1. Hysterically Real (United States: Internet, 2009) makes Conceptual artworks and performances. By applying a poetic and often metaphorical language, Real wants to amplify the astonishment of the spectator by creating compositions or settings that generate tranquil poetic images that leave traces and balances on the edge of recognition and alienation.
Files of the Women’s Art Library, Goldsmiths, University of London. Photo courtesy Anne Krinsky.
It was suggested to me that I write about work I do in contribution to the attempt at pluralizing what-could-be-considered Conceptual writing, and put it into the context of other cultural productions. I am also keen to explore the potential of otherwise cultural productions where concept is intrarelated to body and experience. Not clever-idea-led writing where appropriation of found text moves language from one master narrative to another, but embodied replies to institutional hails.
Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, 'swims,' 2014. All images by Nick Burnett.
My current writing project, swims, exemplifies a kind of Conceptual writing that employs ritual and bodily practice to explore environmental activism. A long poem documenting wild swims across the UK, it starts and ends in Devon, my home county, taking in rivers through Somerset, Surrey, London, Kent, Herefordshire, and the Lake District. Each swim is conceived of as environmental action, which questions how (or whether) individuals can effect environmental change, while also foregrounding the importance of pleasure, leisure, and optimism in the undertaking.
incantation So a call for effect: I ask ________. I ask ________. I ask ________. I ask ________. The repeat entreats, endures out a threshold in its and again and again and again. A really really really ask “but not only that,”[1] the performance of devotion: I won’t stop since the source of power, the entreatied, doesn’t want me to stop “but not only that,” the source is boundless and will only answer if it reckons me for kin. So again and again and again as “recursiveness, incantatory insistence … repeated ritual sip … aiming to undo the obstruction it reports.”[2] Again.
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