Journal of Writing in Creative Practice - Volume 2, Issue 3, 2009

Handwriting has been largely replaced by electronic writing media. As these media converge in digital social networks, writing itself becomes increasingly conversational and informal. What implications does this have for knowledge in general and, more specifically, for educators attempting to encourage and develop new writing practices in creative art and design contexts?

The language used to propose and commission works of public art is particularly subject to close technocratic scrutiny. The risk of underestimating risk presses greatly upon all parties involved in the production process, resulting in a literary approach that favours legalese and the hollow rhetoric of socio-economic enhancement. Could some small changes in the key vocabulary used in this field help to produce a public art practice that is more willing to take risk and more capable of engaging with complex evaluations of artistic merit?

In 2002, Hampstead Achieved opened at K Jackson's pub in Edinburgh, a popular artists' hangout. The exhibition was a showcase of zine activity from Scotland and beyond. Curated by Alex Pollard and Neil Mulholland, the show was packed with the naughty ideas that one associates with samizdat or under the counter visual material and writing by artists. Fake bands, fake fanzines, biting critique, nonsense visual poetry and unabashed nerdiness provided an intellectual jolt for those who had forgotten their Dadaist spirit (Pollard and Mulholland 2003).

The zine culture of Scotland has now moved on somewhat, sprouting newer and even naughtier zines. The samizdat material included in this journal provides a sample of the kind of sport that would certainly be included if there was ever to be a Hampstead Revisited exhibition.

The antagonistic and oppositional mode of publications of the 1960s, such as Rocket, and later manifestations of this voice of dissent and discontent in the pages of magazines like Stigma are almost indistinguishable in certain texts. Stigma was the direct precursor for Scotland's most long-standing visual art publication, Variant, established by students at the Glasgow School of Art in 1984. Examining some of the writings of artists who contributed to these publications is a way of identifying the ways in which art theory and criticism in Scotland both reflected and responded to broader Anglophone critical shifts. It is also a means of understanding the crucial generative nature of art writing in establishing an internationally renowned ecology of artistic practice in Scotland.

Artists who write as part of their practice have long made a very significant contribution to art theory and criticism. Artwriting has re-emerged as a practice in its own right and is growing in popularity and controversy among theorists, critics and artists today, leading to a convergence of these professional roles. I use the concept of mise-en-scne to investigate the ways in which artwriting might be better understood as a practice, one that enables emerging creative practitioners to manufacture a field within which to situate their form, to conceive of the production of an imaginative writerly context for their practice as their practice. I consider ways in which newly developing publishing media, practices and cultures enable artwriting to flourish and speculate upon what impact this might have on the hierarchical world of visual art practice as it integrates with new fields of horizontal distribution.

Walking, Writing & Performance: Autobiographical Texts, Deirdre Heddon, Carl Lavery and Phil Smith, ed. Roberta Mock 2009 edition 1 Bristol: Intellect Books, (184 pp.), ISBN: 978-1-84150-155-0, Paperback 19.95

Design Integrations: Research and Collaboration, eds. Sharon Poggenpohl and Keiichi Sato (2009) Bristol: Intellect, (306 pp.) ISBN: 978-1-84150-240-3, Paperback

Writing Design: Object, Process, Discourse, Translation The Design History Society's Annual Conference, University of Hertfordshire, 35 September 2009