Rite, write, rote, right and sometimes wrong....
Forthcoming in October 2009, RITE is the result of a nine month collaboration with Critical Communities, a New Work Network and Open Dialogues project exploring the practice of critical writing on and as new work (interdisciplinary and live art).
Featuring the work of the Critical Community, RITE is a collection that brings together 18 original texts by UK based art writers that enact expanded acts of criticism, question the essay form, use language as material and attempt to work the different ways that writing can be on or about new work.
Contributors include Emma Bennett, David Berridge, Rachel Lois Clapham and Alex Eisenberg, Emma Cocker, Hannah Crosson, Amelia Crouch, Chloe Dechery, Tim Jeeves, Emma Leach, Johanna Linsley, Joanna Loveday, Charlotte Morgan, Mary Paterson, Jim Prevett, Nathan Walker and Wood McGrath.
RITE is commissioned by New Work Network, designed by Wood McGrath, edited Open Dialogues and produced by the members of Critical Communities with external editorial advice from Maria Fusco. It includes a foreword by New Work Network and introduction by Open Dialogues. All material is copyright the authors and Critical Communities 2009.
The publication RITE can be bought here.
A review of the publication can be found here and below is a selected extract from the review:
“ … Emma Cocker’s piece, ‘Re: Writing, 1993-2009, 2000 words’ (p. 13-21), is a collection of 296 footnotes, including one image, separated by neat semicolons and displayed in small, professional-looking type at the bottom of each of seven pages. Phrases range from the art-typical, ‘(202) Pause is then a critical gesture’, to the romantic, ‘(269) The pages flutter like butterfly’s wings warmed in the sun’, and the psychological, ‘(255) Keeping certain voices at bay’. A curious attempt might be made to read the notes as a linear, or a dreamlike, narrative, however what is more useful about them is that they appear to refer back to a multitude of unknown/unknowable thoughts, texts, actions or observations collated by the artist. Footnotes become, therefore, a way of figuring those longing-filled gaps in contemporary criticism that initially provoked Critical Communities to begin writing for, and amongst, themselves.
[…] Both Record and RITE are broadly titled after their respective functions. However, both books spill quickly outside of their remits, working more as textual-visual performances or displays, rather than as critical, or even truthful, documents. In this way, Record and RITE, though very different publications, feel similarly romantic, desirous, self-conscious. This marks them out as books by artists. These books ask to be read differently, slowly; sometimes critically, at other times emotionally; with caution, with patience; with generosity and with pleasure. They show that paying attention to the ways in which artists use and expand text is particularly appropriate right now, gently to challenge and to refresh what is typically acceptable as art writing, both for artists and for critics.”