TAI-E3156 - Approaches to Writing, Lecture, 25.4.2022-23.5.2022

l choose Hélène’s text because of how it provokes me in a very visceral way, as poetry does. I feel triggered, confused and moved by Cixous’s writing. Her writing is organic and fleshy, I feel connected to it, it opens up ideas that surpass concrete symbols. 

Her way of writing is fresh, volatile and deeply attached to language and to the body. She plays with signs and symbols while reflecting on vitality of language and on life itself. It is inspiring how she crosses linguistics with her personal life, how she moves through these topics with rhythm and confidence. I feel provoked by her freedom and playfulness while keeping a clear structure and reflection behind it. I mainly feel inspired by her way of writing not necessarily as a way to share and connect knowledge, but to reflect upon them metaphysically by playing with letters, words, sentences and meanings. 

Another of the aspects that provokes me is the topics that she writes about. She reflects upon her life, living, dying and language/writing. It is all entangled in her writing, while she searches with language what it means to write/live. She goes through deep self and universal reflections in a poetical and suggestive way, creating images and emotions that go beyond facts. She is sincere, she is deep, she is complex while being simple. 

I’m sharing a text called ”Some Times of Space” by Doreen Massey. The article was originally published in 2003, and I encountered it as it is part of the publication Time appearing in 2013 in the Documents of Contemporary Art series. The publication was recommended to me by the curator Maaretta Jaukkuri as I was looking for reading suggestions on the topic of narrativity and contemporary art.

I enjoy reading the text by Doreen Massey for several reasons. Firstly, it tackles the topic of temporality from the perspective of movement and elaborates on the connections between space and time in a thought-provoking way. Massey approaches movement in space as an intertwining of ongoing trajectories. Instead of perceiving movement as it often is understood, as a spatial representation, a line drawn on the map from place A to place B, the text considers movement as a series of encounters where all the parties are constantly changing and living their own temporalities. The places are newer the same as in our last visit, and in the meantime, we have also changed. “An encounter is always something on the move”, Massey writes.

Second, the text is also easily approachable as it refers to concrete examples that we all can relate to: traveling, encounters with different places and weather conditions.

All in all, the text conveyed a very concrete and insightful understanding of places as a plurality of intertwining trajectories on the move. The perspective of movement is very useful for my investigation on the practices of public art. Massey also makes an interesting point about the spatialization of meaning, that we are used to thinking representation in terms of space. This was also the concern of Henri Bergson, the philosopher who was concerned about the topic of temporality, stating that language ”always translates movement and duration in terms of space,” and ”The more consciousness is intellectualized, the more matter is spatialized.” This notion made me reflect on the parameters of representation, on how our understanding of meaning is constructed.

Bibliography:

Massey, Doreen. ”Some Times of Space.” In Time. Documents of Contemporary Art, edited by Amelia Groom, 116–122. London & Cambridge: Whitechapel Gallery and The MIT Press, 2013.

I have to admit that, when it comes to academic writing, I am more easily captivated by the content of a text than by its form (Definitely look into Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, and D. Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto, if you haven't already).

Here, instead, is a book by Frantz Fanon who powerfully and open-heartedly addresses the reader about the painful complexity of being a person of colour in a world policed and defined by whites. 

We need to read this text as one of its time (1952!), which means acknowledging that some of it is "dated"; yet it was an incredible experience to read through it, for its capacity to affect how I perceived my body, and Fanon's way of visualising experiences in order to make them understandable. 

Dowload here Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks

https://penguinrandomhousehighereducation.com/book/?isbn=9780525573067

I chose to share Han Kang's novel the White Book (2016) which I found few years back through a recommendation of a relative. 

What comes to writing, especially artistic writing, my thoughts are most provoked by how words are used in relation to the multitude of layers within their meaning. The playing with words is what draws me into poetry - the endless possibilities to create parallel images and stories through subtlety. Reading the novel of Han Kang was for me inspiring experience due to its poetic narration conveying a story through seemingly unrelated observations of surroundings sewn together through symbolism of the color white and personal meanings attached to everyday objects. While inspiring as an experimental prosaic text (also in the perspective of translation), such beauty in the use of language is also something I have been curious to try and experiment with in regards to academic writing as well.

I chose Keller Easterling's book Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (Verso, 2014). I find its concepts and approaches to looking at city landscape and global systems such as ISO management standards thoroughly thought-provoking, especially in her way of managing to gather planet-wide networks and systems like mobile data into a writing style which cascades into multiple fields of research. 

I love how this text embraces boredom, repetition and being unoriginal and manages to present them as something totally fascinating - "unboring boredom", as he calls it.

This text also has a special place in my heart as it was the first one to introduce me to more experimetal and conceptual writing and totally opened up my mind about what texts can contain and how they should/could be read:

"In the same vein, as I said before, I don't expect you to even read my books cover to cover. It's for that reason I like the idea that you can know each of my books in one sentence. For instance, there's the book of every word I spoke for a week unedited. Or the book of every move my body made over the course of a day, a process so dry and tedious that I had to get drunk halfway though the day in order to make it to the end. Or my most recent book, Day, in which I retyped a day's copy of the New York Times and published it as a 900 page book. Now you know what I do without ever having to have read a word of it."

It's also, in its dry way, a very funny text.

https://writing.upenn.edu/library/Goldsmith-Kenny_Being-Boring.html

I chose a chapter from a book called Hotel Sapiens by one of my favourite authors Leena Krohn. Her speculative fiction is insightful and her writing has always inspired me. I love the imaginative scenarios she creates and her beautiful, descriptive style of writing and the creative use of language. Hotel Sapiens casts a critical and insightful, but compassionate glimpse to this world and humanity.

'Notes for a Singapore Bestiary: Sexuality, and Interspecies Exchanges in the City-State'. Lucy Davis, In Georg Schoellhammer ed. The DOCUMENTA # 12 Reader. TASCHEN Books, Germany. 2007. ISBN 978-382-28-2530-3

http://files.cargocollective.com/486840/Notes-for-a-Singapor-Bestiary-Documenta-Reader.pdf

I was drawn to this article as the in-depth critics towards social issues with the reinterpretation of Singapore Bestiary. For me, it is also a typical and good example as an artistic and non-conventional forms of writing which combines multiple concerns of personal perception, social politics and nature. Lucy used the fact of animal situations in Singapore and the bestiary of animals to compare and critique social reality. She splits and merges animal and human animality. In this context, animals are also creatures excluded by anthropocentrism, and also the symbols of insult to others in human cities. There are many puns and sarcasm in the text.

Max Liboiron - Pollution is Colonialism (<< it's a link to pdf)

This book does what books should do in terms of referencing, giving voice to other voices + knowledges and providing context. Even if one is not that much interested in the topic of the book, I still recommend to read the introduction, including and especially the footnotes, as it is a statement on how and why Liboiron proceeds.

I chose this text that I´ve been reading for my thesis work. 

This text, even though it´s introduction, captivated me from the beginning because of it´s topic and ancient historical value. The language Pormann uses in this text is very understandable, kind of easy and flowing. He manages to paint a coherent picture of how melancholy has been understood by Rufus and the other physicians at the time and how Rufus´s work relates to the texts of previous scholarships. To me it´s very interesting to read ancient definitions for melancholy, types of it and treatments that were developed. 
The text provoked me to dig deaper into my own thesis research and reading more about the history of psychology and melancholy in art. It gave me a great backround to start collecting my readings for the thesis and also tips how to structure my own text around the topic. 

This text in from an art project School of Artist Development (SAD) which begun in 2019. The content of the text is simple and straightforward, it tells you what your tutor really mean in their words. From the introduction to this book in the category(not sure should I use this word) for SAD,  the vocabulary book could be seen as a documentation to the change of the position (or relationship) of art students and their teachers. 

I enjoy how fun this book is and also how much it relates to my experience as an art student. It is also a great way to rethink how art institutions has changed over the years.

Here is the link to buy the book also photos of the content

Vocabulary: Understanding Your Professor and Make Life Easier

http://silasfong.com/news/product/vocabulary-understanding-your-art-professor-and-make-life-easier/

School of Artists Development

http://silasfong.com/news/product/sad-school-of-artists-development/

https://hethem.nl/en/Chapter-Four/Essay 

This might not be the most groundbreaking text, nor the most visually pleasing one - yet it stuck with me from the first time I read it. This text was the accompanying essay for an exhibition I saw at Het HEM, an exhibition space in an old bullet factory in Zaandam, The Netherlands. The space is big and industrial but curator Van Saarloos (who is also the writer of the text) managed to make an open, welcoming and at times intimate exhibition. And for me, they managed to convey this character of openness and intimacy in the essay as well. 

The most striking part about this text for me is, that it  was one of the first texts I read that really implemented the personal and anecdotes in a curatorial essay in an interesting and thought-through way. In this text, I feel that the personal, the site-specificity and the metaphors are very well implemented and give the essay strength. They helped me to grasp the context and the subject-matter better, which proves to me that the way of writing is supportive to the text. This text gave me the insight that a curatorial text can and may be personal and that this can actually benefit the text as well as the exhibition. 

I find that this book represents a beautiful example of inter-, and almost transdisciplinary artistic research in literature. The  book is a personal account on searching for answers to the cause and treatment of a rare neurological condition. Through a very thorough reading into the disciplinary discourse of neuroscience and psychology Hudsvedt exposes some of the blind spots and inconsistencies of clinical knowledge. She questions the divide between mental and physical in the diagnostics of western medicine.

To me both the form and content  of the text where inspiring and thought provoking.

I think that this article was a pleasantly accessible read. It is takes a form of an interview / dialogue between form Stacy Alaimo and Julia Kuznetski. They have an insightful conversation around the term transcorporeality, giving examples of how porosity and entanglement of seemingly separate bodies is indeed the very condition of every”one” and every”thing”, always and already. I think that this is a nice intro to the posthumanist / new materialist comprehension on embodied ontologies of mixing and co-formation.