On Visibility

I'm excited that i received the book that accompanied a Theresa Hak Kyung Cha retrospective. It's serendipitous that I received this book after reading Calvino's "Visibility" essay. At times, his essay sounds so reductive, and so not "for the millennium." He reduces the imaginative process into a banal binary that either "starts with the word and arrives at the visual image," or "starts with the visual image and arrives at its verbal expression (83)." What about the word as visual image?

Enter Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's breaks it down in her text and photo piece, "Commentaire":

COMME COMMENT
COMMENT TAIRE TEAR


In Cha's piece, we are witness to a scene "taking place before our eyes (83)". We are witness to the scene of the word--the seen word.

Trinh Minh Ha translates best:

"Comment taire? The question raised is not simply how to keep the silence, to stay quiet or to hold one's tongue, but how not to say while saying. [...] Commentaire offers, in its spatial and linear layout of the words, the possibility of a comment or a commentary that includes a comment taire, that is, a comment/how to and a taire/silence, be silent. [...] Engaging language as simultaneously seen and heard, her writing plays up the arbitrary relation between the sound of a word, its visual spelling, its multiple referents, and its foreign mate in translation (Trinh 35)."

Calvino describes words "that accumulate on the page" as being "infinite but more easily controlled, less refractory to formulation (97)." How would he read words on the body? Could Cha's Aveugle Voix be the class segue into performance? See it here. Hear it here. Can words really be controlled so easily? Can words be managed like the citizens of Jackie Chan's dream of a controlled China? Can words let us see the images of the imagination with less refraction than a curved lens? Or, do words still fail?