Art Vapours: Ways of Seeing, Hearing, and Speaking Again

Engaging particularly with the conference themes of drawing and writing, theory and practice, this paper first talked about a special issue of the Journal of Visual Culture published in 2012 marking the 40th anniversary of Ways of Seeing, before introducing a second project, called Art Vapours.

The journal issue was co-edited by Raiford Guins, Juliette Kristensen and susan pui san lok, and comprises eighteen short contributions and reflections from historians, theorists, writers, thinkers, curators and makers, from across the fields of art history, visual culture and practice.

The issue also includes an interview by Kristensen with Mike Dibb and Richard Hollis, both collaborators on Ways of Seeing with Berger, the former the producer and filmmaker, the latter the graphic design; and a selection of visual essays commissioned by lok.

The second part of the paper focuses on a collaboration between lok and Kristensen, under the name Art Vapours. With a view to writing, drawing, thinking, making, publishing and curating across a range of platforms, Art Vapours seeks to hear, recognise, and re-inscribe the voices and bodies that haunt the spaces of feminism, art and the everyday, past and present.

The first AV project revolves around two points of departure, or two moments of discursive self-effacement, self-assertion, and interruption: a letter written to Berger in response to Ways of Seeing, from an apologetic ‘ordinary housewife’; and the women talking in the programmes’ second episode, who speak to Berger, to each other, and before but not to the camera. How might their words be un-archived, uncut and re-scripted, performed or re-staged? How might we recover and listen, re-imagine and re-cast our personal, cultural and political genealogies, in ways that see, hear and speak, to the past and the present?