Mixed messages presents and interrogates ten distinct moments from the arts of nineteenth-, twentieth- and twenty-first-century America where visual and verbal forms blend and clash. Charting correspondences concerned with the expression and meaning of human experience, this volume moves beyond standard interdisciplinary theoretical approaches to consider the written and visual artwork in embodied, cognitive and contextual terms.

Offering a genuinely interdisciplinary contribution to the intersecting fields of art history, avant-garde studies, word-image relations, and literary studies, Mixed messages takes in architecture, notebooks, poetry, painting, conceptual art, contemporary art, comic books, photographs and installations, ending with a speculative conclusion on the role of the body in the experience of digital mixed media. Each of the ten case studies explores the juxtaposition of visual and verbal forms in a manner that moves away from treating verbal and visual symbols as operating in binary or oppositional systems and towards a consideration of mixed media, multi-media and intermedia work as brought together in acts of creation, exhibition, reading, viewing and immersion. The collection advances research into embodiment theory, affect, pragmatist aesthetics, as well as into the continuing legacy of romanticism and of Dada, conceptual art and surrealism in an American context.
With a foreword by Professor Miles Orvell of Temple University, Gander and Garland's collection assembles cutting-edge research of renowned and emerging scholars in American literature and the visual arts, including Lauren Weingarden and Caroline Blinder.

Catherine Gander is Lecturer in American Literature and Visual Culture at Queen's University Belfast

Sarah Garland is Lecturer in American Literature and Visual Culture at the University of East Anglia

Foreword - Miles Orvell
Introduction: to fasten words again to visible - and invisible - things - Catherine Gander and Sarah Garland
1. A poetics of organic expression: Louis Sullivan's transcendentalist legacy in word and image - Lauren S. Weingarden
2. Photographic studies in the Hawthornes' American Note-books - Jessie Morgan-Owens
3. Fragments of the future: Walker Evans's polaroids - Caroline Blinder
4. Cartooning the marvelous: word and image in Chicago Surrealism - Joanna Pawlik
5. 'Twenty-six things at once': pragmatic perspectives on Frank O'Hara and Norman Bluhm's Poem-Paintings - Catherine Gander
6. 'Being kept in the dark can be a critical gesture': Arakawa and Madeline Gins's Mechanism of Meaning - Sarah Garland
7. 'Then art will change. This is the future': Nancy Spero's manifestary practice - Rachel Warriner
8. Forms of potential: reading Lawrence Weiner - Katie L. Price
9. Testimony by hand: Ann Hamilton's myein - Julie Brown
10. Reading with a knife, or the book art of subtraction: the altered books of Brian Dettmer and Doug Beube - Katy Masuga
11. The idea, the machine and the art: word and image in the twenty-first century. Envoi - Catherine Gander and Sarah Garland
Index