Seeing and Meaning: Fiction writing at the intersection of art practice in the 1970s

As part of the panel 'The Carrier Bag Theory of Art History: experimental writing in, on and alongside feminist and queer art', convened by Dr Bridget Crone and Dr Catherine Grant, Goldsmiths, University of London Abstract: Critically appraised in an article in the magazine Art Rite in 1976; a group of artists’ books, made by Adrian Piper, Jacki Apple, Jennifer Bartlett, Constance DeJong, Kathy Acker, Carolee Schneemann and others, were described by the writer John Howell, as “a collective phenomena, a kind of writing which looks like a style inside language but outside literature.” Despite this perception, Howell’s appraisal was largely critical, misreading his own privilege in the strategies many of these women artists employed to embed aspects of autobiographical detail and other personal fragments within their writing. Reflecting on Howell’s comments, Lucy Lippard, writing in her own article in 1977 for Chrysalis magazine remarked ‘what Howell doesn’t seem to like about a certain kind of woman’s book is just what I like best about it.’ What Lippard didn’t disclose was her own writing project — a novel titled I See/You Mean — completed around 1971, excerpted in various magazines throughout the decade, and eventually published in 1979 by Chrysalis, just before the press closed. This presentation will explore how fiction writing intersected with other text processes associated with conceptualism, and its extension into performance and video forms, where the dialogical and dialectical meet the perceptual. At stake is perhaps a consideration of where artwork is re/produced and located both within and as writing itself — where text moves between the states of being and representation