Catherine Gibbon, ed. Boston Mills n.p. Stephen Scobie's lucid comparison of Cubist painting and language fills a discursive gap. Abandoning the illusory grail of exact equivalence, he shows how poetry reaches for visual space and painting for language and time. While painting can be appreciated for its silent being, it reaches for the supplement of words, as words desire the visual sense.
Signs are a lingustic concept, showing the immersion of painting in language.
A painted sign has a double function, representing a thing and acting as a plastic form. When such signs do not signify anything outside themselves, as in non-objective painting, their function resembles that of the arbitrary signs in a linguistic system. Writing and painting are semiotic activities, and in Cubist painting conceptual and plastic are mutually interdependent. Scobie rejects hierarchical notions of iconic and non-iconic signs in Cubism. His alert and clearcut thinking across shifting and dissolving borderlines makes Earthquakes and Explorations an essential guide for anyone interested in interactions between language and painting in modernist or postmodernist contexts.