Résumés
Abstract
This paper explores William Blake’s creative and commercial positioning relative to late-eighteenth-century galleries, exhibition culture and artistic spectacle. Demonstrating a desire to reintroduce originality into reproductive processes while also embracing the exaggerated and politicised rhetoric often associated with the spectacular visual displays of exhibition societies and new media diversions, Blake confronts modern spectacle with corrective spectacles of his own, bringing clarity, detail and focus to bear on otherwise unmanageable sights. By combining the vocabulary of modern visual spectacles with a dutiful commitment to the maintenance of national strength and progress in the advertisements for and descriptions of his 1809 exhibition, Blake optimistically reconfigures his public as a homogeneously capable body of intellectual and consumer ability. Viewing his own artistic assertion as dramatic performance on national and political scales, he appeals to spectatorial intellect in an era of increasingly sensationalist visual displays, individually attempting to reconfigure the taste of his beloved “public” through a seductive hybridization of spectacular novelty and gallery traditions. However, his “failed” exhibition allows us to see the overall incompatibility between his intended functions for art on national and political fronts (the conceptual), the rhetoric of spectacle (the visual), the individualism at the heart of Blake’s revolutionary nationalism and the persistent economical/commercial foundations of this project. Blake’s vision of a direct link between the strength of artistic expression, the potential of the urban audience and the strength of a nation is complicated by the economic demands faced by the artist and the inherently commercial nature of spectacle.
Parties annexes
Works Cited
- Bermingham, Ann. “Urbanity and the Spectacle of Art.” in Romantic Metropolis: The Urban Scene of British Culture, 1780-1840. Eds. James Chandler and Kevin Gilmartin. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. 151-176.
- Blake, William. Advertisement of the Descriptive Catalogue. Complete. Erdman (1809): 528.
- ———. Advertisement of the Exhibition. Complete. Erdman (1809): 526-528.
- ———. Descriptive Catalogue. Complete. Erdman (1809): 529-550.
- ———. Laocoön. 1826-27. The William Blake Archive. Ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi. 30 January 2007. <http://www.blakearchive.org/>
- ———. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Complete. Erdman (1790): 33-44.
- ———. “Now Art Has Lost its Mental Charms.” Complete. Erdman: 479.
- ———. “Public Address.” Complete. Erdman: 567-82.
- ———. “When Klopstock England Defied.” Complete. Erdman: 500-501.
- Chandler, Eric V. “The Anxiety of Production: Blake’s Shift from Collective Hope to Writing Self.” Blake, Politics and History. Eds. Jackie DiSalvo, G. A Rosso and Christopher Z. Hobson. New York: Garland (Taylor & Francis), 1998. 53-79.
- Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “Lecture 7: 1811-12 Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton.” Records of the Lecture, Notes taken by John Payne Collier, 9 December 1811. S. T. Coleridge’s Collected Works, Volume 5 Part 1. Ed. R. A. Foakes. Princeton: Princeton UP; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987. 299-321.
- ———. “Letter to C. A. Tulk.” 1818. 29 January 2007. <http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/stc/Coleridge/letters/Tulk_Thurs_1818.html>
- ———. “Letter to Rev. H. F. Carey.” Feb. 6, 1818. 29 January 2007. <http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/stc/Coleridge/letters/Cary_2_6_1818.html >
- Cunningham, Allan. Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters, Sculptors and Architects. Blake Records. Ed. G. E. Bentley. 2nd Ed. New Haven: Yale UP, 2004. 627-659.
- Darley, Andrew. Visual Digital Culture: Surface Play and Spectacle in New Media Genres. London: Routledge, 2000.
- Erdman, David. Blake: Prophet Against Empire. 3rd Ed. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1977.
- Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Newly Revised Edition. New York: Random House: 1988.
- Hoock, Holger. The King’s Artists: The Royal Academy of Arts and the Politics of British Culture 1760-1840. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003.
- Hunt, Robert. “Mr. Blake’s Exhibition.” The Examiner 17 September 1809. Blake Records. Ed. G. E. Bentley. 2nd Ed. New Haven: Yale UP, 2004. 282-285.
- O’Hara, J. D. “Hazlitt and Romantic Criticism of the Fine Arts.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. 27(1): 1968. 73-85
- Mee, John. Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790’s. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992.
- ———. Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003.
- Read, Dennis M. “The Rival ‘Canterbury Pilgrims’ of Blake and Cromek: Herculean Figures in the Carpet.” Modern Philology 18(2): 1988. 171-190.
- Wood, Gillen D’Arcy. The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture 1760-1860. New York: Palgrave, 2001.
- Wordsworth, William. “Illustrated Books and Newspapers.” (1846) The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. Cambridge: Riverside Press. 1904. 787.
- ———. “Book Seventh” The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850. Eds. Jonathan Wordsworth, M.H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill. New York: Norton. 226-267.
- ———. Lyrical Ballads. 1802. 2 vols. Lyrical Ballads: An Electronic Scholarly Edition. Eds. Bruce Graver and Ron Tetreault. 30 January 2007. <http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/LB/html/Lb02-1.html>