Blogging needn't be about self-promotion: if it's done with honesty and openness, it can complement theatre and extend it in enthralling new ways
Things were happening in 60s New York. A dizzying creative scene was emerging, encompassing and reconfiguring visual art, dance, music and performance. As I've explored this exciting landscape, the thing that has perhaps surprised and delighted me most is quite how much these artists wrote and spoke publicly about their own work. Dialogues, manifestos, notes, essays ? a paper mountain of engaging writing remains from this period. It was a rich tapestry of ideas that informed the work happening at the time and is now embedded in our memory of those artists.
Today, too, things are happening. Exciting creative communities are thriving in London, Birmingham, Glasgow and elsewhere. Yet I often find myself disappointed by the scarcity of public writing by contemporary artists around their work. Especially so, considering that we are surrounded by the wide open spaces of the internet, where we can write as much or as little as we like, and make the results immediately accessible to anyone who is interested. This endless digital space ? and particularly hubs such as this blog ? should be the ideal platform for expressing what we artists do, and why.
Why, then, does it often feel so hard to write about your work in public? Perhaps, at least in part, it's a consequence of the expectations the internet seems to prescribe. As Henry Hitchins suggests, we have grown accustomed to a noisiness in web discourse that could, when talking about yourself, lead to the assumption of unearned authoritiveness or cynical self-aggrandisement ? writing on the internet is implicitly to stand on a soapbox.
But perhaps it also has something to do with why we write. Returning again to New York and the 60s, you find that what's being written does not simply inform the kind of art being made, but actually embodies it. Look at John Cage's delicately contrived performance lectures, Claes Oldenburg's bewildering Raw Notes or Robert Smithson's beautiful description of a tour of the monuments of Passaic. This is writing that at once complements these artists' other work and extends it in enthralling new ways.
If artists more frequently approached writing in public as just such an extension, rather than a means of explaining or promoting it, they might find the process comes more naturally. I'm calling for a messier kind of writing, more vulnerable and yet more declamatory. Writing that is the product of a desire to speak as well as an obligation to communicate. A more restless kind of writing, devoid of neatness, riddled with ambiguities and rhetorical flourishes. Writing that expresses the same wants and preoccupations as that artist's other creative output, without needing to comment on that work. Writing suffused with generosity and fragility. The page as a canvas or a stage, as well as space for programme notes.
Some people already do this exceptionally well. The two who I read most regularly are probably Chris Goode and Tim Etchells, both theatre-makers who are constantly finding new ways in which their written online presence can articulate the same aims and desires as their flesh-and-blood performance work. It would be heartening to see and read of more artists finding their own way through these online platforms, and if you know of any please do leave a note in the comments. Without this, I think we're missing an important opportunity to articulate the value of what we do on our own terms: a means of forging a new way of speaking, to each other and to the world beyond.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2011/feb/18/artists-blogging-work
Lake Bell Haylie Duff Talisa Soto Julianne Hough Paula Garcés
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