Abstract/Summary

This thesis defines echoing in relation to the production and interpretation of contemporary art, writing and critical practice. Informed by the action of performing to the camera, where a body in anticipation of a transmission taking place addresses a perceived audience, and where acts of speech, gesture and attention are front and centre, I locate echoing and reverberation within the body, as visceral events driving language, social relations and subjectivities. Following a trajectory from 1970s performance and video art through to twenty-first century developments in writing-as-practice, echoing is established as a frame through which to interpret citational tendencies in the practice and discourse of contemporary art. Beginning with Nancy Holt and Richard Serra’s Boomerang (1974) and Sharon Hayes’s Screed #13 (2003), I consider echoing as an auditory effect, breaking it down through Brandon LaBelle’s Lexicon of the Mouth (2014) and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s ‘Echo’ (1993). I argue that, unlike appropriation, echoing is not an exact copy of its source, but one transformed by the interruptions and impediments emerging through the circumstances of its respeaking and rewriting at a different place and time and called forth by a different body. In exploration of Edward George’s expression that ‘the body is a body of citational writing’ (2021) through Martine Syms’s Notes on Gesture (2015), I enact writerly practices of citation – such as closely reading a source, embodying it through rewriting and respeaking it aloud, reconfiguring, holding and making it visible – and test how these can challenge conventions for writing and make way for different messages and sensations. Applying J.L Austin’s speech act theory to writing, both as action and a form that is prepared for action, specifically the script, the thesis is written performatively, with the writer, ‘I’, adopting the role of an academic researcher undertaking the task of a practice-based research project, one that is rooted in writing, in anticipation of the reader, ‘You’, extending the performance through its reading. It is modelled and tested through the practice of integrating existing texts and artworks into new arrangements via processes of repeating, restaging and rewriting. These reconfigurations are presented online, at https://www.are.na/lisa-barnard/echoes-and-citations-in-art-and-its-writing, and the reader is directed to them at certain points in the body of the thesis. The interacting transmissions – of reading, writing, enacting, recording and documenting – are viewed as performing points of contact between reader, writer, text and practice. Documents and objects (language signs and symbols; printed matter; audio visual recordings; workshops) are simultaneously reconfigured as source, process and outcome.