Abstract for Lecture Performance

Thirteen points – fragments of image, object, action; slices of matter, memory, history, mediation – are identified: one for each of the ‘Peace Wall’ clusters situated in and around the city of Belfast, Northern Ireland. Each of these becomes the starting point for a piece of writing that seeks to magnify it, hyperbolically; narrate it, fictitiously; study it, obsessively; arrange it, haphazardly. The ‘Peace Wall’ clusters have existed and developed as markers of sectarian division in Belfast for the past forty-five years. This lecture performance seeks to explore the physical, psychological, emotional and imaginative effects of this on the city.

Description of Event:

Never the Same: what (else) can art writing do?
An International Symposium on the Agencies and Futures of Art Writing

15-17 September
Arts Commons
234 9th Avenue SE
Calgary, Canada

Over the past few decades multiple modes of creative and critical writing have proliferated in art worlds. A range of approaches – from ficto-criticism, speculative fiction, performative writing, site-writing, poetic innovations, new mediations and alternative forms of criticism – have made political, philosophical and academic space for art writing. Dylan Thomas notes, ‘A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone’s knowledge of himself and the world around him.’ His phrase ‘never the same’ evokes the articulation of mutable writing approaches which refuse to accept art discourses and production as business-as-usual.

Never the Same: what (else) can art writing do? asks, what are the places for, and political implications of, de-instrumentalized forms of writing? In an age of austerity, neocolonialism, neoliberal uses of creativity, art marketing, grant writing and practice based PhD work, how can writing by and for artists and their work enact resistance to such forces? What are the language forms (re)emerging in the present? How might art writing be considered as an ethical practice towards an understanding/in defense of artistic knowledge? How do (re)emergent modes of artistic writing enact agonisms and solidarities in relation to art audiences?

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/25015