially confusing, in that they display a semiotic collision of artistic codes and require a heightened processing effort on the part of the addressee.
My vantage point is basically semiotic, with the focus of interest going less to verbal texts and more to the issues of frame in the visual arts. Semiotic considerations on the problem of boundaries are complemented with brief phenomenologically-oriented ponderings on aesthetic and cognitive import of framing devices (Crowther, 2009) that emphasize their antithetical function as: a) devices with their own artistic value, even complementing the text vs. b) “defences against the exterior” and hindrances to creative liberty.
First, I turn to two areas of interest of Lotman himself: 1) the extension of artistic media in Baroque art and 2) collages, which I treat as transmediality through surface. Lotman perceived collages as a collision of the fictitious with the real, referring to their doubly figurative nature (metonymical and metaphorical). Next, I complement this discussion with examples taken from 20th-century painting and sculpture, e.g. Spatialism, Minimalism, and Hyperrealism. Of particular interest is the situation in which the frame becomes a text commenting on its content or plays a metatextual function. Another game worthy of attention is embedding of frames.
The discussion closes with the case of transmedial effects between painting and theatre, illustrated by Polish painter and stage-director Tadeusz Kantor’s theatrical experiments in Cracovian Cricot 2 Theatre: a) Velázquez’s Infanta Margarita entering Kantor’s self-portraits and a photo-portrait frame in the performance Today is my birthday (1990); b) Kantor stepping out of the frame of his own self-portrait on the illusory boundary between real life, painting and theatre.
The article posits to treat frame and multiple ways of transgressing it as an integrational phenomenon that opens a path for further interdisciplinary studies across the borders of artistic semiotics, Intermedial Studies, literary theorizing and the theory and philosophy of art.
Downloads
References
Batchelor, D. (1997). Minimalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Careri, G. (1995). Bernini: Flights of love, the art of devotion. Transl. L. Lappin. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Chrzanowska-Kluczewska, E. (2017). Wycieczka multimodalna. Rola wstawek tekstowych w wizualnych dziełach sztuki [A multimodal excursion. The role of verbal inserts in visual artworks]. In A. Dudziak, & J. Orzechowska (Eds.), Język i tekst w ujęciu strukturalnym i funkcjonalnym. Księga jubileuszowa dedykowana Profesorowi Aleksandrowi Kiklewiczowi z okazji 60. urodzin [Language and text in a structural and functional approach. A jubilee volume dedicated to Prof. Aleksander Kiklewicz on the 60th anniversary of his birth] (pp. 55-66). Olsztyn: Uniwersytet Warmińsko-Mazurski w Olsztynie.
Chrzanowska-Kluczewska, E. (2019). Visual narrativity and the creation of a text world – a semiotic study of selected cases of transmediality. Studia Linguistica Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis, 136, 287-296. https://doi.org/10.4467/20834624SL.19.020.11313
Crowther, P. (2009). Phenomenology of the visual arts (even the frame). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Deleuze, G. 1988/2006. The fold. Transl. T. Conley. London: Continuum.
Derrida, J. (1987). The truth in painting. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Elleström, L. (2014). Media transformation. The transfer of media characteristics among media. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK & New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Emmott, C. (1997). Narrative comprehension: A discourse perspective. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Gołubiew, Z. (1999). Kantor. Spanish motifs in Tadeusz Kantor’s oeuvre. The exhibition in the National Museum in Cracow. Cracow: The National Museum.
Gołubiew, Z. (2000). Tadeusz Kantor – Self-portraits. “I’ve got something to tell you”. Cracow: The National Museum.
Goffman, E. (1974). Frame analysis. New York: Harper Colophon Books.
Grishakova, M. (2009). Afterword. Around culture and explosion: J. Lotman and the Tartu-Moscow School in the 1980-90s. In J. Lotman, Culture and explosion (pp. 175-187). Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Kress, G., & van Leeuwen, T. (1996/2006). Reading images. The grammar of visual design. 2nd ed. London & New York: Routledge.
Kroó, K. (2022). Lotman and literary studies. In M. Tamm, & P. Torop (Eds.), The companion to Juri Lotman. A semiotic theory of culture (Ch. 26: pp. 350-366). London, New York, etc.: Bloomsbury Academic.
Langmuir, E. (1997). The National Gallery companion guide. New revised edition. London: National Gallery Publications/Yale University Press.
Lotman, J. (1971/1977). The structure of the artistic text. Transl. R. Vroon. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan.
Lotman, J. (1984/2005). On the semiosphere. Transl. W. Clark. Sign Systems Studies, 33(1), 215-239.
Lotman, Yu. M. (1990). Universe of the mind. A semiotic theory of culture. Transl. A. Shukman, Introduction by U. Eco. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. [Polish translation: Łotman, J. (2007). Uniwersum umysłu. Semiotyczna teoria kultury. Transl. and Foreword B. Żyłko. Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego].
Lotman, J. (1992/2004/2009). Culture and explosion. Ed. by M. Grishakova, transl. W. Clark. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Marien, M. Warner, & Fleming, W. (2005). Arts and ideas. Belmont: Wadsworth.
Minsky, M. (1975). A framework for representing knowledge. In P. Winston (Ed.), The psychology of computer vision (pp. 211-277). New York: McGraw-Hill.
Monticelli, D. (2012). Challenging identity: Lotman’s “translation of the untranslatable” and Derrida’s difference. Signs Systems Studies, 40(3/4), 319-338. https://doi.org/10.1515/sem-2017-0125
Moreira Soares, M. J., & Gonçalves, C. G. (2022). Gilles Deleuze and Bernini’s bel composto: From theatricality to a living-montage. Athens Journal of Architecture, 2022, 8, 1-21. https://doi.org/10.30958/aja.X-Y-Z
Morris, F. (Ed.). (2008). Tate Modern. The handbook. London: Tate Publishing.
Petöfi, J. (1976). A frame for frames: A few remarks on the methodology of semantically guided processing. In Proceedings of the Second Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistic Society (pp. 319-329). Berkeley: University of California Institute of Human Learning.
Prodi, G. (1977/2021). The material bases of meaning. Tartu Semiotics Library 22. Tartu: University of Tartu Press.
Scolari, C. A. (2009). Transmedia storytelling: Implicit consumers, narrative worlds, and branding in contemporary media production. International Journal of Communication, 3, 586-606. https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/477/336
Shukman, A. (1977). Literature and semiotics. A study of the writings of Yu. M. Lotman. Amsterdam, New York & Oxford: North-Holland Publishing Company.
Simmel, G. (1994). The picture frame: An aesthetic study. Theory, Culture and Society, 11, 11-17.
Sobita, W. (2018). Textualisation as an interpretative strategy: Intermediality in contemporary verbal-visual artistic texts. Unpublished PhD dissertation. Kraków: Jagiellonian University. Philological Faculty.
Stockwell, P. (2002/2020). Cognitive poetics. An introduction. 2nd ed. London & New York: Routledge.
Uspensky, B. (1970/1973). A poetics of composition. The structure of the artistic text and the typology of compositional forms. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Copyright (c) 2022 Chrzanowska-Kluczewska Elżbieta
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Authors, who publish with this journal, accept the following conditions:
The authors reserve the copyright of their work and transfer to the magazine the right of the first publication of this work under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Non-Derivs License (CC BY-NC-ND), which allows other persons to freely distribute a published work with mandatory reference to the authors of the original work and the first publication of the work in this journal.
Authors have the right to enter into separate additional agreements for the non-exclusive dissemination of the work in the form in which it was published by this journal (for example, to post the work in the electronic institutions' repository or to publish as part of a monograph), provided that the link to the first publication of the work in this journal is given.
The journal policy allows and encourages the authors to place the manuscripts on the Internet (for example, in the institutions' repositories or on personal websites), both before the presentation of this manuscript to the editorial board and during review procedure, as it contributes to the creation of productive scientific discussion and positively affects the efficiency and dynamics of citing the published work (see The Effect of Open Access).
