Between Art and Writing: Translating meaning through the ‘text-as-host’ in contemporary art writing practice
About
This practice-based research draws on insights from translation studies to rethink the practice and reception of contemporary art writing, where visual art is written around, through, to, from and alongside, as alternatives to writing ‘about’ art, as found in traditional art history and criticism. It investigates art writing as an embodied practice through which the materiality and affective qualities of ‘language-as-text’ become a means to commune with and communicate visual art.
Through analyses of other writers’ work (Estelle Hoy, Quinn Latimer, Lisa Robertson) and my own art writing practice, this research explores how art writing ‘translates’ embodied experiences of artworks to texts that ‘host’ them and invite readers-as-guests. The project uses an expanded theoretical framework of intersemiotic translation (Jakobson, 1959) as the mediation of “experiential process[es]” between media (Campbell & Vidal, 2019:xxvi) and draws on Ricoeur’s (2006) concept of “linguistic hospitality”, where the language of the other is welcomed into one’s own, to consider how art writing forges and gives form to meaning in encounters with art.
Attuned to the materiality and affective dimensions of visual art, this project examines how affect can function as a linking mechanism between embodied experiences of artworks and the ‘texts-as-hosts’ that writers produce through the different prepositional orientations of art writing. The research investigates how these texts have the potential to activate the imaginations of audiences as/and readers, providing hospitable spaces for them to engage with art via writing in more productively expansive ways.
This project is especially timely given increased discussions around accessibility in the arts, because it examines the many ways art can be mediated through language and the implications this has for the readerships it cultivates. This is especially pertinent amidst debates around migration and multicultural societies, where arts organisations have the potential to function as both cultural and community-forming spaces.
