'This Broken Jaw': T. S. Eliot, Ern Malley and Australian Modern Art

Abstract

In the 20th century the ekphrastic conversation between seeing and saying, between opsis and lexis, really begins to swing (and I use the jazz metaphor advisedly).

Both visual and literary artists experimented with new languages, languages of fragmentation and reassembly born of cinema and experimental photography, telegraphy and radio, newspapers and advertising, of the shocking impact of industrial weaponry during the Great War, of the discomfiting interpretation of dreams in psychoanalysis, and of the awful reimagining of the physical universe in Einstein’s theories of relativity. Dada and surrealism’s clipped dialect of collage merged with the literary avant-garde’s symbolist, free verse and stream-of-consciousness tendencies to form a coherent (or deliberately incoherent) cultural domain.