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

Classical Myth/Contemporary Art

My essay, Over and Over, Again and Again, is going to be published in the forthcoming book, Classical Myth/Contemporary Art which has secured Ashgate Press as its publisher (more information to follow soon). My essay explores various practices in relation to the myth of Sisyphus (more information here).

    Image: Vlatka Horvat - Restless


‘Over And Over, Again And Again’ represents The Potentiality of Failure, a sub-section of my broader enquiry, Not Yet There (http://www.not-yet-there.blogspot.com/), which posits a critical value for failure as resistance to or refusal of the dominant progressive, teleological or goal-oriented tendencies of contemporary experience. The contribution to knowledge is the elaboration of a specifically Sisyphean model of failure, for investigating irresolution and incompletion as purposeful, generative strategies within artistic practice. A  4000-word excerpt has subsequently been published in Failure (ed.) Lisa Le Feuvre (Whitechapel Gallery/MIT, 2010); a survey collection including contributions by world-leading thinkers including Giorgio Agamben, Samuel Beckett, Gilles Deleuze and artists John Baldessari, Francis AlΓΏs, Fischli & Weiss and Bruce Nauman.

The chapter’s ideas have been tested at international conferences (PSi # 15 Misperformance: Misfiring, Misfitting, Misreading, Zagreb, 2009) and interviews conducted during the research have been published (‘Flagging Possibilities’, in conversation with Vlatka Horvat', Dance Theatre Journal, 2009). An essay on Horvat’s practice was included in a monograph (In Other Words …, Bergen Kunsthalle, 2011). Parallel investigations have since interrogated the critical potential of failure, irresolution and accident as ‘tactical’ methods within artistic practice including: (Re–) – performance lecture in collaboration with Rachel Lois Clapham in Accidentally on Purpose, Quad, 2013, ‘Moves Towards the Incomprehensible Wild’ – journal article in art+research (2011) addressing the critical efficacy of incomprehensibility within artistic practice through the prism of Alain Badiou’s philosophy; ‘Not Yet There: Endless Searches and Irresolvable Quests’ – book chapter in Telling Stories: Countering Narrative in Art, Theory and Film (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009); and ‘Salvaging a Romantic Trope’ – book chapter in Shipwreck in Art and Literature (Routledge, 2013).