A Seductive Union: Speculative Realism and Contemporary Art

AS someone who engages and writes about art on a consistent basis, the challenge to approach research, or even a text, in the absence of an object is always a challenge: there is nothing to fall back upon or anchor the work around. And yet, there is often, too, an over-reliance on the object, as though description alone can redeem the translation of aesthetic experience into language. When writing an account of a work or body of works, whether that be in a review, an artists’ text or academic treatment, the sure sign of ‘bad’ work is to be able only to describe it: the text stops short at an engagement with form. So too the one that relies overly on description, whether by laziness or disinterest: it can never be a good text, or speak to the heart of what it describes. Thus, any effective text must diverge from the object it describes – creating a new object – and at the same time avoid engagement with works that appear to invite only description. A two-fold negotiation of the object, then, is what is needed: objects as not only things to get at, but also things to emphati-cally restrain oneself from. For me this is the whole problem of writing about art: to adhere but also to rebel from the object of study.