Werner Büttner and the Melodic Tactics of Subversive Affirmation: an Introduction

An introduction to the work and practice of Werner Büttner included in Werner Büttner: Coincidence in Splendour, a retrospective monograph on the artist's painting practice from the late 1970s to present. In this shorter text, Slyce contextualises Büttner's practice amongst his contemporary German painters with which he worked and operated alongside.

Printmare Against Nature

Nicky Coutts showed a work in the show "Printmare: Against Nature 1", reproducing a miniature storm scene from a Scottish five pound note and an essay titled "Animal Print Suicide" for the accompanying publication "Printmare Against Nature 2". Curated by Finlay Taylor, ‘Against Nature’ was an exhibition exploring conditions of current understandings of geography (or the geo-graphical), natural histories and landscapes. This exhibition concentrated on work that uses print, and the ways in which subtle innovations in this medium are used to investigate some of the complexities that arise when looking at nature in art. An associated publication has been published by Camberwell Press with essays by David Cross and Nicky Coutts, as well as page images by Bob Matthews, Denis Masi, Finlay Taylor, Kate Scrivener and Dick Jewell. Exhibiting artists included Franz Ackermann, Jasone Miranda Bilbao, Sarah Bodman, Ian Brown, Helen Chadwick, Paul Coldwell, Cornford and Cross, Nicky Coutts, Dunhill & O’Brien, Adam Gillam, Oona Grimes, Judith Goddard, Mark Harris, Katsushika Hokusai, Dan Howard-Birt, Susan Johanknecht, James Keith, Serena Korda, Michael Landy, Jo Love, Mike Marshall, Bob Matthews, Julian Opie, Tim O’Riley, Simon Patterson, David Rayson, Rebecca Salter, Kate Scrivener, Jo Stockham, and Herman de Vries.

The Essay as Art Form

Beginning with Montaigne’s essayistic dictum Que sais je? — ‘What do I know?’ — this PhD thesis examines the literary history, formal qualities, and theoretical underpinnings of the personal essay to both investigate and to practice its relevance as an approach to writing about art. The thesis proposes the essay as intrinsically linked to research, critical writing, and art making; it is a literary method that embodies the real experience of attempting to answer a question. The essay is a processual and reflexive mode of enquiry: a form that conveys not just the essayist’s thought, but the sense and texture of its movement as it attempts to understand its object. It is often invoked, across disciplines, in reference to the possibility of a more liberal sense of creative practice — one that conceptually and stylistically privileges collage, fragmentation, hybridity, chance, open-endedness, and the meander. Within this question of the essay as form, the thesis contains two distinct and parallel strands of analysis — subject matter and essay writing as research. At the core of the study lie two close-readings: Ana Mendieta’s Labyrinth of Venus (1982) and Le Couvent de la Tourette (1959) by Le Corbusier and Iannis Xenakis. In each case, the writing draws, in its tone and texture, on a range of literary influences, weaving together different voices, discussions, and approaches to enquiry. The practice of essay writing is presented alongside, part and party to, research: a method of interrogation that embraces risk and uncertainty, and simultaneously enacts its own findings as a critical-creative mode of study-via-form, and form-via-study. The thesis is presented as a book-length essay, in which the art in question is equal and intimately connected to the writing used to address it. Method and form are designed to respond to the oft-cited challenge of the essay as fundamentally unmethodical, ranging, and diverse. Research, critical study, writerly description, and storytelling are combined to elucidate and expose each other based not on surface continuity, but on a deep interconnection among ideas that, through language, cohere and become related — imbued with an affinity for one another. The consummate product is the argument, as it works across genres, disciplines, descriptive and critical models, to challenge the narrative structure and language used within contemporary writing about art.