Proximité du Murmure: Dupin and Ubac Collaboratel

Abstract

The emblematic rapport between verbal text and visual image is examined. To the extent that the contemporary French poet and art critic Jacques Dupin and the Belgian born artist Raoul Ubac both present a kind of landscape whose difficult terrain simultaneously implies and retracts human presence, I propose a study of Proximité du murmure that employs the notion of landscape as a strategy enabling us to read the artist’s images and the poet’s words in a collaborative enterprise devoted to the tradition of the book: literary artifact and physical object. In particular, I emphasize what I perceive to be the figurative and material properties of written language as highlighted in a collaborative work of this kind.