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

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