ABSTRACT
Even prior to the arrival of the “pictorial turn” as a term, mid-century Modernist criticism (especially in the visual arts) treated the image surface as paradigmatic of “the visual/aural structure of symbols as a natural division”.5 Art critic Clement Greenberg’s 1940 essay “Towards a Newer Laocoön”, for example, made precisely this claim, reaching back to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s 1766 masterpiece, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry.6 Both texts essentially establish the proper domains of literature and visual art in the structures of apprehension (the ear, the eye), with literature expressing the passage of time, or events, and paintings expressing the visualization of space (in Greenberg’s
terms, the support). In this tradition, “Poetry is an art of time, motion and action; painting is an art of space, stasis and arrested action”.7 Poetry is heard or read. Painting is seen.
