a diary of writing about art – pt. 1

From 1991 to about 1995, I was exploring various ways of making “hybridized” writing, which emerged from an interest in collage, concrete poetry, modern dance, and “total art” (environments, happenings, and performance) that had preoccupied me throughout university. I had abandoned the idea of being an artist but still wanted to participate in something I understood to be the exchange of meaning through art.

In 1993, I decided to pursue a period of study with Primus Theatre as I was interested in their methods, which seemed to me to embody hybridity. At that time, I was also interested in the cut-up writing techniques of William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin that I discovered by way of Kathy Acker. I began experimenting with writing about art using ideas adapted from both sources. Essentially, I was trying to develop a method that would serve me going forward. Thinking about a specific work of art, I would gather images and bit of text and assemble them into collages on the pages of my sketchbooks. The point was to do it as part of my daily practice, part of the flow rather than something with specific or predetermined intent. Then using what I had assembled, I would write “through” it, towards that work of art.

I wanted to write to art, rather than about it. I found it difficult to write any other kind of text (as I had no burning desire to tell a story, it felt like writing simply for the sake of writing) and I wanted to say something about the way that art functions for me that wasn’t linear or left-brained. Unfortunately, the texts ended up reading like poetic fragments without any real structure. And I began to worry that I was not saying enough about the work itself, that the artwork was becoming subordinated by my own subjectivity when I had wanted to honor it. It was an enjoyable exercise but failed, I thought, to yield anything of lasting value. I was wrong.