SESSION: Art Writing: Beyond the Crisis?
At a time when the discipline of art history is seeking ever greater diversity in both subject matter and practitioners, this same diversity has not penetrated to the level of art writing. As Brad Haylock and Megan Patty (2021), James Elkins (2021) and others have noted, channels for criticism are diminishing, acceptable styles of formal art historical writing are narrowing, and movements such as literary studies’ ‘postcritique’ appear to have passed art history by. At the margins of mainstream art history, however, new approaches have been taking root since the 1980s and have proliferated in the twenty-first century. These combine creative writing, criticism and scholarship – often seen as separate or even antagonistic disciplines – to push the boundaries of what art writing can look like (e.g. Greg Tate (1986), Gary Indiana (1985-1988), Jill Johnston (1994); Elkins (2023); Gloria Kury (2015); Janet Malcolm (2014); A.V. Marraccini (2023)). Underlying such experiments is a desire to reflect the increasing diversity of voices within the discipline, question old assumptions, engage new audiences, and reinspire old ones.
In this session, we showcase a range of innovative approaches to art writing and ask how our discipline might seek out and embrace more unusual modes and formats.
Session Convenors:
Christina Faraday, University of Cambridge
Emily Carrington Freeman, University of Oxford
Speakers:
Isabella Streffen, De Montfort University
The Death of the Art Historian
The Death of the Art Historian is a provocation considering the shifting balance of critical authority in writing about art, in the context of the fine art doctorate since the 1990s, its written thesis, and the practices of art writing. Once exclusively the domain of art historians, the critical writing of art flourishes both in the space of the fine art thesis – situated in the studio and addressing the concerns of artists – and in the interdisciplinary spaces of ekphrastic enquiry.
Drawing on my practice as an artist concerned with the relation between art object and art criticism, and pedagogical research in writing for practice, I will outline the approaches, methodologies and outcomes of the postgraduate writing lab that I convene as part of the MA in Contemporary Art Practice at De Montfort University, and where I use the concepts of ‘texts that run parallel to or within art’ (Williams, 2015) and ‘texts which operate as art’ (Maroto, 2020) to explore methods of coming to knowledge about new forms of art and complicate the relationships between the visual/textual and the object/interpretation.
The lab uses studio-based practices to elicit works that are ‘form-curious’, ‘unsummarizable’ and ‘genre-bending’ (Reeder, 2017) explorations of the space between the analytic and the creative, through techniques of collage, translation, the critical-creative and the ficto-critical. By generating texts that have differing or multiple modes of publication: by algorithm, exhibition, broadcast, print media, performance, online magazines and articles, early career artists develop their evaluative methods, vocabularies, and vibrant critical voices.
Adam Nasser Benmakhlouf, University of Edinburgh
Public space no longer sustained by ground”: Contemporary Art Writing and the Art of the AIDS Crisis
11. Statements Around Art Writing from 2011 by Maria Fusco and the newly assembled (at that point) teaching team of the MFA in Art Writing at Goldsmiths, London has defined an era of writerly experiment by artists and critics. In my paper, I elaborate upon the final, and most confounding, two statements:
10. Art Writing involves relations between people, as discursive. Insofar as it is art, Art Writing can engage public space no longer sustained by ground, including that of truth.
11. Art Writing institutes such public space without truth, and sometimes disappears into it.
I directly address the terms of Art Writing: Beyond the Crisis by critically considering the experimental publisher Pilot Press’ continuing series of anthologies, Responses to … (2021-present) “seeking contemporary responses to works of art made during the AIDS crisis”. The series has devoted individual books to artists including Agnes Martin, Derek Jarman, David Wojnarowicz, Paul Thek and Felix Gonzalez-Torres.
I evaluate the necessity demonstrated by Responses to … of experimentation when writing enormity’s artworks via my condensed selection of key propositional taxonomical responses to the series. I argue Responses to … takes the ontological apocalypse of AIDS as its starting point. Writings and artworks are positioned together performing a radical and necessary co-constitution of subjectivity, meaning, identity and infrastructure in the wake of the AIDS crisis’ total devastation. Form is no longer a given, writerly voice is implicated not neutral, positionality is interrogated, authority and authenticity are thrown into suspicion and doubt.
Ralph St Clair Wade, University of Cambridge
Words and Pictures: Zines as Art Writing
Zines first emerged in the 1930s as science fiction fanzines, but the term now includes most small-scale, creative-led, and community-oriented publications. They have been the natural organ for small constituencies of interest or identity, whose thoughts they have both reflected and directed. Scholarly interest has accordingly been sociological and social-historical, concerned variously with politics (Radway, 2011); feminist thought (Zoble, 2009); the female body (Piepmeier, 2008); and racial prejudice (Nijsten, 2017).
This paper newly evaluates the zine as a mode of art-writing. It derives from a series of interviews with creators and argues that zines should be read and made by art historians. The case for this is theoretical, technological and formal.
Zines challenge the art-historical separation of pictures and thoughts about pictures (Baxendall, 2003). The achievement of zines is to unite the ‘picture’ and the ‘thoughts about the picture’ in one unambiguously creative object. Unlike traditional criticism, which is often written from a first-person perspective, but without first-person pronouns, zines make an exhibition of their subjectivity.
Zines have developed in a reactionary lockstep with technological change. As machine-made objects inspired an Arts-and-Crafts insistence on visible human toolmarks, so digital virtualisation has driven zine makers’ interest in tactility. As LLMs have cheapened text by mass producing it, some zine makers (vide: Seedlings) have laboriously re-valued it, by setting each page in moveable type.
The physicality of zines is a positive asset, and not mere reaction. Those writing about the human or social body have found a natural affinity with a tactile, mutable and fragile corpus. Those writing on intimacies of any kind have relished new kinds of morphology; some publications must be untied, unlaced, or even decoded to be read. The presentation of art in zines can be mimetic, as well as verbally descriptive.
Di Liu, University of Oxford
Art Writing as Knowledge Production in Asia
This presentation introduces an ongoing, collaborative art-writing project initiated at the 13th International Convention of Asia Scholars in Surabaya in 2024, featuring writers, editors, and artists from Indonesia and China. It explores expanded, participatory forms of art writing that challenge the Western model of the solitary, contemplative critic. These new formats are not just alternative channels but are essential to the very knowledge being produced about art in Asia today.
I will present two case studies that exemplify this formal innovation. The first is the transition from Jurnal Karbon to RURUradio in Jakarta, where the oral, conversational format of a radio broadcast replaces the written text, which aligns with indigenous knowledge traditions and creates a live, social archive. The second is the ‘harvesting’ practice at documenta fifteen, where visual storytelling and collective documentation became an open-ended, process-based method of ‘writing’ an artistic event into history. These cases frame my reflection on the broader ‘participatory turn’ in Asian art writing, a direct response to the rise of socially engaged art and collective practices in the region. The project itself is a living example of this turn, with four panel papers from this panel already published through Qilu Criticism, a bilingual, independent platform for emerging voices.
This presentation showcases a working model of collaboration in art writing and invites further exploration of how such innovative formats can reshape our disciplinary conversations.
Colin Rhodes, Hunan Normal University, China; DJCAD, University of Dundee
Epistolary art writing as a means toward co-authorship
A few years ago, my colleague Bernard Herman and I were faced with a problem of how to co-write a piece on issues of collecting, canonicity and the contemporary turn in the disputed field of ‘outsider art’ for inclusion in a book accompanying an exhibition. We had a keen interest in the subject and our friendship in common. However, we came from different disciplines – he from folklore and architectural history, and I from fine art practice and art history. We also lived on different continents. In view of this, we decided that an exchange that maintained our distinct voices might work best. We came up with the idea of an essay that harkened back to older modes of letter writing between friends, while taking advantage of the speed of dialogue afforded by email. The exchange in its final form underwent only light editing and retains its conversational tone, although we did return to our letters to include notes acknowledging sources, etc. Finally, arising from a need to respond to editorial enquiries, we realised the necessity of a third voice, which takes the form of footnotes written jointly by us, but attributed to a fictional character, ‘Ed’. The ‘letters’ reveal how two people coming to the same remarkable body of art from different humanistic perspectives find common ground through different approaches. The model of the epistle could be much expanded in dialogic terms to include multiple subjects, where meaning is made, in a Bakhtian sense, at the boundaries between individuals.
Matthew Bowman, University of Suffolk
Art Writing as Techno-Divination and Neo-Séance: Alice Bucknell’s New Mystics
In 2021, the artist Alice Bucknell produced a website/artwork titled New Mystics. Taking its foundation from Bucknell’s own engagement with esoteric and hi-tech frameworks, New Mystics consists of numerous critical texts focusing on various artists, all of whom with practices that explore alternative beliefs, occult histories, and systems of magic. Important here is to understand that these practices revisit non- or anti-Enlightenment concepts as some kind of retreat into irrationality but often situate esoterica in correspondence with advanced technologies as a means for reflecting and opposing a present defined by environmental collapse and the march of illiberal politics.
Relinquishing the supposed benefits of critical distance, Bucknell’s writings on these artists collected in New Mystics also comment, by extension, on her own practice. More crucially, however, Bucknell is seeking a writerly mode adequate to its object; an object freighted with complex esoteric histories. This paper proposes that Bucknell’s experimental deployment of multiple “voices”—Bucknell’s, statements from the artists discussed, and Language AI GPT-3—communing as if gathered in séance is an attempt to disclose the unknown subtending each artwork. Could it be through such a strategy, in which writing becomes divination rather than commentary, that a genuine reciprocity between artwork and art writing be envisaged? New Mystics, with its polyphonic interplay of manifold human non-human subjectivities can serve as a model for another kind of art writing or criticism, one that is, at bottom, a sympathetic art practice as much as commentary on such practices.