Engaged encounters : fiction as art writing - a practical investigation of the borders of art criticism

Sammanfattning: The thesis project Engaged Encounters has been a multi-part investigation into art criticism. Its main components are one of practice and one of theory: a fiction text – Transatlantic Journeys – which I am publishing as a small book in an edition of 200 and exhibiting at Konstfack´s Spring Show, and the present reflective essay. In the essay, I identify the central elements of the current «crisis of art criticism» and ask what impact experimental writing modes can have on the practice and its alleged crisis. I give an account of fields of contemporary writing where the text is acting with or through, rather than being about, art. I find that a common view is that the crisis, real as it might be, can serve as a possibility to re-envision art writing. The fiction text, a two-part short story, is a critical response to my one month internship at Henie Onstad Art Centre. A character is extracted from a chosen artwork of the then current exhibition and "cast" in the narrative opposite the history of the art institution. In the fiction as well as in the essay, I treat the «engaged encounter», the face to face meeting with the other. This is the aspect of art criticism I at present find to be most pertinent: criticism as an encounter between work and viewer, a reciprocal addressing analogous to the risky business of face-to-face human relations. The Norwegian word henvendelsen (approximately approach, address) is the key term used to denote this relation. The insights of the linguist Benveniste and the philosopher Levinas are important references.