Writing Art and Creating Back: What Can We Do With Art (History)?

The roles and borders of art and Art History are not stable. Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes argues that this has been the case since the beginnings of our modern understanding of art, and from the beginnings of the academic discipline of Modern and Contemporary Art History - inaugurated by a curator at the University of Amsterdam in 1963. From this basis, she investigates the boundaries between art and art-historical practices from two sides: artists who engage with (literary) writing, and art historians who do the same - in a creative, artistic way. Using insights from previous studies on James Joyce and Joseph Beuys, as well as Radical History, she concludes that there are good reasons for artists and art historians to work in several registers, to employ indirect and direct notions of social and political efficacy. They thus show that art (history) is part of the world: it contributes modes of meaning-making and world-making.