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.

Text/Review: Words for Marking Time

I will be reviewing the forthcoming ANTI festival for Frieze magazine. I am proposing to use the opportunity to think more about different modes or experiences of time as encountered (and indeed produced) through practice (and language). In turn, these ideas will also form part of the thinking space or research for a new text that I am currently developing in relation to the work of Karin Kihlberg and Reuben Henry.

Words for Marking Time
In this review of the ANTI festival I am proposing to focus on the relation of language to time, on writings for marking and performing time. My intent is to move from an understanding of this relation as being one of tense (from words which locate a performative situation or action in time) towards an interrogation of performative forms of writing which speak more of the qualitative, the how (rather than the when) of writing’s timing. With reference to specific works in the festival I want to focus on kairotic writing, texts that are all about opportune timing or biding your time. Whilst chronos signals chronological or sequential time, kairos describes that moment of an undetermined period of time in which something special happens or is missed. Kairotic texts thus emerge from chance encounters and unexpected synchronicities; they speak out for or against when the occasion calls; they are invitational texts which create openings or opportunities, or else signal the taking place of incidental events whose potential all too often remains unrecognised or ignored. Whilst kairos resists the logic of chronos by focusing on the fleeting instance of opportunity or of a moment passing, there are other forms of performative writing that speak more of the durational properties of time passing,  that unfold over time. However, rather than simply marking or measuring time as a clock might, these durational texts reflect an elastic experience of time, where the passing of time is always uneven and discontinuous, inconsistent and full of holes. These writings elucidate an experience of time as it is a shaped by boredom, immersion, exhaustion, collectivity, conversation, memory, guilt, regret. Collectively both kairotic and durational texts attest to the different ways whereby time is not only passed, but also actively spent, caught, wasted, killed, saved, lost, found, remolded or re-edited through the performative act of writing.