Our last meeting, involving a relatively small group, talked about Andrew Gallix’s TLS review of The Disappearance of Literature: Blanchot, Agamben, and the writers of the No by Aaron Hillyer (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). Talkstudio has discussed Hillyer’s book before but this time some new departures were made possible by the introduction of concepts such as Hegel’s ‘absolute negativity’. At one point I speculated that Hillyer’s approach to creative refusal was already built into Contemporary Art through the ‘not-landscape / not-architecture’ option that sets up Rosalind Krauss’ famous expanding diagram in her essay Sculpture in the Expanded Field.
I’m not sure there was much consensus; however, as we reflected on the discussion it became clear that reading book reviews opened up unexpected vistas across unfamiliar fields of knowledge. Perhaps literary reviewers help us to locate a terrain of ideas around our work precisely because they are not talking about the visual arts. Should talkstudio debate this further? Would this be the same as theorising ‘practice’?
Here is the opening paragraph of a recent TLS review that offers a perfect example of a vista that has been opening up to artists for some time.
Both of these books emerge from the burgeoning academic category of “literary-mobility studies”, or what used to be loosely termed travel writing: a terrain some twenty years in the making, and by now criss-crossed by multi-disciplinary exploration not only of travel and its wealth of associated literatures over the centuries but also by sociological tracks such as migration, social and gender studies, modes of transport, and the impact of wars and power hierarchies. En route, the methodologies of the field of study itself are being turned over and re-evaluated, often revealing that “cultures” are not the set-in-stone concepts we may have inherited, but porous and volatile. Add to that the gems of vocabulary being unearthed, such as “prosopographical” or “loco-descriptive”, and the fact that “textual mobility” (as in “unfettered syntax”) is part of the territory, and it’s clear that mobility studies themselves are on the move.
Annette Kobak, ‘Excess Baggage’, The Times Literary Supplement, September 26, 2017, pp 3-4.
Looking outwards from an art school environment, what does this talk of ‘mobility’ mean to us? Those of you who attended Christine Borland’s recent Doubtful Occasion at Glasgow Museums Resource Centre may agree that ‘mobility studies’ was sharply in focus that day simply because our particular encounter with the stillness of objects seemed to have been excluded, perhaps even negated, by this emergent field of study.
Come along to our next session for more debate: 10.00 am to 12.00 midday, Wednesday, 25th October, 2017.
Note that there is a change of venue. We are meeting in the Glass Box, 1st Floor, Baltic 39, High Bridge, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, NE1 1EW.
Open to all comers.