“What a Hazard a Letter Is”: Correspondence in Feminist Art, Art Writing, and Art History, from Emily Dickinson to Now

This series of events newly figures the role of the researcher as working, thinking, feeling, and writing in close proximity to their subject, to explore the meanings and manifestations of ‘correspondence’ in feminist art, art writing, and art history. Correspondence refers to a type of communication, historically gendered or feminised, that occurs when letters are exchanged; it is also the label attached to an archival box storing and conserving them long after they have been written and sent. Correspondence collects the written pieces of our intimate, social, sexual, and working lives, which can be private or public, or both, and which extend from typed or handwritten sent letters, to drafts of letters, and unsent letters: emails, fan letters, marginalia, messages, open letters, postcards. These are the materials with which we ‘correspond’, form relational networks with and for each other: across mutual spaces of reading and writing, touching and feeling. To correspond is to ‘keep in touch’; to be together; to respond, reply, relate. As a term, correspondence is stretchy, and can send us in multiple directions, from the materiality of the letter, to the associations, agreements, affinities, close connections, and similarities that can occur between subjects, objects, artworks, and things.

Consisting of talks, artist-writer masterclasses, performative readings, works-in-progress presentations, and participatory workshops, this 2021-2022 series of events sets out to explore the sticky relationship between correspondence as an object to be studied, and correspondence as an affective position that underpins and sustains our feminist lives and work: the entanglement of our lives within our work. It moves beyond cultural and art historical studies of the letter, to think newly and seriously about practices of letter writing and correspondence as inventive, feminist methods of art historical research. It aims to consider the ways in which corresponding, connecting, associating, and feeling with artists, subjects, and objects across time, could represent new ways of ‘doing’ feminist art historical research that prioritises affective, embodied, experimental writing and the blurring of subject and object. In this way, and following recent, ‘post critical’ theorisations and experimentations, such as Maggie Nelson on/with autotheory (2015), Paul B. Preciado on/with the ‘body essay’ (2008, trans. 2013), Saidiya Hartman on/with ‘critical fabulation’ and waywardness (2008, 2019), Carol Mavor on/with imaginative archives (2020), Tina Campt on/with listening to images (2017), and Julietta Singh on/with body archives and queer mothering in letters (2018, 2021), the series seeks to create a space that sits between feminist theory and practice wherein new dialogues between art making, art writing, and art history can speak capaciously to one another (and correspond). How can taking risks with literary form, like the writing of a letter that is also a “hazard” (to steal Emily Dickinson’s description that she pencilled onto the unfolded pattern of an envelope), open up new ways of taking risks with content?

Recognising the contribution feminist and queer artists and writers have made to transforming the once private, domestic tradition of letter writing—from the envelope poems of Dickinson, to the letter-poems of Diane di Prima, to the epistolary artworks and novels of Kathy Acker, to the open letters of Audre Lorde, to the epistolary art writings of Quinn Latimer—the series intends to explore the private-made-public forms, feelings, and materialities of their artworks and writings, and the urgent questions and constructions regarding gender, sexuality, class, race, embodiment, sickness, and ability they make. Departing from American art/writing practices, but always thinking about them in relation to others (subjects, disciplines, forms, contexts, geographies, nations, histories), the series asks what such letter-based/correspondence artworks afford us; how might they help us to access our subjects differently? What can we learn about them and their histories or desires, about ourselves, about the structure of our relationship, about the relations between past and present feminisms, by turning more closely to the affective, attentive, embodied, desiring, social, and speculative qualities of letter writing and correspondence as a feminist method of art historical research? What can correspondence—as a practice-based methodological turn—give us?

This series is organised by Dr Alice Butler (The Courtauld) and supported by the Centre for American Art. 

Events

A poem written on an envelope
Emily Dickinson, Long Years apart, Amherst Manuscript 277, Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts.
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