Journal of Writing in Creative Practice - Volume 2, Issue 1, 2009

As the Chicago based performance group Goat Island draw twenty years of beginnings to a close, they open up a myriad of lenses for reflection on, and continuation of, their work through the website project The Last Performance [dot org]. Group and non-group members (friends, audiences) build this collaborative writing project by contributing lenses that respond to the constraints set out by the group.

Focusing on the lenses in the dome at the centre of this project, this article explores the stylistic conventions of contributions, perceptions of authenticity, the promise of community, the impossibility of ending and reasons for ceasing to begin.

It does not take many steps for book to transform from predicate to subject, or for object to change from noun to verb. In this article I discuss the book as concept and as object, drawing on the history of the book, and contemporary discourse and practice, to suggest how books engage us as members of society and as individual practitioners. The article draws on Deleuze and Guattari's reconceptualization of the book as plateau, and as assemblages of strata, working rhizomatically rather than programmatically. It draws too on Foucault's reclamation of the book as experience and experiment rather than knowledge-object to suggest ways of encountering the self and the world in the act of writing. Perhaps not surprisingly, I reject the death of the book scenario, and instead offer an expanded notion of the book as that which can lend itself to performative actualizations, to the magic of the fetish object, and to the work of thought itself: the book as cognitive event; the book as ideas machine. To exemplify these notions, I discuss some recent moves in Australia to explore handmade books that operate not only as art objects, but as research products too, and also suggest how digital books offer alternatives to the conventional performances of identity, for writers and readers.

Kenneth Goldsmith's recent recasting of Sol LeWitt's 1967 article Paragraphs on Conceptual Art as Paragraphs on Conceptual Writing flags a significant tendency in contemporary poetics. For Goldsmith, as for LeWitt, the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. Much like the conceptual art of the 1960s, in which all planning and decisions were made beforehand and the execution was a perfunctory affair (LeWitt 1967: 5), a number of contemporary writers have attempted to eliminate the arbitrary, the capricious and the subjective from their texts. While it is true that early conceptualists frequently used language, the turn towards a more overt conceptual poetics in the North American context has occurred in the wake of language writing; this turn means that conceptual writing draws from the insights and practices of both literary and visual art discourse. My critical essay will consider conceptual poetics, with a special focus on the Canadian writer and performer Christian Bk, whose work offers readers a useful site for questioning the interrelationships of performance, concept and writing. Since the early 1990s Bk has produced sound performances, visual texts, artist's bookworks, pataphysical literary theory and formally innovative poetry. My discussion will also address wider questions about the intersection of post-language school poetics and the visual arts. Many of the writers published in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and related journals were keenly interested in the complex relationship among reading, reference and subjectivity, a relationship which they saw as having political as well as aesthetic consequences. To what extent does conceptual poetics continue this interest? What is the relationship between sonic performance and page-based writing? And finally, to what extent do the visual aspects of this work dialogue with its conceptual and sonic dimensions?

Speakers: Performance, Photography and the Loud Page is a book made by the performance company These Horses (Emma Bennett, Lucy Cran, Bill Leslie) in collaboration with photographer Anne Tetzlaff, published in 2007 by Bonfire Books as the first in a series of book projects by artists working in the field of performance and time-based media. My article takes the form of an illustrated glossing of this book, proposing the book as performance, as a site, as a labour of love. The article engages with discussions around the definition of artist's book and bookworks, and with questions of reading and reader-response criticism. While avoiding defining an artist's book, in the same gesture the article situates Speakers in relation to works by Ed Ruscha, Bernhard and Hilla Becher, and John Baldessari. The form of the glossary considers particular uses of words in These Horses' text, and plays with the cross-referencing and recurrence of terms through the book. The book is placed in a discursive and critical context, while remaining open to different disciplines and conventions of engagement.

Exploring the research, devising and writing processes of Third Angel's theatre piece The Lad Lit Project: a one-man show, devised and written by over 40 people. I asked men, What would you call the chapters in the unwritten book of your life story? My friend Annie says, What I like about it most is that I can see the ghosts of the other men on stage the men who aren't in it.

Recently I've been thinking about The Lad Lit Project as an act of ghostwriting. The Lad Lit Project isn't verbatim theatre. I retell other men's stories in my own words, to my own ends; casting the audience as the protagonist. They combine to create an (auto)biography made up of chapters from many men's lives; an overall narrative of life experiences that speaks to me. That speaks, I think, for me, somehow. I tell their stories, as your stories, in order to tell my own.

The paper reflects on modalities and typologies of writing practice within the fine art practice-based doctorate, exploring how looking at ways in which artists have engaged with writing as process, practice and visual/sonic form, can better inform the ways that doctoral writing itself may develop. Using tools developed through a close reading of Katie McLeod's work on typologies of doctoral writing, conducted in 1995, the paper generates a discussion about the relationship between art's methods and critical writing practice. It suggests that the practice-based doctoral project might be considered as a mutually constitutive one, combining both art making and poetics within an integrated whole, and arguing, with McLeod, that in the practice-based doctorate we are seeing the re-emergence of the artist as scholar, informed by practice and alive to art's investments in writing's digital, visual, performative and sonic forms in a period that theorists have dubbed the late age of print, an age in which the status, form and function of writing, and of print media, are being radically and productively challenged.

This article focuses on choreographic documentation and it particularly questions the role of the written text as a document of a dance work. It begins by tracing my research's attempt at doing without writing. After discussing the need for documentation in practice-based research, the article exposes ontological assumptions about writing: its ontology of permanence as the ability to remain through classical time. It then moves to a discussion of permanence in relation to post-classical time (duration): permanence as memory. The discussion then shifts to my attempt to create a documentation modality which utilized the bodily and image memories of a choreographic work, and in so doing dispensed with writing and utilized choreography itself as its own documentation vehicle. The final section discusses the limitation of this documentation modality and how, in the end, it returned the research to writing.

In 1998 Steve Dutton and Steve Swindells formed the artist collaboration Dutton and Swindells. In 2008 they completed a three-month artist residency programme at Ssamzie Space, Seoul, South Korea. During the residency the artists founded the Institute of Beasts by introducing live animals into the studio as members of a faculty; to suggest new readings of the work but also as a strategy to potentially generate art as a form of encounter in which different compulsions or pathologies pull in various ways but equally live together in a frame or scenario in much the same way as practice can exist as performance, text and as object. An interesting aspect of having an animal(s) in the studio is the unpredictable nature of what happens to the work when it becomes a perch, a hutch or a burrow and what happens to the artist's practice when they share a space with other animal(s). This article and accompanying images form a written/visual extension to a presentation they delivered at Writing Encounters, York St John University, 1113 September 2008.

Playing with Words: The Spoken Word in Artistic Practice, ed. Cathy Lane (2008) Cromford, Derbyshire: RGAP/CRiSAP, 206 pp., ISBN 9780955827334, 12.99