Edbrook, L., Thomson, A., Reeder, E., Thompson, S., 2017.

A little hungry, a little thirsty: Contemporary Art, Writing, Form and Practice (Session Co-convenor)

As visual artists, critics, art historians, creative writers, and essayists working together and independently, we embrace Julia Kristeva?s understanding of ?anxiety of interdisciplinarity? (1997) as a crucial aspect of the form and field of experimental art writing. We also carry Rachel Blau DuPlessis? thirst as she essays about visual texts (2006). In 2015 Gilda Williams claimed that contemporary art writing is ?no longer offering reactive commentary and chasing behind the main event - the art object - but producing texts that run parallel to or within art, sometimes constituting the artwork itself?. This panel will consider and expand the porous interactions of art and writing practices and the relationships between visual and textual outputs, which we consider as attentive, reciprocal, parallel and embedded. Commonly understood as writing which is variously ?about?, ?with? and ?as? art, art writing can also be understood through its specific forms, structures and content, modes of production, patterns of distribution, and the shifting disciplinary, social and professional affinities and differences of its practitioners and audiences. We will examine the relationships of art-writing-practice as aesthetic object or event, as genre-bending essaying, as intrepid reading and looking, as visual art making, and as ?criticism in the expanded field?. By looking at this form as a transdisciplinary practice through which subjectivity might be a means to tether shifting registers within the field, this panel seeks to consider hybrid modes of writing which bring the visual and textual together to embody different readings and ways of coming to knowledge.