June 26 – 27, 2024, 10 am – 12:30 pm
Many thanks to the writer Mitch Speed for his workshop CREATIVE STRATEGIES: Writing Inside Art by Mitch Speed during the basic course within the Studio Program at BAI | Berlin Artist Residency, Art School, Arts Incubator, and Live Online Courses & Classes.
“Writing Inside Art will familiarise students with a crucial branch of the literature on contemporary art — artist’s writings. In this way, the workshop will engage students in an active discussion about the power of artists to use words to illuminate their work, and that of their peers. As the artist Mike Kelley remarked, there is a “long tradition of writings by artists … [that]… could almost be considered a literary genre.” Writing Inside Art will prepare participants to become active readers and contributors within this tradition.
Through close readings, writing assignments, and group feedback, participants will gain familiarity and capability with the powerful artistic tool that is the written word. Far from remaining safely within the borders of the traditional artist’s statement format, the workshop will familiarise participants with the broad spectrum of approaches that artists have taken to writing about their work and that of their peers, from catalogue essays, to narrative texts designed to inventively activate the context of a given artist’s work, to reviews. Participants will leave the course with a newfound toolbox for understanding how artists can actively form the meaning of their work, through writing. For some participants, this may mean integrating writing into their daily work as an artist, whether through creative or straightforwardly essayistic approaches. For others, it may simply mean developing a more highly attuned understanding of how language very often gives form to our experience of artworks, and how artists can contribute to that process, in ways that differ importantly from the crucial work of critics, journalists, historians, and theorists. (Text by courtesy of Mitch Speed)
Day 1
The workshop’s first day will consist of a group reading and discussion, of selected artists’ writings. We will read each text together in a circle, and then proceed to closely analyse each artist-writer’s technique. As indicated in the course description, these readings will range from radical artistic manifestos to intimate and humorous accounts of the artistic life, to essays and reviews, written by artists about their own work, and that of their peers.
Between the workshop’s first and second days, participants will be asked to produce their own artist’s texts, adopting or referencing the techniques and approaches, presented in the first day’s material.
Day 2
The workshop’s second day will repeat the first day’s format, except that this time, we will be collectively reading and analysing your own work, as course participants. Hearing your work spoken aloud in this way is a crucial part of understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your own writing — how it sounds inside a reader’s mind. In giving your work the same degree of critical attention that we give the sample texts on day 1, we will ensure that each participant has a strong foundation for their ongoing work, whether as an author or reader of artist’s texts.
Mitch Speed is a Berlin-based writer. In 2019 his study of Mark Leckey’s video artwork Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999) was published by Afterall Books, as part of their One Work series. His book ‘Still Out of Time: Nostalgia, Art, and Us’ is forthcoming from Floating Opera Press. He’s writen criticism for Camera Austria, Frieze, Mousse, Momus, Border Crossings, Spike, e-flux, artforum, and others. A collection of his essays is also forthcoming from Brick Press.
More information on the Mitch Speed Website.
