Writing on Practice

This edition of JVAP, guest edited by Mick Finch situates writing about visual art practice in direct proximity to artist’s actual processes. Context, theory and the form writing itself takes are all aspects the following texts negotiate.

Artist’s writing is arguably , in itself, a historical genre within the literature of the visual arts. In a contemporary context there is an increasing division of labour of how a critical dialogue with works is established. The critic and the curator act as a vital mouth piece for the artist but often this facilitation can be like an act of ventriloquism with the added confusion of who is exactly putting words into whose mouth. This themed edition of the journal goes to the horse’s mouth so to speak.

There are many voices here in this edition of the journal and this it not meant to be a definitive edition. Instead, it is intended to represent some attempts to voice artist’s theorizing. This then represent no more than some attempts, as with other disciplines attempts in their own domains, to negotiate the appropriate style of an ‘academic’ writing for the discipline of fine art. That there is in these cases, represented below, the sense of description, authenticity and rigor that should represent research, may indicate that issues of style and variation of style, whilst maintaining the properties of good research and research dissemination, do not require a univocal style appropriated from other disciplines style guides,What is required is for us to attend to the issue with some rigor and argue the case for a heterogeneity of voice.

Shez Dawood’s ‘The killing of Chief Crazy Horse – An allegory in 3 parts’ has at its heart a script of a play. Footnotes within the text open it up as a hyper-text touching on Dawood’s wider context and working processes. The performative aspect of the writing plays upon the ongoing discussions about artist’s text in academic contexts and the structure of practice based research degrees and how such texts can be considered as works in themselves.

Beth Harland discusses questions of time in relation to her painting process . Via a theoretical proximity to Proust’s structuring of ‘time regained’ and the Deleuzian ‘time image’ she argues a position of an expanded field of painting that is immanent to specificities that have opened up around digital imaging.

Mick Finch discusses the critical relation between theory and artistic practice in terms of his painting and particularly with the relationship between cultural hegemony and painterly abstraction in terms of questions of signification.

Guillaume Paris’ text is from 1998 and was written under the pseudonym J.D. Layton, a strategy he felt was necessary at that time to situate his work critically. At the centre of this text is the discussion of the notion of the “dispositif” which the fictional aspect of the text itself is a material enactment.

Simon Morley discussion of Rothko’s paintings proceeds from a reading of the canvases proportions and blocks as alluding to paragraphs of writing developing into a general discussion about writing and the book. He brings this back to Rothko through a discussion around critical readings of the artist’s work. This serves as a context for Morley’s own concerns and is supplemented here by a group of works, reproduced in the text, that have been specifically made for this publication.

Ruth Pelzer’s examines the double nature of interpretation at the level of the production/exhibiting of artwork and at the level of writing in the context of doctoral research through a discussion of the concept and technology of ‘post-production’. Ruth highlights an awareness of the different elements of interpretive work and the productive nature of post-production, and argues especially for the role of writing in the creation of a (new) art object in the context of research. With the emphasis on the materiality of the work, the performative and dialogical quality of interpretation and its inter-relationship with the different identities of the artist as producer/maker and viewer/critic/writer are highlighted.

Anne Robinson ask the question, ‘Why do visual artists write?’. What does it mean to be a contemporary artist engaged in practice-based research? Anne’s article is an artist's response to the task of making a body of visual artwork that constitutes research in the contemporary academic context. I am exploring how written language may form part of this and responding to current debates about the possibility of a 'new' kind of knowledge emerging from studio/art practice that can be considered alongside conventional academic research methodologies. Anne set out to gain a deeper understanding of artists' writings and interrogate their functions and affect in a range of contexts, alongside her own practice.

Jane Graves explores the similarity between the practice of art and the practice of the psychotherapist. Both demand a commitment to risk and a high tolerance of excitement. The artist goes into his studio and isn’t sure what will happen. In the same way the therapist enters the consulting room and something completely unexpected happens. Both artists and therapists have been very highly trained but this training has to be put to one side, at least at the conscious level, for that training to be effective. This paper challenges the idea that artists are daydreamers, a charge which psychoanalysts have frequently leveled at them. The article makes use of the early stages of psychosexual development, and in particular explores the role of orality and anality in the creative process. It is only by turning attention to the process that we can understand the result.