On Fri, 2010-01-22 at 00:49 +0200, kasper salonen wrote:
> but I wasn't sure why you brought in this imperative:
> 
> "Second, don't attempt to make the image the cause of the text or
> spoken
> words or the other way round. Let both media have their time and
> space.
> So don't attempt to simply illustrate with an image what the words say
> or again the other way round." 

Kasper, thanks for that comment. You have run into my sloppy on screen
writing. It was intended as not imperative. I have done it so often
myself, reading on screen only to come back to it and have it say the
opposite of what I had thought I had read, so I should have been
sensitive to this possible misreading.

Another example is magazine editing, a print media which emerged in the
second half of the 20th century. Here, with photos, text, headlines and
so forth what is not needed is a photo in which it is imperative that
the photo repeat what the text says. So basically, as a magazine editor
you need to let the photo go its own way and not be tied to a textual
imperative of representation. Don't know if this helps. 

Your use of quotes around "cause" indicate to me an intransitive
relation or connection, if I follow your ideas. Translation is an
analogy that can help add to an understanding of how different media
work, however, unlike language translation, an image can have a
different meaning to the text or in the process of translation changes
meaning as a desired outcome. Images have meanings that do not stick but
instead more often slide off until one has to admit that the image
doesn't really have that meaning, if any meaning at all. A good example
is Caravaggio, Conversion of St Paul, a bear chest young man with his
cloak and tunic on the ground beside him, flat on his back, legs up and
wide, welcoming Jesus into him, sounds like gay porn. Poetry shares this
uncertainty with images, of course, unlike discursive prose with demands
for a strict logical meaning. 

The implicit idea of illustration is that it represents what has been
written. So it becomes limited to a mimesis of the text and the text is
the boundary line that doubles the imperative of illustrative
representation. 20th century art is obviously a break with this
Artistotlian notion of mimesis as representation, which includes the
metaphysical doubling which carries an imperative of representation.
Perhaps, on a more banal level, we don't live in the time of the ancient
greeks and slavery so we would expect different ideas.

The idea of space as created along with matter is Einstein's 1918
general theory of relativity, also. 20th century art has a sort of
parallel idea, loosely speaking. Best Chris Jones.