Emma Cocker is a writer-artist whose research focuses on artistic processes and practices, and the performing of thinking-in-action therein. Cocker’s language-based artistic research comprises a matrix of writing, reading and conversation practices, including diverse process-oriented, dialogic-collaborative and aesthetic-poetic approaches to working with and through language. 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?, 2024. Cocker is co-founder of the international Society for Artistic Research Special Interest Group for Language-based Artistic Research. She is Associate Professor in Fine Art, Nottingham Trent University.

Essay/Text: Without Rhyme or Reason

Below is a critical response to Vlatka Horvat’s work This Here and That There, which has been commissioned for a critical journal based in Croatia called zarez (www.zarez.hr). The text follows a recent performance of the work by Horvat in the Los Angeles River, presented by Outpost for Contemporary Art. In This Here and That There, Horvat continuously rearranges 50 chairs over a period of eight hours. Each successive chair arrangement implies a set of possible relations between their imagined occupants, evoking a range of possibilities related to human interaction - dialogue, encounter, communication, and conflict. The text is used as a space to extend ideas initially developed in relation to this work within an previous essay Over and Over, Again and Again, where notions of restlessness and Sisyphian labour are explored through the prism of Horvat’s practice.


Without Rhyme or Reason