Showing papers in "Journal of Writing in Creative Practice in 2009"

Space and Place: Writing encounters self

Abstract: In addition to contributing this editorial article, Susan Orr and Claire Hind guest edited this issue.

'Dramaturge as Midwife: The Writing Process within a New Zealand community theatre project'

Abstract: This article examines the different writing processes within a New Zealand intra-cultural community theatre project. Drawing on a practitioner perspec- tive I explore how marginalized minority community groups were able to write their own stories and discover a collective identity. In analysing this process I develop the metaphor of the midwife to conceptualize and theorize the role of the dramaturge. I use this case study to interrogate Barthes’s notion (1977) of the ‘death of the author’ and Bhabha’s argument (1994) about how some forms of multiculturalism can lead to political empowerment. In conclusion, I suggest that this multi-authored community project exemplifies the kind of empowerment that Bhabha describes.

Sensing the story: structure and improvisation in writing for performance

Abstract: This article discusses the process of writing through devising in performance. It takes as a case study Apart of and A Part From in which muscle and sense memory – touch, smell, taste, sound and sight – were the points of departure for a contemporary performance piece on migration and identity. This was a practice-as-research project aimed to better understand the artist’s body (myself) in improvisation with memory fragments. Working from a non-verbal frame the writing experience began as actions in space, then new memories in my body, to maps on paper, to key word and some staging patterns, to systematic capturing of the textual, rhythmic and spatial structures in the emerging 30-minute performance. Various objects were incorporated to give aesthetic coherence of the piece. The article reports on the processes of writing in action, the writing and performing as lived experience and how the writing emerged from the spaces in between – self and other, self and object, self and space, present self and past self.

Rocket to Variant: Artists Writings in Scotland 1963-1984

Abstract: 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.

Glossing Speakers, or bookmaking for amateurs

Abstract: 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 paper takes the form of an illustrated glossing of this book, proposing the book as performance, as a site, as a labour of love. The paper 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 paper 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.

Discussion paper from the working group on “Situational Fiction”

Abstract: This article takes the issue of epistemology in writing for (performance) art to ask: ‘What is the value of using “fictional” – as in “novelistic” – writing in reflective discourse on creative practice generally?’ Using Susan Sontag’s seminal essay ‘Against Interpretation’ as a starting point, the article argues that much writing on art assumes art’s ‘will-to-signify’ – its value as a form of meaning – and consequently ‘explanation’ as the purpose of art writing. The problems with this reflex are discussed, including its suppression of alternative responses, which may include acknowledging that art is an affective entity: it has a function (if, in Kant’s phrase, it is ‘without purpose’) and it has an ontology that may be more than its identity as signification. Extending, or restoring, the scope of art’s reflective discourse in this way, the paper also notes, via reference to George Steiner, that a reciprocal extension for the media of this discourse is also possible, and it seeks to map the two extensions as the axes of a grid that offers varied combinations of the content-form dimensions of art writing. One of these conjunctions produces ‘fictional writing’ as a possible response to art. Seeming to dispel the problem of reductionism in explanatory discourse, the article then goes on to argue that the use of fiction in the spaces of art writing – ‘Situational Fiction’ – may be valuable in other ways as well. Hence, this is an argument for knowledge of creative practice in creative form. But ‘Situational Fiction’ may pursue this ethos of ‘creative knowledge’ in another way as well: as its reflexive dimension implicates the reader in deciding whether any aspect of this academic paper designates this work as ‘fictional’, as the paper understands this.

Writing encounters: Institute of Beasts (2008)

Abstract: 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.

The Last Performance [dot org]: an impossible collaboration.

Abstract: 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.