A to Z of Artists Writing and Writers in Art: Part II

Earlier this year, the Nottingham based Staple Magazine published an issue on the theme of writing in relation to visual art, with writings by artists (including Mik Godley, Simon Withers and Errol Lloyd) set alongside artworks by Ellen Bell, an interview with Cornelia Parker, and poetry and short fiction on themes connected to visual art by Mark Czanik, Mel Fawcett, Peter Porter, Robert Vas Dias and Fawzia Kane, among many others. This is the second installment of the 'A to Z' which attempts to fill in some further background to that issue’s interests, expanding the territory beyond the pages of the magazine, and deliberately avoiding any attempt at comprehensiveness. Many key names are omitted (how can it be otherwise when ‘B’ alone could have been Breton, Bourgeois or Barthes?) and many minor and lesser known figures included in the hope that the range and richness of the field is somehow represented in a relatively small space. More information on Staple 71: The Art Issue, and future publications, can be found at: www.staplemagazine.bigcartel.com     

G is for…Geoff Dyer 

Taking his cue from John Berger, the influential author of Ways of Seeing, on whom he wrote an early study, the largely unclassifiable British writer Geoff Dyer has often used his fiction as a vehicle for critical studies of various art forms, and - conversely - has used critical essays as a vehicle for narrative. In his more conventional guise, Dyer has written quasi-autobiographical fictions such as Paris Trance or travelogues like Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It, which concludes at the Burning Man Festival in Nevada, and Out Of Sheer Rage, which follows in the international footsteps of D.H. Lawrence while trying, unsuccessfully, to avoid writing a book about him. Elsewhere, Dyer’s back pages include such works as But Beautiful, on the origins and development of Jazz in America, The Missing of the Somme, on the survival of memories from the First World War, and The Ongoing Moment, a thematically organised study of photography’s most commonly recurring images.  

H is for…A Humument  

The work of English conceptual artist Tom Phillips, A Humument is a visual remix of an obscure Victorian novel - A Human Document by William Hurrell Mallock - created by layering visual patterns and images onto the book’s pages, leaving only occasional words exposed, a technique that excavates Mallock’s bluntly realist prose for an oblique and highly abstract poetry of Phillips’ own devising. First published in 1980, A Humument has since undergone at least three revisions, as Phillips continues to add further plates to the text, which in its published form has the physical feel of a secular medieval psalter, in which illuminations, words and oblique explanatory notes combine in a format small enough to be carried in a pocket. 

I is for…Ian Breakwell   

Ian Breakwell (1943 - 2005) graduated from Derby School of Art in 1964, and in the career that followed worked in media ranging from painting to television, collage, performance and film to a series of diaries. Often coloured by a sense of his own spectator status, Breakwell’s diaries rarely tell us much about Breakwell himself, except by inference, but instead focus on watching the world around him, juxtaposing collages of found newspaper articles, drawings, photography and his own texts in a shifting third-person viewpoint that turns the artist into a kind of voracious documentary camera. Breakwell himself described this 40 year project as “an investigation of the relationship between word and image”, a meditation on “the surreality of the mundane. The diaries record the side-events of daily life, by turns curious, bleak, erotic, tender, vicious, cunning, stupid, ambiguous and absurd”. Parts of the diary were published as Ian Breakwell's Diary 1964 - 85, while his collected illustrated fictions were gathered in The Artist's Dream and Free Range. He also collaborated with Paul Hammond to create two Mass Observation style studies of cinema-going and reading, Seeing in the Dark and Brought to Book.   

J is for…Jones  

David Jones (1895 - 1974) was a Welsh poet, painter and calligrapher who, like William Blake, devised a body of work in which image, typeface and writing were all unified within a single mode of expression. He is best known for his book-length poems In Parenthesis and The Anathemata, published by T.S. Eliot at Faber & Faber between the wars. In Parenthesis draws heavily on Jones’ experience of the trenches during World War One, but overlays its autobiographical passages with material drawn from myth, religion and folklore, a concern that comes to the fore in the fractured mythic universe of The Anathemata, a work described by Jones himself as “a heap of all I could find”, where Celtic and Arthurian legends collide head-on with psychoanalysis and a similar modernist fragmentation to that found in Eliot’s The Waste Land or Ezra Pound’s Cantos. His paintings, mainly but not exclusively in watercolour, explore similar themes, portraying figures from the Mabinogion and Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur in fluid, delicately coloured line drawings. His books often include titles and epigrams set in his own calligraphy, the letters arranged to resemble Roman and Celtic inscriptions in stone, as though his acknowledgement of modernism were pulling in the opposite direction to his fascination with ancient survivals, stories and influences. 

K is for…Kosuth  

The American conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth has been at the forefront of a tendency in post-war art - much intensified after the close of the 1960s - towards art as a self-sufficient species of philosophy and inquiry. Works such as One and Three Chairs explore the various states of a single object, the chair being present as a physical object, a photographic image and a dictionary definition of the word ‘chair’, while Art as Idea as Idea consists of a definition of the word ‘meaning’ in white text against a black background. Kosuth’s primary motivation lies in a feeling that art is a continuation of philosophy and that, in taking this approach, his works allow ideas to become artworks without any need to be embodied in materials and specific forms, these being ‘aesthetic’ distractions from the real intentions of his work. Although Kosuth is on record as being opposed to any acknowledgement of the formal and physical properties of his pieces, one of his great strengths is - perhaps paradoxically - the discovery of elegant forms through which his ideas can be expressed, making for a productive tension at the heart of his ongoing project.   

Next week... L to P