Pool 9: TEXT WORK: On Artists’s Writing

This course seeks to explore the status of artists’ writing, and ‘textual practices’, within contemporary art. It approaches this theme from a number of angles.
First the course positions the diversity of contemporary artists’ writing practices within a longer history of artist’s writing in order to map changing conceptions of ‘the artist’ and their relation to institutions, art historical canon making and questions of social power.
Second it seeks to explore the changing role of artist’s writing in relation to other modes of practice, from video and performance to painting, photography, sculpture and installation, and how new media platforms and technologies have provided new means and questions for textual practices.
Finally it seeks to critically examine recent changes in the role of writing within the professionalization of artist’s self-presentation and the standardization of discursive modes of presenting artists’ work in institutional, artist-run and commercial contexts.
These questions will be explored through a deep engagement with a variety of artist’s writings and other modes of contemporary textual practice.
The course will include guest contributions from an artist with writing/textual practices as well as a writer working within an art context, as well as excursions in and around Zurich to relevant exhibitions and archives.
The course will involve extensive reading and written exercises in English.