Stretching Fiction: in a language-based and visual artistic practice

Mike Croft

The project is a semi-graphic notification of the artist/author’s initiatives to stretch fiction – so-termed analogous to the stretcher component of an umbrella – in his language-based and visual practice. The referenced time-frame is from 2014 through 2025. The contention is that if one considers oneself as subject within one’s work, amidst whatever the work's more objective concerns, then it is a fairly obvious next step to third-person oneself – in the sense that a writer such as Fernando Pessoa invented heteronyms. While in visual practice such a prospect is, arguably, more difficult to articulate, a fictional element instilled in art- or other academic writing already has certain precedents in more experimental writing in the latter fields. If, as in the artist/author’s case, such writing is an adjunct to one’s visual practice, then a fictional characterisation of oneself as another can comment on and variously inhabit one’s visual work. Unlike how characters often populate fiction, however, the artist/author’s strategy is to only partly develop them, hence having them oscillate as, themselves, a question of relevance.

* 2022: The author published an article that separates an artist's sole voice into apparently that of an artist in dialogue with an author

Artist-Author in Action and Reflection

Phenomenology & Practice Vol. 17 No. 1 (2022): Special Issue: Practices of Phenomenological and Artistic Research

https://journals.library.ualberta.ca/pandpr/index.php/pandpr/issue/view/1951

* 2023: Published an exposition on the Research Catalogue, through i2ADS, of artistic work during 2022; Seminar – Of Artistic Research: considered through hybrid writing and visual practice

The exposition involves three voices:

the exposition’s nameless narrator

a text-based author/artist

the fictional character Morry, now named Momrey; a portmanteau name suggesting memory, mummy, and mummification.

The ancient Greek debating practice of parrhesia is referenced as indicative of the exposition’s delivery, which Foucault (2005, p.372) defines as ‘…the frankness, freedom, and openness that leads one to say what one has to say, as one wishes to say it, when one wishes to say it, and in the form one thinks necessary for saying it.

The articulation of an artistic project is the main topic of an exposition, later published in PSIAX # 7, Series II

Drawing the Space of In-between: Researching a Phantom Presence, as part of an issue devoted to the work of the author and their colleagues in a perception research group in i2ADS.

https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/2048802/2048803

Foucault, M. (2005) The Hermeneutics of the Subject. (Trans. Graham Burchell) New York: Picador

Page 6 (2022-3)

Abstract: Seminar – Of Artistic Research: considered through hybrid writing and visual practice

The exposition involves the adaptation of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan's Logical Square, to convey an idea of artistic research practice considered from the perspective of the human subject's position in its midst. As part of the discussion the author has used some evidence of a previous lecture presentation, integrating such material with that of a newer project concerning the visualisation of a nightmare image of a phantom in a portal. The tools of the research are a hybrid form of writing that embroils fictional and academic modes as a language-based practice, and visual artistic practice. The author takes Lacan's idea of the confounding of any logical argument by automatic obfuscation of it by unconscious process, and imagines that he has an other to him as a subjective second voice. The question of voices is central to the research; the suggestion that one does speak to oneself in various ways simultaneously that may be fashioned as distinct and separate. It is argued that the research aspect of artistic practice involves just a section of Lacan's logical square, particularly concerning contingency. This orientation may call to question one's tendency to reason and find meaning from the necessary locus of inquiry from the vantage-point of the language-based Symbolic – of Lacan's three psychic structuring registers Imaginary, Symbolic, Real. The element of fiction provides a literary inclination whereby, while the artistic research speaks about itself as research and references a visual practice, the exposition could also be considered a language-based practice in its own right.

Abstract: Artist-Author in Action and Reflection

The question of conjoined artistic- and phenomenological research practice is explored through two realisations of a drawing-based practice, complemented with a language-based practice that includes transcriptions of a spoken monologue while and about drawing. Through adapting the sense that the monologue’s addressee is an apparently other person, and narrating this situation, the author expresses through the article that the experiential process of drawing is automatically phenomenological. In turn, the article is a presentation of how phenomenological reflection is implicit in the practice. The artist- referenced in the article is termed the artist-author, declared as such to the reader, and is thereafter suggested as split into an apparently more reflexively inclined artist and a more reflectively inclined author/interlocutor. The hypothesis that both artistic- and phenomenological research can manifest as a single practice is embedded in the article’s manner of presentation, the reader of which is almost in the same interlocutory position as the author-, of the artist-author, in being able to notice this. The article’s actual author, however, refers to himself as a homunculus, in effect the hyphen of artist-author, that enables him to detach sufficiently from what can be read and seen to format the article in such terms as enable the reader to critically reflect on its hypothesis. The role of the camera itself, considered as a metaphor for interaction between the reflexive event and its subsequent language-based reflection, is also acknowledged, especially in the context of the artist-’s referencing in the drawing and in his speech how the camera both aids and obfuscates the process, and linking this to theory. The transcript conveys spoken enunciation, especially through its grammatically formatted disfluency and extended pauses, and the author’s personal declaration and observation of himself – reminding the reader that the article’s content is after all about its narrator – is italicised.

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