Uncommon criticism: Reading Ivan Vladislavić’s collected work as art criticism

Abstract

Johannesburg author, essayist, and editor Ivan Vladislavić has a longstanding interest in art, an interest richly recorded in his literary corpus. Since publishing his debut work of fiction, Missing Persons (1989), Vladislavić has repeatedly dwelled on artworks in his fiction and non-fiction writing. His literary corpus is studded with descriptions of paintings, sculptures, photographs, ceremonial statues, murals, and other, more obscure pieces of urban flotsam given their own artistic agency in his fecund imagination. This article discusses his interest and entanglement in art from a threefold perspective: thematically, biographically, and theoretically. It argues that the art world has consistently functioned as a laboratory for the author to refine his thoughts, albeit as a literary writer, not an art critic. While Vladislavić does not identify as an art critic, this article argues that his writing on art and broader literary output represent a valuable critical resource and an important intervention in fervid and unresolved debates around the definition of art criticism. The article begins by identifying thematic constellations that recur throughout Vladislavić’s work, placing these in conversation with salient aspects of the author’s early professional biography. It concludes by proposing that Vladislavić’s oeuvre can be read as a historically mindful, crisis-orientated form of art criticism.