The Experience of Art as a Living Through of Language

Abstract

After Criticism, New Responses to Art and performance, explores contemporary and innovative approaches in the wake of both a theatrical turn in recent visual arts practice, and in light of the emergence of a performative arts writing. Criticism here is perceived as in trouble. Either commodification is deemed to have killed it off, or it has become institutionally routine. Issues addressed include the performing of art's histories; the consequences for criticism of embracing boredom, distraction, and other queer forms of (in)attention; and the importance of exploring writerly process in responding to aesthetic experience. Bringing together newly commissioned work from the fields of art history, performance studies, and visual culture with the writings of contemporary artists, After Criticism provides a set of experimental essays that demonstrate how the critical might live on as a vital and efficacious force within contemporary culture. My chapter ‘The Experience of Art as a Living Through of Language’ takes as its focus the ‘experience’ of the work of art and attempts to put experience to work in the text in order to open up the closures around art production and interpretation effected in the wake of identity politics and identitarian forms of analysis. I endeavour to produce a new methodology in art criticism by writing with the experience of art in order to capture in the writing what it might mean to experience a work of art. My text aims to open up the processes of writing to the vagaries of experience. It draws on the act of writing in fine art. It is significant to that context in that it makes performative use of the lecture format, thereby self-consciously reiterating the very forms of institutional utterance which come to produce “knowledge” of aesthetic experience as such. Book reviewed Art Monthly, (37/280) Contemporary (89).