Showing papers in "Journal of Writing in Creative Practice in 2008"

Here, ‘I’ am

Abstract: In this paper I will discuss three communicative acts: an ephemeral artwork InMemory; a narrative ‘The art of being lost’; and a paper ‘Ephemeral Art: Mourning and Loss’. These were presented, respectively, at the Salina Art Centre, Kansas; Emotional Geography Conference, Queens University, Kingston, Ontario; and (Im)permanence: Cultures In/Out of Time at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. These pieces deal with the same subject, but are presented in different modes reflecting the requirements of different sites – a gallery, a conference, and a book. All three aspired to creativity as well as rigour, to articulate intuitive as well as empirical knowledge. I will discuss these works in terms of site specificity and integrated practice, rather than opposite poles of a creative spectrum, which places text at one end and image at the other. I will demonstrate how each mode has informed the other and how each has benefited from the particular requirement imposed by the ‘site’. The site here is not just the physical location but includes the anticipated audience, the environment, and the atmosphere. The works are interactive and are akin to the concept in communication analysis of ‘recipient design’. I hope this case study may be useful in providing an alternative to viewing writing in art and design as inherently problematic. Instead, I offer an analysis of a multifaceted practice in which the ‘I’ is always present, implicitly or explicitly.

The Critical in Design (Part One)

Abstract: The paper concerns the critical in design which is examined under three headings: structurally, as an internal aspect of the processes of designing; economically, in terms of the internal collusion between (weak) design and the strength, persistence and lure of market forces and private interests; historically, in terms of the emergence of a situation—the artificial becoming the horizon and medium of our existence—that now marks our times as one where design takes on new critical dimensions, above all in relation to securing and creating the conditions that can support a humane sustainable global futures. I: The indispensability of the critical ‘Criticality’ trips uncomfortably off the tongue, feels instinctively awkward in use. No surprise then that its use is unfamiliar, and not only in everyday speech. For design, ever unsure how to treat the critical, the connotations are in any case difficult: it is one thing to deploy criticism (in an operational context – to make it useful to designers as in a studio critique), it is even permissible (just) to be a critic (in a professional sense) – there is, after all, if in embryo, a field of design criticism. But what are we to make of the critical when we deploy it as a noun? What does criticality describe? And what would it be to have the critical not just as an occasional moment, but as that which defines the very state of being of a practice? It was perhaps these uncertainties that prompted, in December 2007, a rare silence on the Ph.D.-Design list-serve. Kaja Gretinger, a designer, researcher and writer from the Jan Van Eyck Akadamie sought help in understanding the potential of the ‘critical’ of design. (The epigraph reproduces the essence of her request.) But though pregnant with implication, for practice as much as for theory, her questions evoked little response. They were, as Barthes might have put it, the ‘motor of no development’. Nor did they provoke what many might think long overdue, namely a debate (or at least a discussion, a symposia) around the role of the critical in design.1 177 JWCP 1 (2) pp. 177–189 © Intellect Ltd 2008 1. It should be noted that Kaja Gretinger has recently answered her own questions in a short but telling paper Thinking Through Blind Spots, 2008. (Unpublished at time of writing) Keywords

The relevance of academic writing in design education : academic writing as a tool for structuring reasons

Abstract: This paper focuses on the current function of academic writing for design education within Sweden. It argues that in its present form academic writing is used to explain the final result by accounting for the process, but it would be much more useful to designers if the form were modified to fit the purpose of justifying a design solution. Interpretations of the academic report as chronologically telling about the process have, in Swedish design education, resulted in muddled texts where the final results are absent or hidden in the lengthy description of the process. The academic report fulfils its function because it is a logical construction. Its form includes explication of the research-process because this process determines the reliability and/or validity of the new knowledge arrived at. An excellent design-process does not, however, guarantee excellent design: a design-solution is justified only by solving the problem. Adjusted to this purpose, academic writing could become a useful tool, helping students to grasp which explicit reasons and grounds may support their definition of the problem, outline how their design may be a solution to it, and also show where reasons and grounds may prove to be poor. Writing, in a modified academic form, can become a useful and integrated tool in design education, primarily if the intellectual skill developed through this writing is useful also for the practitioner.

Auspicious Reasoning: Can metadesign become a mode of governance?

Abstract: As society must very soon adopt more ecological ways of living, this article argues that a primary duty of all citizens should be to envision better ways of living. However, the way we tend to reason remains an obstacle to change. This is because most of us are taught to think using strongly rhetorical modes of argumentation that derive from oratory. This approach is symptomatic of our choice-based consumer society. It is supported by an education system that reduces the teaching of reading and writing to a focus on only one or two of the six cardinal relations that bind author, context, text and reader together within an ethical whole. It also reflects our crude democratic process, which merely invites the bulk of the population to choose a party or representative from a ready-made set of options. The article suggests that academic thought has focused too much on the logical, internal (i.e. epistemological) consistency, and veracity of text and not enough on its actual effects, which are often unintended...

The Good Collusion Defeats the Lone Ranger

Abstract: We all collaborate from birth, in learning language for instance, in learning to play, and as writers. This paper discusses collaborative practice, how creative writers work with each other, including composite authorship as collaboration, as well as collaborative projects with visual and/or sound artists to generate material outside of conventional forms. Various questions are explored; what issues emerge in creative collaboration, especially cross-arts? How might one’s voice, or aesthetics, affect creative text? How might this kind of creativity be a social process? I will utilize examples from established collaborative partnerships. The paper addresses the concept and practicalities of collaboration, the issues and processes,and gives a brief discussion of theoretical ideas around these issues

In the Café Flaubert

Abstract: Developing my long-held contention that an artist might write art-theory differently from non-artist theorists, this paper offers an instantiation of one possible approach. First and foremost, it proposes that an artist's art-theory might utilise their understanding of aesthetic form and functioning to conceive of writing as another ‘art-form’, now taking place in words and referencing the structures associated with that medium. With a nod to Plato’s dialogues, the text adopts the format of a fictional conversation offered as reportage, which takes place between the artist-writer and a philosopher - an expert on the subject of ‘truth-regimes’. The artist consults him in order to progress a project. What ensues puts the artist-writer's preference for a ‘realist’ approach to writing (representation as ‘reflection’) into play with the academic's overview of this and other 'truth regimes'. Introduced to Richard Rorty’s pragmatism and hence the idea of ‘truth’ as ‘use-value’, the artist is initially bewildered, only later realising that it takes her project in a new direction. Given that the text’s departure from the form of conventional art-theory is embodied (not just represented), the issues that it raises are implicit, but include: the (dis)advantages of fictional-dialogue as 'theory'. (On the one hand both the reader and the writer imaginatively inhabit different points of view more readily than happens with non-fictional prose. On the other hand, fictional dialogue may indulge unreliable spokespersons for particular theoretical positions.) Another point for debate concerns the recourse to the Renaissance pedagogic concept of 'teaching through delight'. (While aesthetic pleasure-in-the-text is a spur for both the writer and the reader, the sensuous dimensions of dramatic embodiment may offer a distraction from more substantial issues.) As much as this text is an instance of ‘a writing-as-an-art-form as theory’, it also proposes, reciprocally, that 'theory' may be found outside non-fictional, non-aesthetic academic discourse. When this is the oblique logic of the writing's form, it is also explicitly elaborated in the article, as Durer’s woodcut The Draughtsman and the Lute is seen to comprise observations about the conditions of representation that re-appear in the ‘picture’ that is the fictional discussion in the Cafe Flaubert.

Unnatural fact: the fictions of Robert Smithson

Abstract: Robert Smithson is an influential figure in the history of contemporary writing in creative practice. Indebted as his work is to Lewis Carroll, Edgar Allan Poe, Vladimir Nabakov and Antonin Artaud this paper will argue for a distinctly literary examination of Robert Smithson's art. Smithson is best known for his earth-works such as The Spiral Jetty (1972) and Asphalt Rundown (1969) in which he offsets cultural and natural forms of production. Yet Smithson's ‘site-specific’ practice must be situated in terms of his textual approach. By focusing on aspects of Smithson's writing which call into question mediation, representation, mimesis and documentary, the paper will demonstrate how, throughout Smithson's approach, writing is a means of unsettling the cultural and the textual space of art production. Texts such as ‘A Museum of Language in the Vicinity of Art’ (1968), ‘The Spiral Jetty’ (1969) and ‘A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic’ (1967) are written in correspondence with artworks as a means of relocating the place of production with the reader. ‘The Spiral Jetty’ essay, for instance, which combines aspects of photography, documentary and film-making stages the Jetty's production by drawing attention to its form as a textual, cultural and factual production. The paper will argue, as indeed Smithson's obsessively essayistic reportage seems to acknowledge, that The Spiral Jetty is a matter of writing. Emblematic of Smithson's work with site-specificity more broadly, the paper will argue that the earthwork exists most fully in the correspondence between writing and fact.