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- Volume 10, Issue 1, 2017
Journal of Writing in Creative Practice - Volume 10, Issue 1, 2017
Volume 10, Issue 1, 2017
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‘Bad Retail’: A romantic fiction
More LessAbstract‘Bad Retail’ is a work of fiction that I wrote to accompany a series of my own narrative paintings. The text was originally disseminated through a series of exhibitions in the form of printed handouts that were included alongside the visual works. The story evolved from a simultaneous investigation of two related devices in literature and painting: anachronism and collage. These terms are linked by an act of displacement: of objects from history and of images from their source. This compositional tendency is characteristic of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century romantic fiction, which often refuses to conform to (and remain within) accustomed genre categories. The aforementioned narrative will be accompanied here by a series of illustrations based on the paintings and drawings that I produced in tandem with the text. The aim will be to treat the journal submission as a form of ‘illuminated manuscript’, in which anachronism might be understood as both a verbal and a visual strategy.
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What a thirst it was: Longing, excess and the genre-bending essay
More LessAbstractRachel Blau DuPlessis writes that the essay is restless, always a little too hungry, a little too thirsty (2006). Implicit in this statement is the fact that a good essay is full of desire and creates this response in readers too – building a thirst for more knowledge, for more emotion, for stimuli, satisfaction. Here the essay is unquenchable, undefinable and unsummarizable. This experimental essay talks about the practice and application of writing experimental essays and their capacity to be genre-bending, form-curious texts. Considering specific texts that explore artistic practice and/or, in their hybridity, bring image and text together in essential ways, the hybrid essay will emerge as a way of making, seeing, reading, interpreting and acquiring knowledge. By discussing intentional ambiguity, the unfamiliar familiar, knowledge in context, and the role of language and structure in the creation of presence, silence and absence in texts, this essay draws attention to the complications (and possibilities) of essays and their forms. The best essays create subtle, lively interactions between and within subjects, forms and languages that can howl and shape-shift in the final essay itself. These genre-bending essays can deepen and complicate the knowledge we make for ourselves – as we experience reverberations of meaning in the multiple readings each specific open text encourages. Included here is the writing and thinking of Anne Carson, Gertrude Stein, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Lyn Hejinian and others.
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Dear Susannah (April 2017)
More LessAbstractI propose that the conventions of academia may subject the various practices and practitioners of contemporary art to a set of behaviours that privileges certain modes of knowledge and the discovery and presentation of that knowledge over others. This text aims to perform this position through its form, as a means in and of itself to assert the agency of creative practice as a set of processes, and outcomes that are not in any way lacking in rigour, or needing to be brought into line, or licked into shape. The writing you read has been assembled slowly, in pieces, both knowingly and unknowingly, drawing on an array of writing approaches, channeling a spectrum of literary and creative forms, from within and across and around fiction, art writing and other modes of experimental writing. This text is not an academic article, although it was written as a willing acceptance of an invitation to be included in this journal; as with much contemporary art practice, it performs through and in relation to the place that it is encountered within and I expect this to be the case here. This is part one of a two-part article in the form of a letter.
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Dislocated composition: Overview, transcript and selected articles with reference to The Necropolitan Line
More LessAbstractThe following work makes reference to The Necropolitan Line, an exhibition at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds (December 2015–February 2016). The Exhibition Composition and Overview is drawn from the various forms of information that were originally provided for the gallery employees. This information is interspersed with physical descriptions of the exhibited items. Implicitly about unsettled bodies, the text makes no attempt to resolve the resultant combination of positions: it situates itself in the present tense while it locates the exhibition in the past; it refers to the artist in the third person and exploits multiple sources without asserting an overall voice. The first part of the work provides the context for the storytelling, which is the body of the work, here dislocated to the two appendices. These contain the transcript for a live reading and a reformulated selection of newspaper articles from the exhibition.
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I like the unpath best: Art-practice-writing and the creation of complex, generative and complicating forms and contexts
More LessAbstractSituating myself as a visual artist with a multimodal practice, this article will explore the relationship of writing to making, using the relationship of writing to my own practice to explore questions relating to research processes, the volume of information gathered and the insertion of other disciplinary perspectives. Here, I will address the element of my practice that is based in landscape, specifically explorations that begin with the idea that places are multilayered, ever-changing, embodied and always active. In seeing places as experiential fields of investigation, writing can add a more complex dimension as it flows from the landscape itself and research about it, to practice, with writing occasionally becoming the artform itself.
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Dear Louise (April 2015)
More LessAbstractI propose that the conventions of academia may subject the various practices and practitioners of contemporary art to a set of behaviours that privileges certain modes of knowledge and the discovery and presentation of that knowledge over others. This text aims to perform this position through its form, as a means in and of itself to assert the agency of creative practice as a set of processes, and outcomes that are not in any way lacking in rigour, or needing to be brought into line, or licked into shape. The writing you read has been assembled slowly, in pieces, both knowingly and unknowingly, drawing on an array of writing approaches, channeling a spectrum of literary and creative forms, from within and across and around fiction, art writing and other modes of experimental writing. This text is not an academic article, although it was written as a willing acceptance of an invitation to be included in this journal; as with much contemporary art practice, it performs through and in relation to the place that it is encountered within and I expect this to be the case here. This is part two of a two-part article in the form of a letter.
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The dress of thought: Form and style in contemporary art writing
More LessAbstract‘The dress of thought’ is a consideration of recent developments in the style and form of art writing, looking specifically at narrative and experimental modes of writing that operate as ‘criticism in the expanded field’. This article seeks to define, map and navigate paraliterary forms of art writing, countering frequent assertions that such writing is uncritical or apolitical. In arguing for style and form as essential critical vehicles through which judgement, reference and evaluation can be inferred, I contend that these approaches represent a subversive reappraisal of the role and function of critics and criticism.
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‘You're the least important person in the room and don't forget it’: The intimate relations of subjectivity and the illegitimate everyday
More LessAbstractCollaging epistolary passage and theoretical discussion, this article both embodies and investigates the intimate, cerebral and emotional voice as a post-critical device and a politics of the personal-made-public. Critical memoir and autotheory are examined as rhetorical forms where criticality is charged by correlation to one’s own life. First-person critique, or the ‘radically intimate’, is recognized as a post-critical turn and as a revisionist return to poststructuralist critiques of subjectivity and citational practices of self-writing. A particular focus is this mode of enquiry applied to art writing and acting as a meta-critique of the conditions of creative practice. As a self-reflexive research methodology, it is argued that first-person observation, inflected by affect, intimacy and the quotidian, can be understood not only as a countercultural trend but as a radical intervention in the means, production and historiography of contemporary art, literature and its discourses.
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Will Internets eat brain?
More LessAbstract‘Will Internets eat brain?’ is developed from text in some of my recent video installations, performances and writing projects. The writing explores processes of performative assemblage(s) highlighting activities of accumulation, fragmentation and arrangement, together with everyday interactions between body, technology and the Internet. The text appropriates information retrieval and Internet searches taking the form of a series of cut ups and punctured narratives, SMS language/textese and netspeak. It is experimental, situated both within and against various discourses and protocols and established codes. A virus or infective agent, the writing takes up queer practices of dis-identification; the act of rejecting dominant and pervasive ideologies as a strategy to explore and disrupt entrenched power structures of language, image and words. It is stark, it frustrates, drawing to attention non-linearity, multiplicity-ness and nowotony. An algorithmic tone or voice runs throughout the text. Any singular discursive argument scrambles, lacks concentration or is faulty. ‘Will Internets eat brain?’ was commissioned by MAP Magazine, Glasgow, and presented for Glasgow Film Festival 2017. Earlier versions appeared at ISEA International Symposium on Electronic Art, Hong Kong and Arnolfini, Bristol.
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Fractured consciousness
Authors: Lindsay Seers and M. Anthony PenwillAbstractOne cognitive function that seems to keep the mind very busy is the task of narration. Our brains are extremely skilled at finding plausible narratives in any given situation, no matter how seemingly disjointed or chaotic, creating cohesion from the fragments of consciousness and reason. The mind will wrap itself around a set of disparate events and find causal relationships where probably none exist. It will verify an already established world-view, interpreting events in such a way as to reaffirm prejudices and justifications. The stories we tell ourselves and others and how they are reinforced and gain power through technologies is a fascination that underpins my work as an artist. My works are saturated in both storytelling and narrative. This article considers the relationship between synthetic intelligence and narrative, looking at how my work as an artist has been influenced by the findings and propositions, particularly in relation to consciousness, of neuroscientists including Chris Frith, Paul Fletcher and Anil Seth.
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Volumes & issues
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Volume 17 (2024)
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Volume 16 (2023)
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Volume 15 (2022)
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Volume 14 (2021)
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Volume 13 (2020)
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Volume 12 (2019)
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Volume 11 (2018)
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Volume 10 (2017 - 2018)
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Volume 9 (2016)
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Volume 8 (2015)
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Volume 7 (2014)
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Volume 6 (2013)
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Volume 5 (2012)
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Volume 4 (2011 - 2012)
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Volume 3 (2010)
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Volume 2 (2009)
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Volume 1 (2007 - 2008)