Parallel lines: form and field in contemporary artwriting

Abstract

Artists who write as part of their practice have long made a very significant contribution to art theory and criticism. Artwriting has re-emerged as a practice in its own right and is growing in popularity and controversy among theorists, critics and artists today, leading to a convergence of these professional roles. I use the concept of mise-en-scne to investigate the ways in which artwriting might be better understood as a practice, one that enables emerging creative practitioners to manufacture a field within which to situate their form, to conceive of the production of an imaginative writerly context for their practice as their practice. I consider ways in which newly developing publishing media, practices and cultures enable artwriting to flourish and speculate upon what impact this might have on the hierarchical world of visual art practice as it integrates with new fields of horizontal distribution.