Black Page: 'Tristram Shandy' After Conceptualism

Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–1767) speaks to times outside its moment of creation, looking forward as well as back. It raises the broader issue of ‘experimental’ or vanguardist literature’s relationship to temporality: the way it offers both a mysterious break from its present while simultaneously being embedded in specific traditions. This essay approaches Tristram Shandy transhistorically, focusing on one of the most widely remarked upon instances of Tristram Shandy’s experimentation: the black pages mourning Yorick’s death. This essay re-reads the black page alongside a specific vanguardist trajectory: Kazmir Malevich’s Black Square, and conceptually-oriented art and writing by Craig Dworkin, Holly Melgard, Abra Ancliffe, Mishkah Henner, Claudia Rankine, Glenn Ligon and others. These works encourage an identification of Tristram Shandy with conceptualism’s fluid movement between artistic and literary categories, between visually striking, ‘unreadable’ literary texts and textually-oriented artworks.