‘I never read. I only look at art.’ Andy Warhol
‘There is no contemporary reader.’ Hélène Cixous
‘I write in order to give the contemporary the slip.’ Jacques Derrida
Image: Madame Bovary by Sharon Kivland
Contemporary art-writing and creative writing continue to flourish. This afternoon event spotlights reading as itself an art, something to be cultivated, celebrated, enjoyed and thought about. Writers, artists, teachers and academics who work with, and on, reading will talk and present work. What does reading bring to contemporary art? How does it affect the institutions where it takes place? Who am I when I read? Where do I go? What traces does reading leave in me, or in the wider world? Where does reading end?
Reading is an important part of the life of many contemporary artists and writers: it may also be what their work is about. There are traditions, theories and learned practices of reading but it’s also a more or less spontaneous, private and unregulated occurrence. And what happens to reading when we are confronted by the unreadable?
1-2.30‘The Rite of Reading.’ Forbes Morlock, The Institute for Creative Reading and Syracuse University London. Forbes writes about texts, art and psychoanalysis; he teaches, among other things, a course called ‘Reading Pictures: Seeing Stories.’
‘Teaching Reading Creative-Critical Writing.’ Stephen Benson and Clare Connors convene the new MA in Creative-Critical Writing at The University of East Anglia. They will talk about their experience co-teaching creative-critical writing and about reading such writing with their students.
‘Individual Reading Records.’ Kate Briggs is a writer and translator; she teaches at the American University of Paris and Paris College of Art.
2.45- 4.15 ‘Essayism’. Brian Dillon, UK editor of Cabinet magazine, and Tutor in Critical Writing at the Royal College of Art, will address the essay as a form that crosses literature, film and contemporary art.
‘Shimmy Shimmy.’ Hester Reeve’s practice explores art as a species of philosophical agency, invested first and foremost in the task of radical thinking. She chooses to operate in her own mind via ‘HRH.the’ (a conceptual persona) and is Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University. She will work the book and the body.
‘Action Reading.’ Peter Jaeger is a Canadian poet, literary critic and text-based artist now living in the UK. He is an AHRC research fellow for 2012-13, and is working on John Cage’s poetics.
4.45-6 Nicholas Royle, writer and critic, Professor of English at the University of Sussex, will read a bit of Elizabeth Bowen alongside some Wallace Stevens.
‘The First Reader: a Dictation,’ Sarah Wood (event organiser: s.wood@kent.ac.uk) is an editor of Oxford Literary Review and Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, also Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Kent.
‘Reading Nana’ by Sharon Kivland, artist and writer, Reader in Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University, and Tutor in Critical Practice, Wimbledon College of Art, UAL. Sharon is a keen reader, thinking about what is put at stake by art, politics, and psychoanalysis.