Another month gone! And spring beginning to make herself known in cautious fits and spurts.
In keeping with the fleeting sense of bounty and possibility late February can bring with its teasing promise of spring, for a minute there it seemed I might send out a couple of pieces over the course of this changeable month. But, ultimately I decided on this one and this one alone, which is a kind of amalgamation of various craft talks I’ve given around the practice of art writing over the years. Mostly, I think, because I’ve taken a big, wavering step back from presenting on this topic in public forums, and it feels right to send it out into the world while it’s still fresh and ripe in my mind.
It starts with a fairly basic overview of my writing practice, and then moves into a (hopeful) demonstration of how writing and research unfold for me on a daily basis. As you’ll see, I’ve gathered the various authors and artists into what I’m calling ‘movements’. They’re not presented in a linear way or given equal weight; rather, I’m trying to show how they function for me on any given day. That is, how images or clauses sustain my writing, how they linger and accrue and come to function synecdochically for a broader approach or set of ideas—the kinds of contingencies, potencies and prompts I follow through literary practices and art practices, and how those trails sustain me while I write.
In Madness, Rack, and Honey, Mary Ruefle writes that while she remembers almost no details of the books she’s read, she remembers the shadows they cast over her. It’s those shadows, she tells us, that make her long to return to a text. I feel something similar toward what I’m calling ‘movements’ today; they’re instances of atmosphere or tone that I return to.
Below, there are four movements, each containing two or three central references. Then, there are more peripheral references which I’m calling interludes. These interludes are fragments of material that have been integral to me at some point but, for whatever reason are not as palpably present for me at this moment in time. All the movements and interludes are in constant oscillation, and six months ago or a year from now an interlude might be a movement or vice versa. By this, I mean that right now some ideas are inflecting others, but that relationship might be turned on its head. With regard to a writer like Kapil who I’ve been reading for years, at the moment ‘transcript’ feels like the most apt, resonant term—at other times it’s been ‘residue’ or ‘stain’. There were also times when I would group all of the writers I’m referring to here under terms like ‘occlusion’ and ‘subaltern’.
Irrespective or how potent a textual-visual relationship is, whether it’s dictating the course of my research as a movement or inflecting it as an interlude, I think of each text and every artwork or practice as an echo pinging within a chamber—but each time an echo reverbs, rather than waning, it accrues. The material is continually compounded, becomes increasingly resonant, evermore buoyant. A pair of gloves filling up with air, cupping and then deflating. Soon to cup again.
All of the material below also speaks to this relationship between artworks and bodies of text, between certain visual practices and certain textual practices. Hopefully, the nature of those relationships will be quite self-evident, but I’ll say more generally that I don’t find it especially useful to think about art writing in terms of ‘response’. (Although, when I first started working on a commission basis for exhibitions that was very much how I saw my own texts as operating: hybrid response, poetic response, lyric response.)
Terms like ‘interrelation’, ‘mutuality’, ‘kinship’, and ‘consubstantial’ are how I parse art writing for myself. Rather than, say, a text-based exercise in documenting the experience of an exhibition or critically expressing a work, when I think about art writing I think about a weave in which belts of cloth are overlapping. Or, in the words of Amina Cain in A Horse At Night, “a crystal lake and a frozen body; one thing laid on top of another. Together, not separate. Relaxing into each other with their outlines intact.”
When I started working in a collaborative way with artists from about 2016, writing ‘scripts’ for sound and video installation, I started thinking more about textual and art practices in terms of a common mechanism. In these collaborative contexts, this mechanism—the point of overlap—was something I had to identify as an end goal before I started working on a text, but it became something that happened more organically when I started working in the novel form.
For instance, sections of my first book, Follow Me To Ground, overlapped or coalesced thematically with Jenny Keane’s “Lick Drawings” in which Keane both underscored and displaced the horrific element in stills from horror film, and subverted the trope of the female body as a vehicle for the abject.
To put it plainly: displacing the abject was a touchpoint for me in writing the book, and these images were teaching me how to do that in prose.
In terms of prose style, I was fixated on Megan Eustace’s “Donor Prepared for Spot Exam”, in which the artist’s line treats the prone, medicalised body with both violence and tenderness. Again, to put it plainly, this conflation that was very important to me, and was one I wanted to incorporate at a sentence-level.
Large sections of my second novel, Redder Days, were written under the influence of Ana Mendieta’s Silueta Series, specifically while thinking through
the material imprint of the othered body, which is often a body that has been denied expression because its experiences don’t find a ready host in rational speech (generally, on account of rational speech’s ties to structures like patriarchy and colonialism)
the alternative kinds of material expression available to those bodies that have been placed outside conventionally expressive language
the particular materials that serve the othered body while it’s seeking out these alternative kinds of expression in order to leave a trace of itself behind.
In short, sometimes an artwork will drive a scene or a chapter at a character or thematic level in a way that’s quite tangible and identifiable, and at other times its expressive mechanism or sensibility will permeate the prose with a certain quality or generate a sequence of images.
Unlike when I’m working collaboratively, when working in the novel form this ‘overlap’ or ‘common mechanism’ is not a conscious choice or a process I turn to as such.
Of reading novels, Cain writes ‘narrative has been impressing itself more and more visually in my mind’, and of writing Kate Zambreno describes being ‘after a series of moods or textures’. Each of these feel very accurate to me.
I’m often asked if any of my art writing craft talks and seminars are available online, and this is most likely the closest I’ll come to sharing the material in this way. With that in mind, this is a document—a transcript, if you like—as supposed to a honed and polished essay.
If you try your hand at the exercise, I would love to hear from you.
‘Til next time, and wishing you a lovely turn of the seasons—
Sue
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to A Penny Spinning to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.