Reasons to Write Into Art: On Textual Collaboration with Artist Heidi Norton

Focusing on the relationships/constellations between the act of writing, the process of research, and contemporary visual art practices is how I’ve attempted to anchor this series of guest blog posts, but until this winter I could only have spoken to the first two. It’s curious that as a critic and arts writer, you can work full-time to become as fully fluent as possible in the language of contemporary visual art–recognizing it, and occasionally producing its most important turns of phrase, without ever actually speaking it yourself, so to speak. (In other words, so many people who write about art only ever have to learn enough to be able to identify the most important connections, the most obvious expressions, and so forth, without ever learning how individual words and phrases might actually translate to everyday practice.)...