Research Task: Creative Art History and Fiction as Method

For this task we were asked to makes notes on the below sections.

The function of writing in art history and art practice.

• Self conscious writing - writing that's aware of its own practice, involving style and structure to form new narratives.

• Fictionalisation and projection - the desires, thoughts and feelings from the body of artist, body of text and body of writer.

• Interpretation - as above.

• Art history has always had a element of creative writing, as its full of imagination, metaphors, similes, feelings, opinions, describing emotions, creating new voices, shaping what art means.

• Exploration of writing techniques, styles, tones and what they do to create new narratives, fiction, collage, repetition, challenges academic conventions.

• Embodiment - the presence of the writer and the experience of viewing art creates links between the body of the art, historian and artist.

• Collaborations between artists and historians creates even more narratives, new arguments, new artworks/writing.

What is argued in terms of what experimental forms of writing will bring to these disciplines?

• The body of the art historian - desires and performance that take place in writing.

• The body of text - focuses of the visual nature of words

• The body of the artist - how art history constructs a narrative around the artist and their work.

• How should art history be written? a focus on creative writing providing new methods of doing this has been gaining momentum.

• A legacy of artists writing that play with the conventions of academic writing.

• The stretching, questioning and refusal of academic conventions is not confined to artists.

• Not so much a problem with theory, but an interrogation of the art historians voice that dominates. Butt calls for a more performative engagement with the art of criticism focusing on the art of writing.

• Grant would expand on the above by including wider investigation into the terms of art history, focusing on creative writing and discussing the construction of narratives around art, artists, and art historians.

• The character of performative writing draws attention to the act that is taking place in the writing of history, with a physical presence of the writer and the writing itself in the creation of a story.

• Desire, feeling, irrational and intuitive is often put aside when art history is written. Engaging with the body of the text or the body of the writer through experimentation, can recapture this.

Names and examples to explore later.

• Paul Barolsky - Vasaries Lives

  A first to inform you of the conception of history alongside information of the artist and artwork.

• Maria Fusco - The Happy Hypocrite

  A journal of experimental art writing. Considered texts from artists such as Paul Gauguin and George Bataille.

• Jeremy Melius - in his discussion of Bernard Berenson's 'Amico di Sandro'.

  Investigates Morelli in the mid 19th century has elements of creative writing.

  Creates a fictional artist to construct an interpretive framework, belying fantasies of authorship.

• Gavin Butt - After Critism

  Explores anxieties around art criticism and critical theory.

• Della Pollock - 'Performing Writing'

  Highlights a blurring between critical and creative writing.

  Carol Muvor - Hannah Cullwick

  Jane Blocker - Ana Mendieta

• Michael Ann Holly - 'The Melancholy art'

  Argues all art history has a component of melancholy as it tries to resuscitate objects from the past, in their continued existence in the present which cannot be achieved by scholarly writing of art histories.

• Adrian Rufkin - Ingres: Then and Now

  Attention to the tensions between the object of study, desires of the writer, expectations of the reader. Written in a pulp fiction style, refuses the academic monograph, essayistic form, essential for creation of new narratives, and the reflection of what occurs when writing art history.

• Nicholas Chare

• Francesco Ventrella

• Ewin Panaofsky, Bernard Berenson, Aby Warburg

• Griselda Pollock - Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Musuem (2007)

• T.J. Clarks - The Sight of Death (2006)

• Charlotte de Mille - Henri Bergson, Virginia Woolf

• Vanessa Bell

• C. F. B. Miller

• George Batalille - 'Rotten Sun'

• Linda Goddard - Paul Gauguin - Diverse choses (1896-7)

• Gertrude Stein - 'Regular Regularly in Narrative' (1927) and Camera Work

  How to create in the 20th century

• Peter Wollen and Laura Mulvery - Riddles of the Sphinx

• Patricia Ruben - Henry James portraits

• Henry James - The Liar

• Gavin Parkinson - Hayden Whites 1966 request for history to be written 'using impressionistic, expressionistic, surrealistic and actionist modes of representation, acknowledging that art history never really just states the facts.

• Sophie Calle - 'The Rules of the game' collab with Paul Auster. 'Double Game'

• Paul Auster - 'Leviathan' - created two artworks - (The Chromatic Diet' (1977) and 'Days under the sign of B, C, and W' (1988).

• Satish Padiyar - Flaubert, Adorno, Barthes and Derrida

  Contemplates the vertigiousness in the act of writing, the substitutions that occur in the creation of a sentence.

  The effort to write art histories creatively is about the freedom to write, but what freedom signifies is not straightforward.

• Rosalind Krauss - 'The Optical Unconscious' - Jackson Pollock

  Variety of writing styles to convey construction of histories around 20th century artists. Filmic style, anecdotal. Explores metaphor of the detective for the work of art history, clues that are relevant or irrelevant to create and weave a narrative e.g the body of the art and the body of the artist.

References -

• Grant, C. ‘A narrative of what wishes what it wishes it to be’ in Grant, C. and Rubin, P. eds (2011), Creative Writing and Art History special issue of Art History, Vol 34, Issue 2, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.