28th of April 2016 – International Conference on Artistic Research: Writing

The Hague

Keynote: Redell Olsen

  ‘A Column of Air: Flickers/Writing/Painting’

     28 April 2016, 14.15 till 15.00 — Royal Academy of Art

In 1967 Art and Language designated a column of air ‘art.’ The place of writing as and in place of painting seemed assured. When you begin to look away from seeing and reading the dematerialised art work, there emerges a new possibility, a poetics of flickers. In 2016 this column of written air flickers with art forms very different from the art critical language associated with conceptual art. What does this flickering reveal? Poetics and the visual arts flicker with glimpses of this not not-conceptual-art, and not not-writing­-as art. My performance/lecture will explore how writing might engage with a flickering ekphrastic turn to landscape painting and its spin-offs. Timothy Morton questions whether ‘Nature’ was ever really there as more than a flickering ghost. I will nevertheless resist the double bind associated with simplistic definitions of ekphrasis, undoing the binary logic of writing as a half-glimpsed phantom of another ‘proper’ subject. The possibility of the filmic will be registered across the boundaries between the documentary, the poetic, and the visual-as-writing. Tracing this exploration through existing works and images, this lecture/performance hopes to enact a writing of paintings for paintings and an aesthetics of art that flickers in writing.

http://www.sarconference2016.net/rc/index.html#archive

Video of Paper here