Mixing It Up

The term Art Writing (or for that matter, Practice as Writing, or logically the inverse as well) is a complex, but necessary phenomenon. The ‘proclamation’ I propose for this presentation slides between the Artistic Research of the embedded within a practice, elucidates the potential of the practice conforming to a sense of integral knowledge and also proposes the practice of writing itself as a technique or mechanism that becomes the work. Within the terms: Art as Writing and Writing as Art, the as becomes transformative and in this context removes writing from being a tool to explain, clarify or to rationalise the artwork. This is based upon the supposition in the United Kingdom, whilst undertaking a research/doctoral project, that writing maintains a core aspect of that research and that the written exemplifies the research the researcher undertakes. This constructs a complex, and I would suggest unnecessary, infraction of the intensities evident within artistic research/practice. The written text in this case becomes solely a document that records the research undertaken. Therefore the suggestion that the two; Art as Writing and Writing as Art inflect one another with an equality that does not presuppose (or become a postscript for) the artwork, whilst maintaining the relevance and importance of the written word. The in-between, the space within which both (Art and Writing) can inhabit, whilst being one another and at the same time separate from one another, constructs an indisciplinarity that acts as a form of blending, warping and/or mixing (much like a DJ set) that constructs new forms of thinking and for that matter new forms of artistic research