Writing Joyishly
Workshop for the Association for Art History Conference 2024
University of Bristol, 3-5 April 2024
Session Convenors: Rebecca Bell, UWE Bristol; Clare Johnson, UWE Bristol; Rachael Miles, UWE Bristol; Jenny Rintoul, UWE Bristol; Joanne Lee, Sheffield Hallam University; Julia Lockheart, University of Wales Trinity Saint David
Writing is “a means of producing, codifying, transmitting, evaluating, renovating, teaching, and learning knowledge and ideology in academic disciplines. Being able to write in an academic style is essential to disciplinary learning and critical for academic success” (Fang, 2021). In this session, visual culture educators working with practice-based students explored how to approach academic writing produced through historical, theoretical and contextual research in environments where the students’ literacies are primarily visual, spatial and material. Writing in this context can bring to the fore ‘an epistemological tension between the distinct worlds of text- and object-based research practices’ (Biggs and Büchler, 2012: 231, in Gimenez and Thomas, 2015: 34). We query how to inhabit this tension and expand the role of written practices in art and design scholarship.
Through performances and provocations, this two-hour collaborative workshop considered the overlaps and interfaces between art historical writing and the art school as a cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary exchange. Convenors and participants together explored ideas of threshold, liquidity and fluidity, consider writing as bodily and visual, and examine the critical importance of care and hope. We examined how contemporary art and design practices can reconsider art historical writing.
The convenors’ approach develops an ongoing research project entitled Ways of Writing, which so far has produced workshops, two special issues for the Journal of Writing in Creative Practice (2022 and forthcoming), and a session for On Not Knowing: How Artists Teach (The Glasgow School of Art, June 2023).
Link: https://forarthistory.org.uk/conference/2024-annual-conference/