Expect them to err: an editorial

Laura Haynes

This is a story of digression. An excursion in loosening method. 

In January I stood with one of this year’s Art Writing graduates and faced multiplied pangrams rendered in cyan, yellow and magenta across multiple media. This work was part of an ongoing exercise in improvisation and restraint, in the approximate senseless, and in discoveries of the associative profound. It is part of Aglaé D. Mouriaux’s graduate project and I turn to it here to demonstrate and reflect on the manner of Art Writing, the programme, its participants and of the genre or discipline. ‘Expect them to vowel,’ reads the third pangram.

‘To ryegrass, to bird funk, to jazz quartz.’1 

Expect them to vowel. 

I digress. 

Expect them to verb. Let this be an excursion. Let the teller disappear into the act of telling. Expect them to err, to errancy, to assemble a programme of negations and reinventions. Expect them to imagine a genre of the yet to be.2

This is a story of digression. Where do we begin? 

In September 2018 the postgraduate programme in Art Writing at The Glasgow School of Art was launched. This enterprise was part of a broader project to foster Art Writing as a specialism, as a discipline?, a paradiscipline?, a critical theory, as an attuned and philosophical practice in the School of Fine Art. What I have learned since then has concerned a vital practice of deviation and I know myself to be fortunate to have formed, shared and trodden—heavy and light-footed—with trusting, testing and gallant tellers of a moment. Since 2018 I have spent my time with co-conspirators who have been equally invested in knowing what material, critical, experimental, conversational, fictional and nonfictional, performative, aesthetic, instructional, propositional writing can do, what it offers us in a fractured and terrifyingly fracturing world. In edition 1 of The Yellow Paper: Journal for Art Writing, published during the commencing year of Art Writing, I named this a ‘kind of remedial romance’, a form of ‘compassionate theory’—of ‘affection, gratitude, solidarity […] a form of care as a form of practice which situates itself the/a present’.3 This call for reparative practice(s), I noted, is in a spirit of resistance and a necessary form of renarrativising. I would argue that as a collective of people, as a shared inhabitancy of time, the Art Writing programme at The Glasgow School of Art has offered just this: renarrativisation in a spirit of resistance. As a verb Art Writing is far from redundant. Just as a life can bear, it is a form that can accommodate and occupy: as a language-based practice it is material, interdisciplinary, academic, critical, political, gestalt in its objects, visible and invisible. ‘What is to be written of art that evaporates?’ asks Madeleine Kaye, and continues: 

We present this piece in the gallery, cork it open and spray all the bare necks of the unsuspecting visitors in their fur coats, and as the perfume lands on their skin, its existence changes, defying a universal description. The absence of this universal description, the unavoidable failures of any attempts at this non-existent text, is the space where I write.4

Art Writing is ‘heard as tone, not carved as stone,’ as with the chimeric patterning described by Daniela Cascella in edition 2 of The Yellow Paper. It is equally ‘impossible in theory but real in the imagination’. Cascella wrote: 

Here is a form of writing that is chimera, composite of parts written in different styles, some of which may seem impossible, monstrous, disturbing. Here is chimeric writing and it demands neologisms, a new vocabulary, wildly imaginative approaches to reading, hear Chimera.5

This deviating practice is chimeric and its changing existence is perennial. This year concludes the seventh year of the Art Writing programme and 2026 will conclude Art Writing as a master’s programme in the School of Fine Art. This news is experienced as loss by inhabitants, but I trust it to not be a marker of redundancy or failed resistance but, let’s hope, a perennial rearrangement where Art Writing as a project continues in the School with new and broader coalition and chimeric initiatives. The last seven years have sparked new forms of colloquy, new partnerships and methodological clusterings in Glasgow and beyond and this constituency of people and places, this atmosphere for dialogue, will continue to thrive, will continue to move with and across affiliations. ‘Each type of punctuation has its own rules and related movements, but against all of that it can be a blank. A moment to reorganise,’6 writes Art Writing student Emma Mortimer. 

This last year we have been grateful to work with Olivia Douglass, Catherine Grant and Laura Guy as part of our Form & Field study intensive. Lisette May Monroe returned in the second semester for Publishing & Publics, along with Art Writing graduate Alison Scott and Ailsa Lochhead of Move To Feel. The contributions of Kiah Endelman Music, Maria Howard and Rebecca Meanley as Graduate Teaching Assistants have been invaluable and on behalf of the programme and the students I thank each of them for their enthusiasm and commitment. Further gratitude is expressed for the distinctive guardianship of Francis McKee in the second semester of this year which allowed for a sabbatical and some writing time. In an extract from Five Days of Demons, Francis writes of Sean Bonney’s call for the incendiary torch during fall, failure or dismantlement. ‘Set against a backdrop of an increasingly volatile and hostile world, these calamities are small but are instructive,’ (p 30) writes Catherine Grant. If you’re alive to it this disconnect is daily and insistent. 

In October we contributed to the Cooper Gallery’s Sit-In Curriculum’s fourth chapter of The Ignorant Art School; we invited Esther Kinsky to GSA to be in conversation with Anne-Marie Copestake; worked with Jude Williams towards live readings at Soft Shell: Through the Cracks presented at the Poetry Club, Glasgow. We were delighted that Jude also performed as part of this event. In May we held the group exhibition Floor Boards and published the first part of ‘With Palestine’ as a special dossier of The Yellow Paper online. 

In this edition, Rosie O’Grady contributes ‘Knock, knock’ following the award of The Yellow Paper Prize for New Writing for her memoir in three parts, Naming the dog. This work was later awarded The Emerging Art Foundation Art Writing Prize 2024. 

Also included is ‘All we did was say hello’ by Kate Briggs, an extract from ‘A Social Process of Unknowing Yourself in Real Time’: Work on Conversation, published by The Yellow Paper Press and to be launched later this year. This book conversationally gathers the activity around Kate’s residency in the School of Fine Art between 2022 and 2023. It is a book of collective thinking, workshop materials, exchanges, pedagogical rituals and new writing. 

It has been a full and vibrant year. It has been a full and vibrant year across the realms of different discourses and interdisciplines. In gasps and gaps, its verbing is resonant and reverberant. 

 

 

 


For what can be oppressive in our teaching is not, finally, the knowledge or the culture it conveys, but the discursive forms through which we propose them. Since, as I have tried to suggest, this teaching has as its objective discourse taken in the inevitability of power, method can really bear only on the means of loosening, baffling, or at the very least, of lightening this power. And I am increasingly convinced, both in writing and in teaching, that the fundamental operation of this loosening method is, if one writes, fragmentation, and if one teaches, digression, or, to put it in a preciously ambiguous word, excursion.7

 

 

Footnotes

  1. Aglaé D. Mouriaux, Writing Practice I, Art Writing, The Glasgow School of Art
  2. Mary Cappello, ‘Timeless Dwelling: Imagining a Genre of a Yet to Be’, creative|critical, https://creativecritical.net/vanishing-acts-the-embodied-mary-cappello/
  3. Laura Edbrook (Haynes), ‘As if *: an editorial’, The Yellow Paper: Journal for Art Writing, 1, p 5
  4. Madeleine Kaye, ‘Writing Sculptures and Exploding Galleries’, Art Writing, The Glasgow School of Art
  5. Daniela Cascella, ‘My Chimera’, The Yellow Paper: Journal for Art Writing, 2, p 15
  6. Emma Mortimer, ‘And/Or’, Art Writing, The Glasgow School of Art
  7. Roland Barthes, ‘Lecture in Inauguration of the Chair of Literary Semiology’, College of France, 7 January 1977, October, 8, 1979, p 15