work in progress ... and some already expired ... a series of writings and narralogues addressing the contiguity, contingency and confluence of image and text in visual arts practice exploring artists books, hypertext, art writing and publishing, artists writing and publishing, text based art and other practices. It has struck me, but it’s no surprise, that the written word has become a site of contestation and renegotiation. In large part, I attribute this to the emergence of new information and communication technologies that have presented an opportunity to reconsider the written word in ways not wholly possible for 500 years, since the invention of the printing press. The word has always been technological, somehow mediated and mediating, always contingent. So my starting point is quite simple - what does the written word mean to us in this digital and ‘hyperliterate’ era? And why are written words so prevalent and emphasised in this artworld, in which I am so thoroughly implicated, as ‘writing art’ or ‘artwriting’.

‘Wordings’ - a noun that comes out of verb - like writings or drawings. Wordings has that same inflection and a concern with what we can do with words, not necessarily as writing, but, simply and complexly, as words. However, word isn’t a verb in the same way as draw is. Though I’d like to see people start using it was a verb, ‘to word’, ‘to write’ or ‘to draw’. In a world where new technologies have made it possible ‘to text’, are we really so remote from the possibility of ‘wording’? As a noun, wording implies our expression - the way (manner, action or form) in which something is expressed or phrased. It’s about how we use our words to express something. Wording is something we are often precise or careful about. Sometimes we don’t like the way things (expressions, requests) are worded. Wording is equally political and aesthetic.

This is a project that is concerned with the ways in which words and writing are intimately concerned with image and art. It’s particularly concerned with my own words and wording. Narralogue. Is perhaps something I should have already been aware of. As an art writer, I have been ‘writing art’ or ‘art writing’ for many years and narralogue seemed to provide another means of doing art writing, to consider my own writing practices. I began looking for traces and resonance. ‘Chronicle’ might be another way of describing this writing. As a journalistic or press practice the chronicle presented poets and novelists with a means of addressing a wide readership on themes of their choice. The Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector published her chronicles in the Jornal do Brasil from 1967 until 1973. These have been described as ‘extraordinarily free ranging and intimate’ and took the form of serialised stories, essays, aphorisms, conversations, random thoughts, introspective revelations and memories. What sort of art writing might come from such a method? What if the art writer left scholarship to the scholar and pursued a different writing - more literary, more personal?

My perspective is doubled, perhaps split. I write art, though some may not count what I write as criticism, and I write as an artist, we won’t go there just yet. I keep seeing image and text in close proximity, leveraging off each other – touching, flowing and co-existing. There’s a kind of uncertain contingency of word and image. I wanted to look closer, to examine, in my own part of the world or word, what this relationship entails and how I experience it. Is this an ‘other writing’ as Teri Hoskin discusses or perhaps it implies an ‘other reading’. Perhaps these ‘other’, more uncertain, ways of relating to inscription are rankling. These aren’t adventures as such. Rather, these writings arise from passing encounters, sometimes the starting point is a general observation such as ‘more contemporary Indigenous artists are working with text’. Or, ‘many younger and emerging artists are [re]turning to text-based art’. I wonder who reads the catalogue essays or other writings tucked away in publications with tiny print runs. There are discussions about art writing and arts issues have attracted the attention of the press. What of the artist’s book as a transgressive slippage between art object and art writing? In these instances we know that sense of the troublesome or otherness in writing and reading – it is not quite the same. So ‘not quite’ means something here too.

Who wants this writing? Can this be the sort of writing that is wanted? This is a writing that is supposed to recede from view, so very unconsumable (or, simply, expendable), it is like an excess. Yet there remain so many words about art and, in the digital world, weblogs, discussion lists and the like can alter the way criticism functions, as a connection and as multiple connections. Otherwise, I might see a text work, aphoristic and compressed, and wonder if SMS or locative media has anything to do with it. I look at the crossovers of analogue and digital works, reflect momentarily on the significance of hyperliteracy. Just passing thoughts that became all the more insistent. Because these are language games, inflection matters. Narralogue and chronicle seem like a useful ways of doing this and doing something with words - mapping encounters with image, text and theory across many contexts, across generations, across technologies and across cultures within my own locale.

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