Where does artistic research in or through literature already exist, and how can it be shown why and on what terms literature may now join the debate? I contend that considering these questions via Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s concept of minor literature provides a particularly rich approach to a multi-layered phenomenon. The examples advanced here in the argument reflect my experience in the field(s) and do not claim exclusivity. In fact, it is, in my view, clearly an enrichment that the authors of this volume present a great diversity of vantage points and approaches to our common theme.
Institutions
The disciplinary formation of the Humanities in the 19th century has been effected through educational programmes being set up and the formerly (more) universal scholars newly seeing themselves as representing one field that they studied and for which they subsequently established journals, associations and conferences.
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Obviously, the promise of efficacy (shorter study times) already played a role. It can be assumed that these mechanisms continue to
Literature Departments seem to have catered for creative writers better than Art History Departments for artists. The need for creative writers to take matters in their hands has thus been less pronounced than with artists. As reasons, I can imagine the differently situated battles: rather than trench warfare between (older art) historians and theoreticians—which led many theoreticians to desert art history departments, setting up those of Visual Culture, Curatorial Studies, or Cultural Analysis and seeking the proximity of their more theoretically active colleagues from literary studies—, academics in Literature departments had to contend with the often more positivist mind-set of their linguistics colleagues. All the while, the historical (or other extra-literary) research that creative writers continued to pursue could still appear as a related enterprise, as History Departments—where theoretically oriented—even moved into closer
Creative writers in Europe, when not self-taught, are often literary scholars and, therefore, understand these scholars. Even more: while they broadly differentiate theoretical and creative modes, they teach students that different genres of texts can live (peacefully) alongside one another—and they can in their work embody that range. They are (and have for a long time been) both artists and researchers. This state of affairs brings with it a rich form of self-identification, but likely also a decreased need to consider the poetic voice as research per se. The supposedly higher status of the academic researcher is already reached, turning ‘artistic’ work into a welcome escape, rather than something for which that status also and directly needs to be fought. This is e.g. true for W. G. Sebald, who, working at the University of East Anglia, began to write semi-autobiographical fiction with (‘poor’) images also as a liberating response to the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), which then only considered his German literary scholarship, not his literary translation or (semi-)fictional writing, to be ‘returnable.’
As far as art is concerned, the wholesale incorporation of art academies in UK universities has brought a professionalisation but also a displacement of art history and theory. When art school art history becomes (or is merged with) university art history it tends to cater for art students’ more recent interests, instead of representing the field. Art history, due to the discipline’s German origins, was also not heard for political reasons, despite the field being represented in the English-speaking world by German Jewish emigrants and their institutions, such as the Warburg Institute in London. Aby Warburg’s collected writings were only published in English translation in 1999
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, and the virtual absence of such inter-weavings of theory and practice—as in his Mnemosyne Atlas, for example—in the hegemonic self-understanding of the discipline during its institutionalising and professionalising process no doubt contributed to artists wishing to take matters into their own hands. This was in the 1980s, with the advent of New Art History, aided by an understanding of (and envy for) work in literature departments being at once more theoretically rigorous and more creative.
Duchamp Effects
The deskilling 7 of artistic practices from Dada and Marcel Duchamp, especially since the inception of Duchamp’s ready-made strategy in 1917, was seriously felt in the education of artists from the 1960s onwards. Conceptual practices in Duchamp’s wake required a re- or up-skilling in historical and theoretical terms: a lingualisation 8 or linguistic turn. 9 This, of course, in addition to opportunities for employment: although representatives of this practice such as Seth Siegelaub proved ingenious in finding modes of selling ideas and their simple representations in written form, teaching positions in ‘de-academicising academies’ proved the most sustainable form of ensuring survival. As a consequence, since the first Colstream Report, in 1960, argued for the intellectualisation of artists’ education (the inclusion of art history in the curricula) 10 , generations of UK artists were taught by lecturers whose own work resembled research more than object-making. Artists began to live the lives of trans-disciplinary or supra-disciplinary academics, contributing to conferences, rather than exhibiting (or turning their exhibitions into conferences, such as in the case of performance festivals). Since Harald Szeemann’s documenta 5, 1972, exhibitions also became thematic, orienting artists’ activities away from disciplinary allegiance and encouraging transcendence of genres or medium boundaries: artwork and exhibiting became research question-driven.
The high (or low) point of that development saw the introduction of the RAE in the UK, from 1986, in which the staff of the newly university-incorporated art schools had to justify their work in research terms, as predetermined, research-question-driven, documentable, published (e.g. in exhibition-format). More recently, in the renamed Research Excellence Framework (REF from 2014), artistic work has also had to be accounted for as (directly) impactful. The statements required for these exercises necessitated formulating said research
When visual artists use words in their re- or up-skilling moves (RAE reports), they (need to) exercise a—similarly flattened and often stereotypical—understanding of text or language as sufficient evidence for elucidating or standing in for ideas, however poetic their language use in their (artistic) practice. For the examples given, we may refer to the stereotypical alignment of the visual with intuition and the word with intellect.
14
As concerns language, writers in their (predictably) more advanced understanding of the capabilities and deficiencies of their tools can choose to be at home in both registers if and when they choose to—and otherwise (as both Joyce and Beckett did) transgress the boundaries towards the visual field, where they seek the deceptively purer means of expression.
15
Visual artists, by contrast, have had to battle more
Minor Literatures
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have understood what they termed minor literature as deterritorialised (moving a language of power away from its hegemonic, professionalised and bureaucratic space); as a communal enunciation (rather than privileging the single, canonical author); and immediately political. 16
Following 1968, Deleuze and Guattari, in their own work, sought to ‘minor’ not just psychoanalysis, but academic writing in general. Their co-authorship and creatively poetic tone in a relatively low register do not make their texts immediately accessible to (my) undergraduates, but academic writing became more creative, more theoretical (i.e. also inherently interdisciplinary) and less ‘academic’ (Michel Serres e.g. considered quotations as a sign of the material remaining undigested by the author).
17
With that new generation of thinkers gaining academic positions, academic writing can arguably be said to have adopted elements of artistic research, making it less necessary to establish another new discipline. Cultural Studies, Visual Culture, and Cultural Analysis, in addition to enlightened Literature and Art History departments, enabled scholars from a literary studies background to devote themselves to visual culture also, as e.g. W. J. T. Mitchell and Mieke Bal
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have done: moving between courses and departments devoted to art and literary scholarship – and embracing artists as scholars and PhD candidates also. Moreover, some scholars themselves began to create artworks.
19
In Art History this is not so unusual, as the exhibition has long been seen as a mode of dissemination that slowly but
Elsewhere, I have considered the writings of some visual artists a minor practice: Tacita Dean and Rodney Graham are visual artists who have a long-standing interest in literature—and they write very well. 22 I established their production of fictional texts and books as minor in relation not to literature but visual art, owing to their places of distribution (exhibition): art spaces, not (literary) bookshops and libraries. 23 Writing visual artists are not a new phenomenon, in fact, their proliferation has itself functioned as the basis of another collecting/writing/curating/exhibiting project: The Book Lovers. 24 The fact that such writings and projects are being exhibited and collected by art institutions points to an interesting development, one spawned and furthered by Art Writing Masters courses for visual artists, such as the inaugural one at Goldsmiths College, University of London, led by Maria Fusco. Writing and publishing have turned into media in which visual artists work—and where they wish to learn the skills involved, i.e. creative writing and publishing. Although Dean and Graham themselves do not (wish to) work as Academy teachers, they have given example to a growing group of artists educated under the strictures outlined above, who are – for all intents and purposes – artistic researchers, active in the writing, publication, collection, and/or exhibition of literature.
Another kind of minor literature, where deterritorialisation should be understood as a move into virtual space, or a copy-paste transposition of the text itself, is Conceptual Writing. Some of its practitioners and contributors
Literature’s (Late) Inclusion in the Artistic Research Debate
The question of why literature should be included in the artistic research debate—and why now—i.e. whether there are advantages or not; this question
As the institutionalisation of Duchamp’s legacy has shown, artistic research is an opportunity for creative work to gain value in public discourse by being associated with research, with universities, i.e. with what has for long been understood to be ‘major,’ the realm where a livelihood can be eked out and status procured. However, universities and the centralising but fragile world of publishing—alongside the carrier of research par excellence, the book—have all but lost their major space: economically, politically, and in public life. Instead of attaching itself to something major, I would see the artistic research debate as an opportunity for literature and its practitioners to effect the communal enunciation of an embattled intellectual class, whose pronouncements are now in many countries politically suspect, as they are immediately taken to be political (on the Left). In its deterritorialisation outside of the major, communal enunciation and political immediacy, the artistic research debate has followed the (under-funded, contemporary, and critical elements of the) art sector, and is further expanding into literature. This assumption (conscious or not) of a minor position, I take to be an understandable response, even one of the few potentially viable battle strategies, a call for solidarity among those in the margins. 29 Through its ‘belatedness’ (historically not a complimentary category), literature can avoid the early, normative—and according to Hito Steyerl “boring” 30 —elements of the artistic research debate and graduate immediately to what is interesting today: describing and valuing the diversity of what is being created, without having to police boundaries, recouping the ‘art-ness’ of this work—and acting on a systemic level.
What do I have in mind when proposing this? As two brief examples, and in concluding, I will consider the Finnegans Wake reading group as shown by Dora García and the oeuvre of multi-disciplinary writer/artist/researcher Brian O’Doherty.
Dora García, The Joycean Society (2013). Still from Video. Image courtesy: Dora García and Ellen de Bruijne Projects.
Dora García, The Joycean Society (2013). Still from Video. Image courtesy: Dora García and Ellen de Bruijne Projects.
Dora García, The Joycean Society (2013). Still from Video. Image courtesy: Dora García and Ellen de Bruijne Projects.
Reading groups of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake take place the world over, but their status is unlikely to be one of credit-bearing university courses. Despite conjuring and generating academic learning to a high degree, they take place in the margins. Having participated in the one at the James Joyce Foundation in Zurich, I likened the Wake reading group to formats within contemporary art (then called relational aesthetics, now social practice).
31
It is to be situated within the force field of literature, art, and research, or, for our current purposes: literary artistic research. In 2013, Dora García, who had already invited Joyce scholars for what I would call FIU-like discursive contributions to the Venice Biennial, documented the Zurich Wake reading group in a film, The Joycean Society.
32
García is directly inspired by Deleuze’s and Guattari’s work, precisely their anti-psychiatry stance but also minor literature. The fact that marginal (artistic) research should be so exciting, so ripe for both artistic and scholarly work today, allows one to reflect on the current character of (academic) institutions and the current shifts in disciplinary relations with which I began my discussion.
Brian O’Doherty’s medical and perception theoretical research gave him undoubted research credentials early on. He then became a TV presenter on art and a programme director at the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA, which is now awaiting closure). A Booker-prize shortlisted writer of (historical) fiction, he has published on art (inaugurating institutional critique through Inside the White Cube) and has created visual art since his student days (choosing for it the pseudonym Patrick Ireland as an activist response against the Bloody Sunday massacre, Derry, 1972). His editorial work includes Aspen 5+6 (1967), for which he commissioned The Death of the Author from Roland Barthes. The arguably ‘literary research’ activity of commissioning, compiling and editing texts, of including interviews, films, etc. in a white box, has been established as an inaugural moment (an ‘exposition’) of artistic research. 33 Aspen can also be understood as one of the first conceptual art exhibitions.
Brian O’Doherty, ed., Aspen 5+6 (1967). Arrangement: Mary Ruth Walsh, Photo: Fionn McCann.
Brian O’Doherty, ed., Aspen 5+6 (1967). Arrangement: Mary Ruth Walsh, Photo: Fionn McCann.
Brian O’Doherty, ed., Aspen 5+6 (1967). Arrangement: Mary Ruth Walsh, Photo: Fionn McCann.
Indeed, O’Doherty’s multi-disciplinary practice constitutes a particular Duchampian legacy, as he ‘portrayed’ his friend Duchamp using an electrocardiogram: the mute, ‘uncreative’ artist of the 1960s thus still created form and evidenced that there could be no concept or thought without a body’s beating
Bibliography
Agamben Giorgio , “Aby Warburg and the Nameless Science” (1975), in: Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, translated and ed. by Daniel Heller-Roazen . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999, pp. 89–103.
Andersson Andrea , ed., Postscript: Writing After Conceptual Art. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017.
Bal Mieke , Travelling Concepts in the Humanities. A Rough Guide. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002.
Beuys Joseph /Heinrich Böll , “Manifesto on the Foundation of a ‘Free International School for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research’,” 1973, https://sites.google.com/site/socialsculptureusa/freeinternationaluniversitymanifesto, date of access: 17 Sept. 2018.
Bishop Claire , “UNHAPPY DAYS IN THE ART WORLD? De-skilling Theater, Re-skilling Performance,” in: Brooklyn Rail, December 2011, http://brooklynrail.org/2011/12/art/unhappy-days-in-the-art-worldde-skilling-theater-re-skilling-performance, date of access: 17 Sept. 2018.
Bryan-Wilson Julia , “A Curriculum for Institutional Critique: Or the Professionalization of Conceptual Art,” in: Versksted # 1, 2003: New Institutionalism, ed. by Jonas Ekeberg . Oslo: Office for Contemporary Art, 2003, pp. 89–109.
Buchloh Benjamin , “Conceptual Art 1962–1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions,” in: October 55:1 (1990), pp. 105–143.
Buchloh Benjamin et al., “Conceptual Art and the Reception of Duchamp,” in: October 70:4 (1994), pp. 126–146.
Cotter Lucy , “Between the White Cube and the White Box: Aspen 5+6,” in: Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes , ed., Brian O’Doherty/Patrick Ireland: Word, Image and Institutional Critique.Amsterdam: Valiz, 2017, pp. 57–79.
Dean Tacita , “W. G. Sebald,” in: October 106 (2003), pp. 122–136.
Deleuze Gilles /Felix Guattari , Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975), translated by Dana Polan . Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
Dworkin Craig /Kenneth Goldsmith , eds., Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011.
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Faust Wolfgang Max , Bilder werden Worte: Vom Verhältnis von bildender Kunst und Literatur vom Kubismus bis zur Gegenwart, Cologne: DuMont, 1987.
Gilbert Annette , ed., Wiederaufgelegt: Zur Appropriation von Texten und Büchern in Büchern. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2012.
Glasmeier Michael , ed., Künstler als Wissenschaftler, Kunsthistoriker und Schriftsteller. Cologne: Salon Verlag & Edition, 2012.
Goldsmith Kenneth , Uncreative Writing . New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2011.
Holert Tom , “Artistic Research: Anatomy of an Ascent,” in: Texte zur Kunst 82 (2011), pp. 38–63.
hooks bell , “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness,” in: Yearnings: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End Press, 1989, pp. 203–209.
Hopkins David , “Re-thinking the ‘Duchamp-Effect’,” in: Amelia Jones , ed., A Companion to Contemporary Art since 1945.Oxford: Blackwell, 2006, pp. 145–163.
Joyce James , “Fluviana,” in: transition 16/17 (1929), between p. 296 and p. 297.
Lerm Hayes , Christa-Maria, Joyce in Art: Visual Art Inspired by James Joyce. Dublin: Lilliput, 2004.
Lerm Hayes Christa-Maria , “‘The Joyce Effect’: Joyce in the Visual Arts,” in: Richard Brown , ed., A Companion to James Joyce. Malden, Oxford: Blackwell, 2007, pp. 318–340.
Lerm Hayes Christa-Maria , “Considering the Minor in the Literary and Photographic Works of Rodney Graham and Tacita Dean,” in: Mieke Bleyen , ed., Minor Photography: Connecting Deleuze and Guattari to Photography Theory. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2012, pp. 85–102.
Lerm Hayes Christa-Maria , “Mad, Marginal, Minor (Artistic) Research” / “De la recherche (artistique) folie, marginale et mineure,” in: Dora García , Mad Marginal: Cahier # 4, ed. by Chantal Pontbriand . Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2015, pp. 120–133 and pp. 298–312.
Lerm Hayes Christa-Maria , Writing Art and Creating Back: What Can We Do With Art (History)? Inaugural lecture 537. Amsterdam: Vossiuspers, Amsterdam University Press, 2015.
Lerm Hayes Christa-Maria , ed., Brian O’Doherty/Patrick Ireland: Word, Image and Institutional Critique. Amsterdam: Valiz, 2017.
Mitchell W. J. T. , “Word and Image,” in: Robert S. Nelson /Richard Shiff , eds., Critical Terms for Art History. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003, pp. 51–61.
Perloff Marjorie , Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010.
Rorty Richard , The Linguistic Turn: Recent Essays in Philosophical Method. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1967.
Thurston Nick , “Publishing as a Praxis of Conceptualist Reading Performances,” in: Journal of Writing in Creative Practice 6:3 (2013), pp. 421–429.
Turner James , Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014.
White Hayden , “The Historical Text as Literary Artefact,” in: Adam Budd , ed., The Modern Historiography Reader: Western Sources.Abingdon, New York, NY: Routledge, 2009, pp. 351–364.
Warburg Aby , The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance. Los Angeles, CA: Getty Publications, 1999.
James Turner spoke at the University of Amsterdam in 2016. See also: James Turner, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014.
Tom Holert, “Artistic Research: Anatomy of an Ascent,” in: Texte zur Kunst 82 (2011), pp. 38–63.
Charles Esche, Director, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, has motivated his recent practice as de- or anti-modern, corresponding to Walter Mignolo’s decolonial thinking. Charles Esche, “The Demodernizing Possibility,” in: Paul O’Neill/Lucy Steeds/Mick Wilson, eds., How Institutions Think. Between Contemporary Art and Curatorial Discourse. London: The MIT Press, 2017, pp. 212–221.
Joseph Beuys/Heinrich Böll, “Manifesto on the Foundation of a ‘Free International School for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research’,” 1973, https://sites.google.com/site/socialsculptureusa/freeinternationaluniversitymanifesto, date of access: 17 Sept. 2018. See also: Tom Holert (curator), Learning Laboratories, BAK, Utrecht, December 2016–February 2017, https://archive.bakonline.org/en/Research/Itineraries/Future-Vocabularies/Themes/Instituting-Otherwise/Exhibitions/Learning-Laboratories, date of access: 17 Sept. 2018.
Hayden White, “The Historical Text as Literary Artefact,” in: Adam Budd, ed., The Modern Historiography Reader: Western Sources. Abingdon, New York, NY: Routledge, 2009, pp. 351–364.
Aby Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance. Los Angeles, CA: Getty Publications, 1999. See also: Giorgio Agamben, “Aby Warburg and the Nameless Science” (1975), in: Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, translated and ed. by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999, pp. 89–103.
Claire Bishop, “UNHAPPY DAYS IN THE ART WORLD? De-skilling Theater, Re-skilling Performance,” in: Brooklyn Rail, December 2011, http://brooklynrail.org/2011/12/art/unhappy-days-in-the-art-worldde-skilling-theater-re-skilling-performance, date of access: 17 Sept. 2018.
Wolfgang Max Faust, Bilder werden Worte: Vom Verhältnis von bildender Kunst und Literatur vom Kubismus bis zur Gegenwart. Cologne: DuMont, 1987.
Richard Rorty, The Linguistic Turn: Recent Essays in Philosophical Method. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1967. On the Duchamp reception in art see also: Benjamin Buchloh et al., “Conceptual Art and the Reception of Duchamp,” in: October 70:4 (1994), pp. 126–146.
For a response to this report by a performance artist/educator, Stuart Brisley, see: http://www.stuartbrisley.com/pages/39/60s/Text/Concerning_the_Coldstream_Report_____The_existing_Art_Educational_System/page:2, date of access: 17 Sept. 2018.
Benjamin Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962–1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions,” in: October 55:1 (1990), pp. 105–143.
David Hopkins, “Re-thinking the ‘Duchamp-Effect’,” in: Amelia Jones, ed., A Companion to Contemporary Art since 1945. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006, pp. 145–163.
Julia Bryan-Wilson, “A Curriculum for Institutional Critique: Or the Professionalization of Conceptual Art,” in: Versksted # 1, 2003: New Institutionalism, ed. by Jonas Ekeberg. Oslo: Office for Contemporary Art, 2003, pp. 89–109.
W. J. T. Mitchell, “Word and Image,” in: Robert S. Nelson/Richard Shiff, eds., Critical Terms for Art History. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003, pp. 51–61.
In comparing performance art pieces similar to (and predating) Beckett’s Quad, 1981, I argued that Beckett’s transgression of disciplinary boundaries is problematic, not least for his aims. To summarise briefly, he affirms the spatial centre in a way that visual artists (of the time and sympathetic to Beckett, such as Bruce Nauman and Brian O’Doherty) would not have done this. Nevertheless, Quad was exhibited as a visual artwork in documenta X, 1997. Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes, “Reciprocity: Beckett Interpreted in the Context of Contemporary Art,” keynote: Beckett and Company, Tate Modern/Goldsmith’s College, 6 Oct. 2006. Joyce’s genre transgression is mainly to be seen in: James Joyce, “Fluviana,” in: transition 16/17 (1929), between p. 296 and p. 297. Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes, Joyce in Art: Visual Art Inspired by James Joyce. Dublin: Lilliput, 2004, pp. 14–18.
Gilles Deleuze/Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975), translated by Dana Polan. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
Michel Serres in a lecture at the University of Utrecht, 3 Sept. 2016.
Mieke Bal, Travelling Concepts in the Humanities. A Rough Guide. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002.
Christa-Maria Lerm-Hayes, Writing Art and Creating Back: What Can We Do With Art (History)? Inaugural lecture 537, Amsterdam: Vossiuspers, Amsterdam University Press, 2015. Online: http://www.oratiereeks.nl/upload/pdf/PDF-6174DEF_Oratie_Lerm_WEB.pdf, date of access: 17 Sept. 2018.
For traditional art historians, an exhibition is still, however, not as legitimate a form of publication (in the Netherlands, the NWO Research Council does not consider them as such). This state of affairs leads curators to pursue artistic research PhDs.
Artistic Research has thus found advocates and (traditional) institutional frameworks, usually accepting studies as PhD submissions that provided generic (if interdisciplinary) literature and practice reviews, research questions, peer practice investigations and clarification of an original contribution. Whatever looked like a book (also when it contained documented art or curatorial practice) could be examined as a PhD.
Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes, “Considering the Minor in the Literary and Photographic Works of Rodney Graham and Tacita Dean,” in: Mieke Bleyen, ed., Minor Photography: Connecting Deleuze and Guattari to Photography Theory. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2012, pp. 85–102.
Tacita Dean, “W. G. Sebald,” in: October 106 (2003), pp. 122–136.
The Book Lovers is a collaboration between Joanna Zielinska and David Maroto. They have collected novels by (visual) artists. This considerable collection has been exhibited, e.g. at de Appel in Amsterdam, 2014, and it has found an institutional home at M HKA, Antwerp. See: http://www.thebooklovers.info, date of access: 17 Sept. 2018.
Craig Dworkin/Kenneth Goldsmith, eds., Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011; Andrea Andersson, ed., Postscript: Writing After Conceptual Art. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017.
Marjorie Perloff, Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010; Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2011. See also: Annette Gilbert, ed., Wiederaufgelegt: Zur Appropriation von Texten und Büchern in Büchern. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2012.
A good example is Nick Thurston from the University of Leeds. See Nick Thurston, “Publishing as a Praxis of Conceptualist Reading Performances,” in: Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, 6:3 (2013), pp. 421–429.
For a pre-history of these developments see: Michael Glasmeier, ed., Künstler als Wissenschaftler, Kunsthistoriker und Schriftsteller. Cologne: Salon Verlag & Edition, 2012. – This state of affairs may also be compared to (analogue) film, which has sought refuge in (or has been swallowed by) museums. Thomas Elsaesser elaborated on this in a lecture series at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 2016.
bell hooks, “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness,” in: Yearnings: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End Press, 1989, pp. 203–209.
A conference on artistic research at dOCUMENTA (13), 2012, was situated within the (art/research/installation) space of Dora García’s The Klau Mich Show. García established the space originally for a theatre performance that included psychiatric patients. Through the discussions here artistic research debates turned away from normative approaches. Hito Steyerl spoke of how boring she found such normative definitions (which would, of course, have to be undone by the very next project).
Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes, “‘The Joyce Effect’: Joyce in the Visual Arts,” in: Richard Brown, ed., A Companion to James Joyce. Malden, Oxford: Blackwell, 2007, pp. 318–340.
Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes, “Mad, Marginal, Minor (Artistic) Research” / “De la recherche (artistique) folie, marginale et mineure,” in: Dora García, Mad Marginal: Cahier #4, ed. by Chantal Pontbriand. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2015, pp. 120–133 and pp. 298–312.
Lucy Cotter, “Between the White Cube and the White Box: Aspen 5+6,” in: Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes, ed., Brian O’Doherty/Patrick Ireland: Word, Image and Institutional Critique. Amsterdam: Valiz, 2017, pp. 57–79.
In 1975, Brian O’Doherty submitted to Praeger Publishers, from whom he had received an advance, not the expected manuscript on Art Since 1945, but a sculptural object so inscribed, made of painted wood.
Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes, “Introduction, or the Crossdresser’s Secret,” in: Lerm Hayes (2017), Brian O’Doherty/Patrick Ireland, pp. 9–25.