UvA

Artists’ texts are texts written and produced by visual artists. Their number increasing since the 2000s, it becomes important to clarify their obscure relationship to art institutions. Analysing and comparing four different artists’ texts on a textual level, this research proposes an alternative to text-image dichotomies that, from the 1960s, still dominate approaches to such work.
Four works and associated questions offer case studies to investigate textual strategies:
1) Keren Cytter’s The Seven Most Exciting Hours of Mr. Trier’s Life in Twenty-four Chapters (2008): How does narrative develop in the artists’ text? This analysis involves a reading through postmodern literature and consideration of referentiality.
2) Dora Garcia’s The Inadequate (2011): What form does the artists’ text take? Departing from this work I study the productivity of the fragment through metafiction.
3) Josef Strau’s A Dissidence Coincidence but W.H.C.T.L.J.S. (2008): What does the author’s role consist of? How can the “I” be understood against the background of autobiography, taken into account autobiography’s position vis-à-vis autofiction?
4) Matthew Buckingham’s “Muhheankantuck – Everything Has a Name” (2005, 2007, 2008): How does the word function? Trying to arrive at an approach less governed by syntactical constructions – dear to post-structuralists – Buckingham’s work is read through the lens of poetry.