This presentation explores the compositional possibilities of collage where decontextualising and juxtaposing incongruent text, images or actions within a conceptual aesthetic construct produces a variety of disruptive gestures or indeterminate outcomes. This particular collage aesthetics, connected to the score or instruction, collapses distinctions between writing, reading and performance. Texts by Carolee Schneemann, Constance DeJong and Lucy Lippard published between 1972-79, form the basis for the discussion, as examples of fiction writing developed from an engagement with what the scholar Liz Kotz has described as “the poetics of chance and collage”. Bound within the material format of the publication, each artist utilised the processes of publishing within the frameworks of writing — interconnecting design and editorial decisions as well as production and distribution. Iterated through magazine projects as excerpts, serial publications and performances, each artist eventually published the books, Parts of a Body House Book (1972), The Complete Works of Constance DeJong I-V (1976), and I See/You Mean (1979).

As collected publications they elided inclusion as either literary or artistic works, yet their commitment to an exploration of individual and collective subjectivity, formulated within the emergence of second wave feminism, would find their writing described by John Howell in a rare article from 1976, as a “syntax of self”. For these artists, the self was constituted within the processes of a writerly ‘becoming’ — synthesised on and off the page, with the object of text, the document or the book, translated and embodied within the processes of performance or exhibition making. With visual materials sourced from the library and archives at Tate, the presentation will describe the transitions between forms and types, to illustrate writing that moved between subjective and critical boundaries, with publications and events that connect the US and the UK.

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