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.

Abstract: Diagrammatic Formatting of the Human Subject in and as Artistic Research: Lacan’s Logical square and Hysteric’s Discourse

The article presents an argument towards the adaptation and mapping of two tables by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in a context of consideration of oneself as subject within the activity of artistic research. The author argues the possibility from the viewpoint of his own experience as an artist. By implication, this may be of relevance to and confer with the experience of the article’s readers. The two tables are specifically Lacan’s Logical Square and the Hysteric’s Discourse—of Lacan’s four basic proposed discourses. Lacanian theory is referenced to the extent that it should be possible to comprehend not merely the tables’ adaptation, but that the latter is viable only through and as a manifestation of such theory. Given that his primary visual medium is drawing, the author begins and develops a small diagram by way of illustration, and in one section of the article demonstrates the Lacanian concept of jouissance through and as written language and how it can affect how one writes, both initiatives of which show oneself as subject situated within practice.

Page 7 (2023-4)

* April 2023, the author began the DNA Ancestry project, working with a sense of before receiving the DNA result and therefore construing ancestry unfettered by scientific findings, given that the knowledge available of relatives, let alone distant ancestors, is little. For this reason, they worked with a small set of family photos, writing into this stage of the project a fictitious scenario where it is the character designated by the initial M. who imagines his (male) ancestral lineage from a found box of family photos in a junkshop.

* Importantly in relation to present S. E. Asian location, spanning some twenty-five years, the character M. in the project imagined that half of his descendants stemmed from S. E. Asia.

* While distances across time can be geographical, inasmuch as humans are involved, they will also have their subjective effect. The project explores a subjective response to the ancestral information through coffee staining in relation to now-known aspects of the represented ancestral geolocation, and integrates imagery pertaining to the character M.’s explorations in the first part of the project.

* Three projects published on the RC (Research Catalogue) through i2ADS:

Seminar – Of Artistic Research: considered through hybrid writing and visual practice (2023)

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

Ancestry – Before DNA test – Considered through Drawing (2024)

https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/2143958/2143959

Ancestry – After DNA test – Considered through Drawing (2024)

https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/2235923/2235924

* 2023, unpublished paper: A Provocative Trio – biological, psychic, drawn – Explored through Drawing

Section from the paper that refers to the Ancestry project's fictional family, its process of visualisation, and that the result is itself a kind of visual fiction:

[....] Images of a paternal great-grandmother, a father, a maternal grandfather, a mother, and a baby in the lap of whom is interpreted to be an older-woman landlady – alien, in a sense, therefore, to the baby, and possibly an other to it at the psychical level – are each rendered in coffee, ink and crayon on corrugated cardboard. Back to the stain; whether it be slime mould on a wall or the spread of liquid coffee into corrugated cardboard, as evocative of possible meanings that invoke unconscious relevance, and substitute the mirror understood heterotopically for the drawing in terms of the image it carries, its sheer materiality and environmental contexts, to experience this at-once real and unreal. This presented family may be considered a visual fiction [....]

* 2024: Worked on the adaptation of Lacan's Logical Square to the question of the experiential artistic process, and mapping Lacan's Hysteric's Discourse with it to convey the possibility of the internal siuation of the subject within the Logical Square qua within artistic research

PsyArt Volume 28 (2024)

Diagrammatic Formatting of the Human Subject in and as Artistic Research: Lacan’s Logical square and Hysteric’s Discourse

https://psyart.org/diagrammatic-formatting-of-the-human-subject-in-and-as-artistic-research-lacans-logical-square-and-hysterics-discourse/

* 2024: Re-formatted book-length manuscript with view to submitting for publication + re-formatted chapters as read-alone articles

Example in practice, from section of the book's Introduction re-formatted as article:

Introduction to an Unpublished Manuscript: with a Prologue (from the main fictional protagonist’s viewpoint)

Abstract: A Provocative Trio – biological, psychic, drawn – Explored through Drawing

The article introduces and discusses a stage in an artistic project on-going at the time of writing, where its present visual-material practice, which in this case is drawing, concerns the anticipation of the results of a DNA Ancestry test to which the project will then respond. The practical work is informed by theoretical reading pertinent to the project’s topic, which informs such work in terms of what the author designates provocations. There are in fact a trio of these, the first two being the microbiological and the psychoanalytical, while the third is the consequence of the former two on the visual-material work – at the present time two small sets of drawings. The microbiological is considered as the human body in terms of its genotype and phenotype, the psychoanalytical in terms of one’s physical body as the Lacanian Real, and the drawings themselves are considered for how, due to the influence of the former two provocations, they discretely challenge the generic basis of drawing itself. The article is divided chronologically into the provocations biological, psychical and drawn, and drawn provocations on drawing. How the drawn, of the provocations, is described implies the influence of the two preceding provocations. Theoretical references offer some insight into what the author has been reading during the project, and their impact on the course of the visual-material work.

Abstract: Introduction to an Unpublished Manuscript: with a Prologue (from the main fictional protagonist’s viewpoint)

“Should this be it?” Morry will have intervened. “Have we ushered in a text with a degree of provision that suggests the end in and as the beginning, and a pulling of the end back through to the beginning in terms based on the endlessly perpetual cycle that is life itself?”

The as-yet unpublished manuscript, called drawing-fictions-time, of which this is the introduction, integrates an imaginative fictional extension concerning a meeting of lives across time and space that is unfolding, while received understanding of time is both informing and being constructed by drawings.

The alternative readings of the word fiction in the present work’s title allude to the range of interests that are brought together in a hybrid synthesis. If the idea of fiction is taken as a noun, this suggests that at least part of what is referred to in the manuscript, in between drawing and time as nouns, involves an imaginative narrative. The work weaves such narrative with critically reflective writing. However, if the middle word of the manuscript’s title is interpreted as a verb, then the onus is towards a role of drawing as the medium that makes a story of time. This has been the initial intention of the manuscript’s referenced drawings that were done in the context of interest in time. Yet another reading of the title can be that fiction itself has time, and that this is considered through the medium of drawing. In both cases the word fiction is performative. Apart from this, it is mainly time that is referenced and explored in the text, and is integral to the drawings to the extent that neither one can be extricated from the other. Indeed everything, not merely drawing, is subject to time, insofar as the latter is experienced by consciousness and is often conceptualized. The previous sentence, therefore, infers the limit of the text to a consideration of time as a human construct.

The manuscript’s penultimate chapter concludes some detail on the question of author, reads as follows: ‘The author’s positioning himself in the work in the third-person enables him to better observe his own reflexivity […] displacing authority that could be self-acknowledged onto another who is inside the text.’ While the author is thus folded into the text, he appears in first-person in the drawing chapters, and briefly below as the more natural way of conveying an anecdote. It is concomitant with the concept of the work that the authority of what in reality is a first-person narrative is called to question in such a way. The following submitted anecdote, however, does also serve to introduce the person who appears in the drawing chapters as I.

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