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.

Page 8 (2024)

Inasmuch as it is writing, then any alternative voice other than the neutrality of that of the academic will automatically challenge academic writing conventions. While in qualitative research writing there is a certain valence for a personal voice, if the embodied generic topic of one's writing is oneself as one's own subject, no less than in one's visual- or other creative practice, then it may be of interest to try to cite and articulate such embodied involvement.

The strategic inclusion of an apparent other-person to oneself (sometimes termed heteronym), either through displacing one's own voice – to be heard more strongly – onto a third-person or, more intimately, a second-person, takes on the demeanour of fiction. (Fiction termed a demeanour may convey a fairly accurate idea of the involvement of the fictive in otherwise academic writing.)

Writing genres:

academic

reflective/academic

parrehsia

ethnography

autoethnography

fiction

autofiction

creative non-fiction

literary non-fiction

Philosophical:

Alain Badiou (insight into Lacan's antiphilosophy, difference between subject and operator

Martin Buber ([1970] 1996) I and Thou (relation between first- and second-person)

Jacques Derrida (concerning animal qua human other)

Emmanuel Levinas (perspective on the other)

Jacques Lacan (psychoanalytical theory on the other/Other)

Paul Ricoeur ([1990] 1994) Oneself as Another

Lucy O'Brien ([2007] 2010) Self-Knowing Agents

Quantum:

Karen Barad (relational ontology, concerning entanglement of matter and meaning during indeterminate and determinate states, implicating human agency as but one player among other organic and inorganic agencies)

Genetic

GPS

Neurobiological:

Philip Ball ([2022] 2023) The Book of Minds

Richard Masland (2020) We Know It When We See It

Richard Sapolsky (2023) Determined: The Science of Life without Free Will

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