Monthly Archives: July 2008

This essay operates over three stratums, incorporating the minefields and complexities inherent to determining artwork. In this particular case the defining, describing and situating of the work must all be told in first person. It seems necessary to dismantle this “I” that will be talking to “you” the reader, who can remain homogeneous if you like.
Allow me to introduce you to the three “I”s of this essay. There is the “I” within the writing process. This is the artist’s I who speaks with the ‘authority’ of ‘experience’, if not intention. The statement-making voice elucidating artistic decisions that would ideally, were it not for this essay, be laid to rest in the appropriate poststructualist manner. This is the I that is accumulating a critical praxis, quantifying and qualifying choices for the text, drawing influence from established practitioners, locating the text in theory.
The second “I” is the I that is part of a narrative. The subjective I that retells an event with an interpretive voice and with itself at the centre. This is the I that happened .
The third discursive “I” is the I that is a stranger to the text. The analytical voice that imagines critical contexts for the body of work and for the direction of the practice. This is the voice of criticism that applies poetics as a science of thought over the text.
This I thinks in historical, formalistic terms, it appropriates –ism frameworks and individual thinkers. It isolates departures and affiliations with historicised cannons. This is the I whose task it is to weave a trajectory of logic through each of the texts, imagining a cohesive body, themed and knowing of one another.
The three “I”s need not appear linearly nor distinctly but as nomadic counterparts within the multiplicity of ‘creative’ criticism.