My proposed paper, Writing without Writing:
Conversation-as-Material, has been accepted as part of the forthcoming
one-day symposium, New Modes of Art Writing, taking place
at Manchester Metropolitan University,
10 November 2017.
“To encounter is to be turned, whether for a moment or for life; to
encounter is always in part not to know, to be a little or to be very lost; to
encounter is to surrender something of ones self, willing or otherwise….”
(Benson & Connors 2014:5) About the event: How do we encounter art through different modes of
writing? Interrogating the chiasm of the critical and the creative written
voice: Is there a space where creating and experiencing art meets and
converges with writing? If so, what is this space? And how might we theorize
it? How can we use writing to explore the varied forms of visual arts
practices? And how might we incorporate and situate writing within the context
of our artistic research, and the wider practices of the arts and humanities? What
tensions may arise in this alliance and is it possible that this hybrid form
may propose something more than the sum of its parts? We would like to
examine how art may incorporate different forms of writing to consider how
traditional positions of objectivity and subjectivity can be challenged and
whether there are ways of bridging the gap between different writing practices,
in order for new forms to emerge. New Modes of Art Writing 2 intends to
provide a space where we might rethink writing as a further agency of our
creative practice, encouraging exploration of its potential as an artistic form
and as a method of critical enquiry.
Abstract: Writing without Writing: Conversation-as-Material
This performative presentation elaborates a mode of art-writing entitled
‘conversation-as-material’ that I have developed through various
collaborations as both artistic form and method of critical
enquiry. Within this method, conversation is conceived not
only for reflecting on practice but also as a generative practice
in-and-of-itself, site and material for the construction of inter-subjective
and immanent modes of linguistic ‘sense-making’ emerging
from the enmeshing of different voices in live exchange. Whilst conversation
often provides a verbal-linguistic means for reflecting on artistic
research, conversation-as-material re-forms the relation between art and
language through its quest for a not-yet-known vocabulary
emerging synchronous to the live circumstances that it seeks to articulate.
Here, meaning does not exist prior to utterance but rather is co-produced through the
dialogic process itself, with recorded dialogue transcribed and distilled so as
to reveal an emergent infra-personal textual
poetics; excavation of language fragments through a form of ‘writing-without-writing’. Arguably,
conversational transcript unfolds with a different textual texture or
vitality contour to conventional writing; its cadence or rhythmic pacing – its
pitch and intonation, the tempo of speech – involves the embodied rise and fall
of inflection and emphasis, excited acceleration, hesitation and deliberation,
syncopation, sentence incompletion, syllabic glides and slurs. Yet, rather
than simply a dialogic archive, conversation-as-material considers the
transcript as aesthetic material for playful appropriation and reworking,
blurring the distinction between artistic production and reflection. My
presentation brings performative examples from my own collaborative
practice into dialogue with the conceptual work of Brian Massumi, Daniel
Stern and poetic-philosophical writing of Hélène Cixous to reflect on the
immanent quality of coming-into-language, of conversation as an
aesthetic, art-writing practice.