INTRODUCTION CONTRIBUTORS ABOUT

Writing art, art writing

Sarah Gory

At the very beginning of this project, we read and discussed Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay ‘Against Interpretation’. It engendered some lively debate—some of us liked her provocation to move away from excavation and content towards a focus on affect and form and function. Some of us were less convinced. And yet whether we were writing with or against her ideas, consciously or not, it shaped our approach to the art writing pieces that make up this collection. At the end of the essay, Sontag writes: ‘In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.’ This is, I think, as good a place as any to begin the project of crossing disciplines, of harnessing our powers of attention as writers in new ways and in new forms.

The pieces that make up this collection are as eclectic and varied as the artworks that we were writing with. We spent time exploring contemporary conceptual artworks across forms including sculpture, video, weaving, and we spent time with traditional oil paintings from the nineteenth century. We thought about line and balance and colour and composition, and we discussed ideas of silence and transcendence, or writing with and through and beyond and alongside. As a result, you’ll find pieces of poetic exploration in here alongside political entreaties; you’ll find surreal, dream-like sequences alongside personal memoirs; you’ll find biting cultural critique alongside meditations on time and nature; you’ll find letters and fragments and essays and other modes that sit at the threshold. And yet despite these differences, there are threads that link these pieces together. All of the writers pushed themselves outside of their comfort zones, using text in formally innovative ways to slow down the act of reading, to ask you, the reader, to linger in the figurative space of language just as you might linger in the physical space of the gallery.

And so here is our invitation to you—stay a while.

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