Parallel Texts: Contemporary Women’s Experimental Art Writing in North American Exhibition Catalogues from the 1970s to the Present

Experimental writing can inhabit liminal spaces in-between genres and disciplines as it strives to rupture normative rhetorical patterns by playing with form and pushing language beyond its expected conventions. When this mode of writing is brought to bear upon an art object, the resultant text often reads as a type of splintered, improper criticism (in its disregard for conventions and often satirical take on art criticism), an elaborate exercise in ekphrasis, or an entirely new contextualization of the art object embedded within playfully anarchic and hybrid prose. This thesis focuses on pieces of writing produced by four women in the United States and Canada from the 1970s to the present which were initially published in exhibition catalogues and extend the worlds of the art objects they are in conversation with. It is structured chronologically, focusing on the writing of Lucy Lippard in the 1970s, moving to Lynne Tillman’s in the 1980s, followed by Lisa Robertson’s in the 1990s, and ending with Renee Gladman’s in the 2000s. These four writers, while very different in writing styles and background — with Lippard primarily considered an art critic, Tillman a fiction writer, and Robertson and Gladman regarded as poets — all share a similar approach when it comes to producing a piece for an exhibition catalogue. Writing in a mode of what Lisa Robertson calls ‘the parallel text’ or what Lynne Tillman (via Craig Owens) calls writing ‘alongside’ rather than ‘about’ art, they allude to the artwork without making direct reference to it in the text, avoiding naming it explicitly. Through close readings and historical research, I analyse the different rhetorical moves of these four writers as a way of tracing a genealogy of contemporary women’s art writing and the development of the form of ‘the parallel text’. Following a tradition of the avant-garde, these experimental texts gesture beyond conventional structures and expand through politically activist and feminist thinking. They serve as fulcrums to investigate critical and creative architectures that revel in the gap between visual art object and text. They question the ways in which we talk and write about art.

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2024

Author dc:creator

• Gomis Watson, Emma-Joana

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Dillon, Sarah
• Tobin, Amy

• art writing
• feminism
• parallel text

Licence

• https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/b662d0f3-e16c-4b78-94e4-7e406a4420ff/download
• http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved

Language dc:language

eng

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.118104

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/383916