Art Writing, Writing Art

Sarah Gory

We began this publication with a provocation. What would it mean not to write about art, but to write with and through and alongside works of visual art? We spent a lot of time thinking and talking and writing about the relationship between form and content, the way a structure is not a mere container for the knowledge or poetics within, but can also become a part of the storytelling and the texture of the piece. We spent a lot of time thinking and talking about affect, about the experience of reading or viewing or listening to a work of art. We spent a lot of time imagining the ways that creative forms can collaborate across disciplinary lines.

As a result, the pieces that comprise this publication can be described as art writing, but they are also so much more expansive than that. These pieces ran the gamut from essays to poems, dialogical exchanges to personal memoirs, experiments in fragmentation to magic realism to poem. Writing alongside nineteenth century oil paintings or deeply conceptual contemporary works, the substance of these pieces is as varied as their forms, exploring matters of motherhood and domesticity, first loves, family legacies, the fragmented self, the political divide, feminism and questions of art itself. All of the writers that you’ll find here have been willing to take their ideas and their practice into unfamiliar territory with the knowledge that, in the end, a work is more than the sum of its parts—that the process cannot be separated from the outcome and that all of it is an invitation to someplace transcendent.

And so in the end, the pieces contained herein, cannot be reduced to any single genre or container. To quote Justin Clemens, they are: ‘Art as writing, art with writing, writing about art, the art of writing, art against writing, art as the epitome or antithesis of writing, even when it’s nothing but writing.’

Sarah Gory is a writer, editor and educator working at RMIT University.