Item – Theses Canada

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OCLC number
1032909920
Link(s) to full text
LAC copy
LAC copy
Author
Carroll, Leanne Katherine.
Title
"Artist Writings : Critical Essays, Reception, and Conditions of Production since the 60s."
Degree
(PhD)--University of Toronto, 2013.
Publisher
Toronto : University of Toronto, 2013.
Description
1 online resource
Notes
Includes bibliographical references.
Abstract
This dissertation uncovers the history of what is today generally accepted in the art world, that artists are also artist-writers. I analyse a shift from writing by artists as an ostensible aberration to artist writing as practice. My structuring methodology is assessing artist writings and their conditions and reception in their moment of production and in their singularity. In Part 1, I argue that, while the Abstract-Expressionist artist-writers were negatively received, a number of AbEx-inflected conditions influenced and made manifest the valuing of artist writings. I demonstrate that Donald Judd conceived of writing as stemming from the same methods and responsibilities of the artist - following the guiding principle that art comes from art, from taking into account developments of the recent past - and as an essayistic means to argumentatively air his extra-art concerns; that writing for Dan Graham was an art world right of entry; and that Robert Smithson treated words as primary substances in a way that complicates meaning in his articles and in his objects and earthworks, in the process introducing a modernist truth to materials that gave the writing cachet while also serving as the basis for its domestication. In chronicling the reception of these artists' written production at the time of its writing, I conclude that writing that could be related to artists' visual practices is what resonated in the late 60s. In Part 2, I explore Frank Bowling's public deliberation on the relationship of black experience to modernist painting in Arts Magazine; Art & Language's supposition that an editorial might count as art - arguing that it always already came up for the count as secondary-primary artist writing; female artist-writers' disclosure of their art and writing in new feminist-founded magazines; and critics' recognition of artist writings as a critical space. I conclude by proposing that the profusion of and demand for artist writings were constituted by the poststructuralist death of the author along with a persistent meaning-limiting author-function. This study confirms that critical engagement with writing by artists is a challenge: to viewers/readers, to art writers, and to artist-writers during the nascent era of artist writing.
Other link(s)
tspace.library.utoronto.ca
hdl.handle.net
Subject
artists' writings.