Text 4 – To Converse

Synopsis

‘To Converse’ offers a wandering conversation between two voices, one seemingly a maker seeking to hold to the context-specificity and uniqueness of both the event of making-for-art and its resulting gest, and the other trying to articulate the task of a writing striving to write from within making’s interests and commitments while eschewing any claim to be either its ‘representative’ or its ‘critic’. This second responsive voice challenges itself to respect making’s retreat into unsayability.

The exchanges between voices circle around the issues of typification, making’s self-as-multiple, Art’s Body, aesthetic and economic valuation, making’s relation to institutional representation, making’s surfaces, and art’s summons to ‘otherness’.

The writer-respondent’s voice relentlessly takes over (to the apparent growing frustration of the maker) calling up, along the way, support from Seth Price and Christopher Middleton.

The maker, feeling increasingly disembodied by the exchange, leaves the scene…