Resumen de (Blind Summit) Art Writing, Narrative, Middle Voice
Writing about many of those material and textual things that constitute what we call modernism and postmodernism through means provided by contemporary, mainstream academic art history and theory drags them back into those very explanatory, realistic, and representational forms repudiated by twentieth-century avant-gardes. One challenge for trained writers on art concerned with such material is to adapt their writing to forms of utterance that (post)modernist art and writing deploys in its refusal to inherit traditional, certaintist rhetorical codes. Middle voice offers one means of rethinking agency in art writing along such lines. Its writer-observers neither grasp nor are grasped by phenomena, but are changed by articulating them whilst observing and recording something of this change. Such an unorthodox configuration of relations between perceiver and phenomena means that middle voice is difficult to conceive within limits of realism dictated by academic art writing. Consequently, one of these texts argues for a greater diversity in art writing; the other is a performance of this writing, meant to shadow, mimic, and play off (without describing, delimiting, or determining) a work of art. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
