Speaking of Writing
The artist’s talk or symposium paper has its process of preparation.
But commonly, the presented material masks the nature of the preparatory
work. The writer-artist-presenter engages with diverse modes of
production, composition and disruption: editing and erasure;
improvisation and projection; rehearsal, both vocal and sub-vocal;
encounters of text and image. But these methods are often devalued or
disavowed in the adoption of more formal procedures associated with the
event of speaking in public.
The recent history of visual arts practice, with its fusion of
performance and residual object-based work, its increasing assimilation
of varieties of writing, and its interrogation of the relationship
between image and text, suggests that contemporary artists and art
researchers are well placed to critically explore the habits of public
presentation. Sin Podium will bring together presentations that, in
various ways, look at the production of writing in its relation to
spoken presentation, engaging in an interrogation of the concept of the
speaker’s platform in all its diversity. The event will focus on those
rarely acknowledged practices, both material and immaterial, which
underlie the presentation of writing.
From submitted proposals, Sin Podium invited a number of current PhD
candidates to make contributions that take issue with established forms
of writing and presentation, whether such forms are sourced from the
world of art, criticism, philosophy, theory, literature or academic
research.
Contributors
The Museum of English Rural Life (MERL), University of Reading
