Invited contributor to an essay on critical writing by Chris Brown (Reviews Editor at a-n). Other contributors included John Beagles, Neil Mulholland, John Slyce, Joshua Sofaer and Peter Suchin.
"There is a deceptively complex relationship between the artist’s intentions in her work, the curator’s interpretation of that work, and the writer’s response to that presentation. Writers’ approaches to this relationship vary enormously, from careful negotiation to absolute autonomy. And, as writer and lecturer Emma Cocker points out, the context influences this relationship too: “Is the writing intended as criticism, as a form of critique or qualitative judgement; or an interpretation or contextual construct? Is it dialogic or responsive; academic or theoretical; performative or propositional; experimental or speculative, playful or simply a form of reportage that documents or describes a piece of work? ... Cocker's writing is often informed by conversations or interviews with artists. She states, "This kind of dialogue between artists and writers is not a way of simply clarifying the intentions of the artist that are then articulated by the writer, but is rather a space where meanings are proposed, negotiated and contested ... Cocker's interest lies in developing and examining critical contexts to frame an artist's practice, as opposed to passing a critical judgment of the work itself or "trying to rigidly locate its meaning or deny the work its inherent instability".
Read more on the Interface Section of the a-n website @ http://interface.a-n.co.uk/articles/single/379627
- emma cocker
- Emma Cocker is a writer-artist and Associate Professor in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University, UK. Her research enquiry unfolds at the threshold between writing/art, involving diverse process-oriented, dialogic-collaborative and aesthetic-poetic approaches to working with and through language. Cocker often works in collaboration with other artists on durational projects, where the studio-gallery or site-specific context is approached as a live laboratory for shared artistic research. Cocker’s writing has been published in Failure, 2010; Stillness in a Mobile World, 2010; Drawing a Hypothesis: Figures of Thought, 2011; Hyperdrawing: Beyond the Lines of Contemporary Art, 2012; On Not Knowing: How Artists Think, 2013; Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line, 2017; The Creative Critic: Writing as/about Practice, 2018; Live Coding: A User's Manual, 2023, and in the solo collections, The Yes of the No, 2016, and How Do You Do?, 2025. Cocker is co-founder of the international Society for Artistic Research Special Interest Group for Language-based Artistic Research. See also https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2985-7839