JWCP 2 (2) pp. 151–158 © Intellect Ltd 2009 151
Journal of Writing in Creative Practice Volume 2 Number 2 © 2009 Intellect Ltd
Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/jwcp.2.2.151/1
Keywords
creative knowledge
Situational Fiction
explanation
artists’ writing
Susan Sontag
Discussion paper from the Working
Group on ‘Situational Fiction’, Chelsea
College of Art & Design, University of
the Arts London: On the value of
‘Situational Fiction’ for an artist’s writing
1
Mary Anne Francis University of the Arts London, UK
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 suppres-
sion 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 exten-
sions 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.
Introduction
• This short paper is designed to seed discussion among colleagues,
students and other interested parties regarding the benefits of fictional
writing and, specifically, one form of that – ‘Situational Fiction’ – in
artists’ written texts.
1. The term ‘artist’
is used here to
designate ‘creative
practitioners’; while
the Working Group
was fine art-specific,
we think that there
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Mary Anne Francis
is little in this paper
that precludes its
relevance for design-
ers and other cultural
producers.
2. Sontag regards ‘expla-
nation’ as a cognate
of ‘interpretation’
and includes it in her
(anti-)topic’s remit –
as an operation that
has a more determin-
ing relation to its
object than her title’s
term. That is also
how this paper uses
‘explanation’.
3. See George Steiner’s
Real Presences (1989:
12 and 16) though
the point is implicit.
Nor as Steiner also
notes, is criticism
necessary as a
discrete and non-
aesthetic enterprise,
when ‘[a]ll serious
art, music and
literature is a critical
act’ (Steiner 1989: 11).
4. No judgement of
that judgement is
intended: ‘failure’
in this context may
be necessary to a
thing’s success as art.
However, the idea
that art might com-
prise its own critical
reflection is over-
looked, and to that
extent, the call for an
‘external’ apparatus is
a little premature.
• In particular, the paper engages with the idea of ‘Situational Fiction’ as a
useful counter to the tendency towards explanation (of the artwork) that
too often defines the function of artists’ writing.
• The Working Group would like to flag the relationship between this ini-
tiative and proposed developments in ‘Imaginative Writing’.
1.0 Explaining ‘explanation’
A definition of the term is usefully located in ‘explain’, and in the etymol-
ogy of that: ‘Latin explanare, (as EX
1
, [L., ‘out of’] planus ‘flat’, assimilated
to PLAIN
1
)’ (Concise Oxford English Dictionary 1995). And the definition of
PLAIN
1
runs: ‘adj., adv., n. […] • adj. 1 clear; evident (is plain to see)’
(Concise Oxford English Dictionary 1995).
Hence, even if tendentiously, ‘explanation’ is an ‘out of flatness’, or a
‘making flat’. (Fancifully: it is a thing ‘from Flatland’). Explanation is a mak-
ing plain (and plane) the plain of making (that is often bumpy).
1.1 The command to explain – in words
The commonplace that art requires explaining goes a long way back. As
Susan Sontag notes, it is a consequence of seeing art as ‘content’, which
originates with Plato’s theory of ‘mimesis’
2
(Sontag 1994: 3). Sontag does
not elaborate on the reasons for this emphasis on art as ‘content’ – though
it would be possible to speculate, and suggest, following Jürgen Habermas,
for example, that modernity prefers the ‘cognitive’ over and above ‘aesthet-
ic-expressive’ elements (Habermas 2003: 1129). Nor does she discuss the
logocentric aspect of ‘the never consummated project of interpretation’ –
the fact that by and large, the project takes place in words (Sontag 1994: 5).
Here, we would want to note, with George Steiner, that words are not the
necessary medium of interpretation, or of cultural commentary.
3
It is not,
however, the intention of this paper to address that commonplace (ripe
though it is for shaking down) but, instead, the commonplace that art ben-
efits from explanation or that explanation is a reasonable response to art.
And to take action accordingly.
1.2 Contemporary commands to artists to explain their work
(in writing)
The command for explanation is the most insistent in the area of art as
research. (In this, art as research has much in common with the educa-
tional arm of public galleries – an overlap which may owe less to the fact
of their common pedagogic context, and more to shared ideologies of
pedagogy). By way of evidence, we cite the following:
• Many of the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s directives for
‘practice-led research’ in the Creative and Performing Arts – prem-
ised, as they are, on art’s failure to represent itself contextually and
critically, and document its process.
4
While the actual term ‘expla-
nation’ is absent from the seminal Arts and Humanities Research
Board (the former AHRC) 2003 paper, the demand for creative
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153
Discussion paper from the Working Group on ‘Situational Fiction’ …
5. The ‘explanation’
that the AHRC
demands is less of the
hermeneutic variety
(i.e. a form of ‘close-
reading’) and more
of the sort that
regards the creative
text as a cultural
phenomenon.
6. There is much to be
said about the rea-
sons for contemporary
culture’s preference
for this ontology. For
now, we will simply
note that emphasizing
‘content’ facilitates
the deployment of
art in the service
of ‘knowledge and
understanding’ as
construed by instru-
mental rationality.
outputs to be accompanied by a ‘scholarly apparatus’ is neverthe-
less, and not surprisingly, read as a demand for those outputs to
be ‘explained’.
5
In his response to the paper, Euan McArthur refers
to the ‘scholarly apparatus’ as ‘an accompanying explanatory text’
(McArthur 2004: 79).
• Elsewhere, the AHRC takes up McArthur’s gloss: paragraph 85 of the
2008 Research Funding Guide notes: ‘The Council would expect [crea-
tive] practice to be accompanied by some form of documentation of the
research process, as well as some form of textual analysis or explana-
tion, to support its position and demonstrate critical reflection’ (AHRC
2008b: 26). And the AHRC Doctoral Guide (2008) repeats this verbatim
(AHRC 2008a: 26–27).
Suffice to say that these instructions seem to have a global reach: in a dis-
cussion of practice-based research entailing ‘creative artefacts’, the
University of Technology, Sydney commends the idea that writing ‘clarifies
the basis of the claim for [the practical work’s] originality’ (Creativity and
Cognition Studios, University of Technology Sydney).
1.3 The problems with the will-to-signify and its technology
of explanation
Aside from the objections that this paper has already noted – namely,
that ‘explanation’ flattens, and represents the worst end of a cultural cli-
ché – there are other problems that accrue when ‘explanation’ is a mode
of approach to culture.
1.3.1 Explanation and its others
As Susan Sontag notes, interpretation – as an outcome of ‘mimesis’ –
implies only one of several ways of thinking the ontology of art.
6
She
writes, as the opening of her essay, ‘The earliest experience of art must
have been that it was incantatory, magical [that] art was an instrument of
ritual’ (Sontag 1994: 3). Of art thus construed we would not ask, ‘What
does it mean?’ Or (with the AHRC) ‘What is its significance?’ Rather, we
might ask, ‘Does it work?’ Or ‘What is its affect?’ De-naturalizing art-as-
content, Sontag’s move proposes that we outline the extended paradigm
of art as other types of thing … art as social function; art as pleasure; art
as outcome; even art as useful object (following Duchamp’s suggestion
that a Rembrandt could be used as an ironing board) (Duchamp 1973:
142). And clearly, what comprises a legitimate response to art would dif-
fer as the theory of what art was changed.
Moreover, as Sontag’s text proposes ‘explanation’ as just one of several
types of response to art, it chimes with Steiner’s claim that criticism can
occur in different forms. Taken together, these comments propose two axes
of a matrix that starts to map some of the possibilities for discourse around
art, and which locates ‘verbal explanation’ as just one combination of pos-
sibilities in a larger field.
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154
Mary Anne Francis
Medium of response – examples
Response to a work of art Words Visual images Other
creative
medium
e.g.
musical
work
Non-fictional Fictional
7
Non-
aesthetic
Aesthetic
Type of response –
examples
Interpretation including
‘explanation’ – hermeneutics
Review e.g.
novel;
journal
article
Artwork
Discussion
of work’s
function –
teleology
Personal –
i.e. sensuous
and
psychological
‘affect’
Artwork
Social – i.e.
discussion of
artwork’s
purpose for a
given society
as e.g.
ritual/magic/
commodity
Matrix
Description of entity –
ontology
Auction
catalogue-
blurb;
an ‘erotics’
of art
(Sontag)
Analyses of origins –
aetiology
e.g. Bio-
graphical
criticism
e.g. X-
ray of a
painting
Figure 1: Matrix depicting the discourse around art via two analytic categories: Type of response
and Medium of response. Note that it is indicative rather than exhaustive – both in the contents
of its ‘axes’ and in the contents of the spaces that those axes generate. It is intended to indicate the
way in which the current configuration of discourse around art represses alternative manifestations.
1.3.2 Undecidability
Taking a very different tack, we could also argue, in the wake of Paul de Man,
that ‘explanation’ is a hopeless task. Paradoxically perhaps, this is the import
of his essay ‘Resistance to Theory’ (de Man 1986). For art, as a mode of sig-
nification – if it must be thought of in this way – refuses ‘decidability’ (i.e. the
7. Note that fictional
writing is an option
for all the spaces in
this column.
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155
Discussion paper from the Working Group on ‘Situational Fiction’ …
8. To denote, so it
seems, a category of
Science Fiction, but
we have yet to find
an a priori definition
of the term in that –
or any other –
application.
9. Note the relationship
between reviewing
and talking is not
symmetrical. The
former prohibits art-
ist’s self-reflection
but the latter tends
to court it in the form
of the ‘artist’s gallery
talk’ and the open
studio/residency
discussion.
10. Which begs the
question as to how
an artist’s novel is to
be distinguished from
a novel (proper). The
point here, perhaps, is
that an artist’s fiction
may not be a matter
of its situatedness
alone. Issues of aes-
thetics specific to the
type of author (artist),
for example, may
come into play.
telos of all explanation and much interpretation, too) (de Man 1986: 14–17).
Writing of the ‘literary’ (and art is, undecidably, a valid substitute), de Man
identifies this as the ‘rhetorical dimension of discourse’; ‘the tropological
dimension of language’ that resists theory as ‘the stable, cognitive field that
extends from grammar to logic to a general science of man and of the phe-
nomenal world’ (de Man 1986: 17). Only a theory that resists theory thus
construed, would, de Man argues, resist decidability.
Hence:
2.0 Instead of explanation and its relatives…
…this paper offers ‘Situational Fiction’. Which is also a response to the
hegemony of explanation, as described above.
2.1 Defining ‘Situational Fiction’
The term is not entirely new; it seems it has occasional use, elsewhere
8
–
but its deployment here is new – as it describes a certain use of writing in
the context of an artist’s practice.
2.1.1 ‘Fiction’
First: to the ‘fictional’ aspect, and the question ‘What does “fiction”
designate?’ – noting that term has several meanings. We are not com-
mending false beliefs, no matter how expedient they might be. For this
would not advance the cause of research as a truth-seeking missile. Nor
would ‘fiction’ as a simple fabrication, or invention as opposed to fact
(‘fiction’ as a lie). Rather, we are advocating ‘fiction’ in its complex sense
as ‘literal lie for abstract truth’. Or: ‘true lies minus facts’. This is ‘fiction’ in
its novelistic sense, but ‘fiction’ that is more than novels.
2.1.2 The situations of an artist’s writing
The various locations of an artist’s writing – where it is consumed or
destined for – are reasonably familiar: most obviously, there is the ‘art-
ist’s statement’, which takes extreme form as a manifesto. Artists write
reviews (of other artists’ work); and talk about their work and that of others.
9
Artists lecture, and write conference papers. Sometimes they write books.
As Art in Theory testifies, artists’ essays make a major contribution to
that field. Student-artists hurdle essays/dissertations/theses. Artists
write reports on projects … these include their RAE returns.
Each type of writing is associated with a (different) situation, when ‘situ-
ation’ refers to cultural-social-space, and when sometimes that space brings
with it a specific physicality – an edition of a journal, conference hall, and
so forth.
Hence ‘Situational Fiction’ is the use of fiction, as defined above, in the
varied contexts of an artist’s writing. It is fiction, in its novelistic sense, that
is written for a non-novelistic context: fiction outside the covers of a book,
unless it is an art(ist’s) book.
10
Having been defined, if only in a rudimen-
tary way, we offer it without inverted commas: Situational Fiction.
2.2 The rationale for Situational Fiction
We propose it has a role to play in the varied contexts of an artist’s writ-
ing for the following reasons which, to begin with, mirror the problems
with explanation as identified in 1.3–1.3.2.
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