Researching and Writing On Contemporary Art and Artists Challenges Practices and Complexities 1St Ed Edition Christopher Wiley All Chapter

Researching and Writing on
Contemporary Art and Artists:

Challenges, Practices, and
Complexities 1st ed. Edition
Christopher Wiley
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/researching-and-writing-on-contemporary-art-and-arti
sts-challenges-practices-and-complexities-1st-ed-edition-christopher-wiley/
Researching and
Writing on Contemporary
Art and Artists
Challenges, Practices, and Complexities
Edited by Christopher Wiley · Ian Pace
Researching and Writing on Contemporary
Art and Artists
Christopher Wiley · Ian Pace
Editors
Researching
and Writing
on Contemporary
Art and Artists
Challenges, Practices, and Complexities
Editors
Christopher Wiley Ian Pace
Department of Music and Media Department of Music
University of Surrey City, University of London
Guilford, Surrey, UK London, UK
ISBN 978-3-030-39232-1 ISBN 978-3-030-39233-8 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39233-8
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2020
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction
on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and
information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication.
Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied,
with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have
been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published
maps and institutional affiliations.
Cover image: Vikas Kumar/EyeEm

Cover design by eStudioCalamar
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Contents
Part I General Introduction
1 Researching and Writing on Contemporary

Art and Artists 3
Christopher Wiley and Ian Pace
Part II Critical Perspectives
2 The Artist Is Present: Scandal and the Academic

Study of the Living Artist 19
Lorraine York
3 From Vocational Calling to Career Construction:

Late-Career Authors and Critical Self-reflection 39
Hywel Dix
4 The Purpose of the Written Element

in Composition PhDs 65
Christopher Leedham and Martin Scheuregger
v
vi CONTENTS
5 Ethnographic Approaches to the Study of Western

Art Music: Questions of Context, Realism,
Evidence, Description and Analysis 91
Ian Pace
6 When Ethnography Becomes Hagiography:

Uncritical Musical Perspectives 123
Ian Pace
Part III Case Studies Across the Arts
7 Writing Catastrophe: Howard Barker’s Theatre 151

Andy W. Smith
8 Writing the Contemporary Ballerina: Sylvie Guillem,

Misty Copeland and Lessons in Biography 173
Jill Brown
9 Amend the Arena: On Adrian Piper’s Work 191

Vered Engelhard
10 Writing About Contemporary Composers:

Memory and Irony in The Apollonian Clockwork 205
Joel M. Baldwin
11 Artfrom: Researching the Canon Through

Publications of Art and Design 223
Miriam Cabell and Phoebe Stubbs
Part IV Art Considered on Its Own Terms
12 Occlusionary Tactics 241

Joanne ‘Bob’ Whalley
CONTENTS vii
13 Abstracts 249
Richard Birchall
14 MusicArt: Creating Dialogues Across the Arts 259

Annie Yim
in conversation with Christopher Wiley
Index 277
Notes on Contributors
Joel M. Baldwin is a composer based at St Hilda’s College, University

of Oxford, working towards a D.Phil. under the supervision of Martyn
Harry and Gascia Ouzounian. He is particularly interested in the ways
in which meaning can be expressed through convergences of popular
music and classical music, sound and space, motion and narrative, and
through combining music with visual art, film, dance and theatre. He
is currently working on two highly collaborative projects: a setting of
poems on mushrooms with musical material derived from the ecology of
fungal mycelial networks, and a non-narrative opera exploring the limi-
tations of language. He recently completed a piece for two dancers and
film featuring mezzo-soprano Michaela Riener with Ensemble Klang,
and produced a new opera for students at Oxford’s Faculty of Music
based on the short story, The Beginning of an Idea by John McGahern.
His research revolves around aspects of interdisciplinarity, intertext and
the psychology of creation in new music theatre.
Richard Birchall read Music at the University of Cambridge and stud-
ied as a postgraduate cellist at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama
in London under Louise Hopkins. He later completed studies in Film
Music composition at Goldsmiths College. He pursues a varied career as
cellist, composer, arranger and orchestrator. Richard’s compositions and
arrangements have been performed at the BBC Proms, Royal Festival
Hall, Wigmore Hall, The Purcell Room, The Sage Gateshead, and
throughout the UK, and have been broadcast on BBC Radio 3, Classic
ix
x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
FM, and French and German national radio. His piece Mirrors was writ-
ten for Cellophony and premiered in the Park Lane Group series at the
Purcell Room in January 2011; since then he has completed various
works for chamber ensembles, following commissions by the Minerva
Trio, the Piatti Quartet and from individual artists. Recent works include
Labyrinth for cello and chamber orchestra; Alice in Wonderland for eight
cellos and narrator; Delirium for two violins; and a second string quar-
tet, Hands. http://www.richardbirchall.co.uk/.
Jill Brown trained in classical ballet at Bush Davies Schools and the
Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts. She then completed
a Bachelor of Arts (Distinction) at the University of Western Australia
and subsequently embarked on her career in publishing. Later she com-
pleted a Graduate Diploma in Editing and Publishing (Distinction) at
the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. Jill has worked as an edi-
tor, commissioning editor, publisher, editorial director and writer in edu-
cational, trade and online publishing for companies that include Pearson
Education, ABC Books (a division of the Australian Broadcasting
Corporation) and Random House Australia. She is the author of
two commercial titles on nutrition and fitness. Jill graduated from
the University of Queensland with a Master of Philosophy in Creative
Writing in 2019. She is currently Publishing Manager for a non-profit
educational publishing company in Melbourne. She is also a dance con-
tributor to Limelight magazine.
Hywel Dix is Principal Academic in English and Communication at
Bournemouth University. He has published extensively on the relation-
ship between literature, culture and political change in contemporary
Britain, most notably in Postmodern Fiction and the Break-Up of Britain
(Continuum, 2010), After Raymond Williams: Cultural Materialism
and the Break-Up of Britain (University of Wales Press, 2nd ed. 2013)
and Multicultural Narratives: Traces and Perspectives, co-edited with
Mustafa Kirca (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2018). His wider research
interests include modern and contemporary literature, critical cultural
theory, authorial careers and autofiction. His monograph about literary
careers entitled The Late-Career Novelist was published by Bloomsbury
in 2017 and an edited collection of essays on Autofiction in English was
published by Palgrave in 2018.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xi
Vered Engelhard is an artist and scholar based in New York, whose

practice is centred in the performance of alternative modes of sociality
arising from explorative interactions among instruments, scores and peo-
ple. Their work is concerned with the political dimension of composi-
tion, expanded conceptions of ancestry and the ethical dimension of
objects. As a musician they have performed in New York, Lima, Berlin
and Madrid. Engelhard’s compositions have been performed in venues
such as National Sawdust, Areté Gallery, the City University of New
York, Columbia University and Human Impact Institute, among others.
Engelhard is an active member in the New York Constellation Ensemble,
the OPERA Ensemble and Siestaaa. Their writings have been published
in Kunstmuzik, Columbia Law Blog, Asymptote, Brooklyn Rail, Museo
de Arte de Lima and Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand,
among others. Engelhard has participated in residencies at Mildred’s
Lane, Governors Island and the Interdisciplinary Art and Theory
Programme, and will be resident at The Watermill Center in the spring.
They hold a B.A. in Visual Arts and Philosophy from Sarah Lawrence
College, an M.A. in Art History from Columbia University and are a
Ph.D. candidate in Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia
University.
Christopher Leedham is a composer and conductor based in the UK.
He read music at Magdalen College, Oxford before continuing post-
graduate study in composition at the London College of Music and
Media. His compositional concerns involve the perception of narra-
tive threads in abstract musical structures and the creation of complex
musical webs utilising only the simplest of musical ideas. Research into
these issues formed the basis of his Ph.D. in Composition, awarded by
the University of York in 2013. His works have been broadcasted and
performed internationally and have been published by the University of
York Music Press. He has taught at Leeds College of Music (where he
was Senior Lecturer between 2015 and 2019) and at the universities of
York and Lincoln. As a conductor, he has performed at venues across the
country including The Forge, Camden; Capstone Theatre, Liverpool;
The Engine House, Manchester; and the Edinburgh Fringe. He is
co-founder of ensemble Dark Inventions, with whom he has recently
released premiere recordings of new works by Judith Weir and Philip
Cashian.
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Ian Pace is Reader in Music at City, University of London, UK, and

an internationally renowned pianist specialising in new music. He pub-
lished a monograph on Michael Finnissy’s epic cycle The History of
Photography in Sound (2013) alongside a recording of the work, and he
is co-editor of the volumes Uncommon Ground: The Music of Michael
Finnissy (1988), Critical Perspectives on Michael Finnissy (2019), Writing
About Contemporary Musicians (2020) and Rethinking Contemporary
Musicology (2020). He has also published articles in many journals,
recorded 40 CDs and given over 300 world premieres.
Martin Scheuregger is Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of
Lincoln, where he leads the B.A. (Hons) Music programme. He was
awarded the degree of Ph.D. from the University of York in 2015 for
his thesis entitled ‘Conceptions of Time and Form in Twentieth and
Twenty-First-Century Music’. This study deliberately blurs the bound-
aries of composition and musical analysis, presenting both original
composition and analysis of relevant works to explore four interlinked
temporal themes: fragmentation, miniaturisation, brevity and organicism.
This interdisciplinary approach to research continues in his current work,
which combines and juxtaposes composition with analysis, and extends
to his activity as a music curator, producer and director of contempo-
rary music ensemble Dark Inventions. He has published on the music of
György Kurtág and Thomas Simaku, and is currently developing a mon-
ograph on the music of British composer George Benjamin.
Andy W. Smith is a writer and researcher based in Cardiff, South Wales.
He has published book chapters with Manchester University Press,
Routledge and Oberon on a wide range of subjects including horror
cinema, postwar British Theatre, graphic novels and TV series includ-
ing Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. He has contributed entries to
The Encyclopedia of the Gothic and The Routledge Companion to the
Gothic, and has a forthcoming book chapter on Universal horror films
with Edinburgh University Press (2020). Andy is the co-editor with
James Reynolds of Howard Barker’s Theatre: Wrestling with Catastrophe
(Methuen Bloomsbury, 2015), which was shortlisted for the Society
for Theatre Research Book of the Year 2016. He works for the Quality
Assurance Agency for Higher Education as the Head of Quality and
Standards, responsible for managing the UK Quality Code for Higher
Education and other sector benchmarks.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii
Miriam Cabell and Phoebe Stubbs Miriam Cabell is Associate

Professor of Design at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence,
RI. She trained in photography and the language arts, and in her practice
she interrogates ‘the image’ and the different ways it is created through
visual and textual grammar. Phoebe Stubbs trained as a glassmaker and
now explores abstract concepts such as ‘transparency’ in language and
materials. She also works as an editor and administrator in the arts, and
is Project Administrator for Listening Across Disciplines II at London
College of Communication. Their professional practices are integral to
their understanding of the art world, from its obvious inequalities, to
the methods of distributing artwork, and has led to their joint interest
in art publishing and its mechanisms. They were in residence at NES in
Iceland in June 2017, and at the Luminary in St Louis in July 2017.
Their publishing imprint, Pink Jacket, published Suggested Reading in
Spring 2018, an artist book of the work of Keith Allyn Spencer; two new
visual publications, fangirl and HEY will be launched in Spring 2020,
as well as a new series, fortissimo, the umbrella under which artists, writ-
ers, critics and other practitioners are invited to test ideas and theories of
feminisms that begin elsewhere than dominance and oppression; instead,
for example, considering and celebrating pleasure and joy as revolution-
ary gestures; their collective, Contributors Inc., recently had work pub-
lished in Cabinet magazine and Temporary Art Review, and in March
2020 will be launching, in collaboration with The Luminary, their artist
book Artfrom.
Joanne ‘Bob’ Whalley is a Lecturer in Dance at University of
Roehampton, where she teaches postgraduate dance and choreography
students. Her book Between Us: Audiences, Affect and the In-Between
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), published with her research partner Lee
Miller, celebrates spaces which cause an affecting, and bodies affected.
In 2015 she completed a B.Sc. in Acupuncture, and she specialises in
palliative care. Her Ph.D. students explore grief narratives, empathy
and affective exchange, concepts of with-ness and witness. Whalley
and Miller completed the first joint practice-as-research Ph.D. to be
undertaken within a UK arts discipline in 2004, and they make per-
formance, installation, performance text and objects to international
audiences.
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Christopher Wiley is Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of

Surrey, UK. He is the author of many book chapters and articles on
musical biography and life writing appearing in journals including
The Musical Quarterly, Music & Letters and Comparative Criticism.
He is the co-editor of forthcoming volumes including Writing about
Contemporary Musicians (Routledge, 2020), Transnational Perspectives
on Artists’ Lives (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), Women’s Suffrage in
Word, Image, Music and Drama (Routledge, 2021) and The Routledge
Companion to Autoethnography and Self-Reflexivity in Music Studies
(Routledge, 2021), as well as a recent guest-edited double issue of the
Journal of Musicological Research (2019). He is currently preparing a
monograph on the earliest volumes of the ‘Master Musicians’ biographi-
cal series (1899–1906).
Annie Yim is a concert pianist and founder of MusicArt, an initia-
tive to create original artist-led performance projects. Known for her
wide-ranging solo and chamber music repertoire that encompasses
canonic works and new music, she has broadcast live on BBC Radio 3,
Classic FM and national radios in Canada and Portugal. From London
to Berlin and Salzburg, her performances with artists and art spaces have
been featured in New York’s T Magazine, Artnet and Gramophone. She
is a founding member of the Minerva Piano Trio. Born in Hong Kong
and raised in Vancouver, she studied piano at the University of British
Columbia. She holds a Doctor of Musical Arts degree and completed her
performance-based research on Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms
at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and City, University of
London.
Lorraine York, F.R.S.C. is Distinguished University Professor and
Senator William McMaster Chair in Canadian Literature and Culture in
the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University,
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. She is the author of Literary Celebrity in
Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2007), Margaret Atwood and the
Labour of Literary Celebrity (University of Toronto Press, 2013) and
Celebrity Cultures in Canada, co-edited with Katja Lee (Wilfrid Laurier
University Press, 2016). Reluctant Celebrity, which examines public dis-
plays of celebrity reluctance as forms of privilege intertwined with race,
gender and sexuality, appeared in 2018 from Palgrave Macmillan, as did
Ethics and Affects in the Fiction of Alice Munro, co-edited with Amelia
DeFalco.
List of Figures
Fig. 3.1 Only a low level of success is ever achieved 43

Fig. 3.2 Early break-out is consolidated by a high level
of subsequent success 44
Fig. 3.3 Subsequent work struggles to live up to early successes 44
Fig. 3.4 The career is slowly and gradually developed 45
Fig. 3.5 The overall career trajectory experiences a ‘peak’ 45
Fig. 3.6 The overall career trajectory experiences an inverted peak 46
Fig. 4.1 Comparison of perceived benefits to self and examiners
(Respondents were asked to give these elements a ‘star’
rating between 0 and 10) 72
Fig. 4.2 Content of written element 74
Fig. 4.3 Types of commentary 75
Fig. 4.4 Timing of writing 80
Fig. 4.5 Model of late-stage reflexivity 81
Fig. 4.6 Influencing factors on the written element 85
Fig. 10.1 Ironic music example of a pigeon cooing
(Andriessen and Schönberger 2006, 52) 214
Fig. 12.1 1 February 2019, 10:23 242
Fig. 12.2 1 February 2019, 10:22 243
Fig. 12.3 1 February 2019, 10:19 244
Fig. 12.4 1 February 2019, 10:44 245
Fig. 12.5 1 February 2019, 10:46 246
Fig. 12.6 1 February 2019, 10:20 247
xv
xvi LIST OF FIGURES
Fig. 14.1 Annie Yim, Richard Birchall and Christopher Le Brun

(left to right) at the gallery of Katrin Bellinger at Colnaghi,
October 2015. Two of Le Brun’s works in the exhibition
hang on the wall behind; Cloud is the painting on the right
(Photo credit: Franek Strzeszewski, © MusicArt, 2015) 261
PART I
General Introduction
CHAPTER 1
Researching and Writing

on Contemporary Art and Artists
Christopher Wiley and Ian Pace
Researching and writing on contemporary art and artists take many

forms: the scholar meticulously developing a journal article, book chapter
or research monograph over many months or years; the journalist penning
a review or opinion-piece, often working to a strict deadline; the writer
affiliated with a specific arts institution or event, preparing a programme
note, theatre booklet or exhibition handbook; the aficionado typing a per-
sonal blog entry, producing a fanzine or even just documenting a spon-
taneous insight via social media. In respect of art created, and artists who
have lived, close to the present time, all such writers—and many more
besides—may have developed a close relationship with their subject mat-
ter, with which they might have a myriad range of wider personal connec-
tions, some of which may affect their access to documents, interviews and
other sources for their research. How can such authors engage with the
C. Wiley (*)
Department of Music and Media, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK
e-mail: c.wiley@surrey.ac.uk
I. Pace
Department of Music, City, University of London, London, UK
e-mail: ian.pace.1@city.ac.uk
© The Author(s) 2020 3

C. Wiley and I. Pace (eds.),
Researching and Writing on Contemporary Art and Artists,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39233-8_1
4 C. WILEY AND I. PACE
art and the artist, yet maintain a respectable level of critical distance when
researching and writing about them and their work?
This volume has its origins in recurrent dialogues between the two
editors and others concerning the need for rigorous critical thinking
about the very nature of researching and writing about contemporary
artists and their output, as manifested in different types of discourse.
In a multidisciplinary scholarly field, this topic is very far from being
exhausted, though some piecemeal aspects have, of course, received sig-
nificant previous coverage in the literature. Several general volumes on
writing about art consist primarily of student-facing guidance rather
than scholarly critique of real-life practices (for example, Krüger 2008;
Herbert 2012; Williams 2014; Barnet 2015), but there are a number
of edited anthologies in which biographers reflect more generally upon
their experiences in writing the lives of their subjects, such as Jeffrey
Meyers’s The Craft of Literary Biography (1985) and John Batchelor’s
The Art of Literary Biography (1995), some of whose contributors hap-
pen to have been writing on modern figures and/or those with whom
the authors had personal connections. A range of other volumes (for
example, Herndon and McLeod 1979; Hatcher 1985; Morphy and
Perkins 2006) consider the subject from an anthropological perspective,
frequently downplaying both art and artists in favour of wider cultural
questions, but sometimes with material relevant to the issues of this vol-
ume (see Ian Pace’s chapters for more on this subject). Journals such as
Performance Research have carried articles documenting areas such as
artistic practices and processes in relation to individual case studies of,
as distinct from self-reflexively contemplating acts of researching and
writing on, contemporary art and/or artists; similar engagement can be
found in leading book-length studies of practice as research (for exam-
ple, Allegue et al. 2009; Smith and Dean 2009; Freeman 2010; Nelson
2013). Many trade periodicals offer examples of writing on contempo-
rary art, as distinct from the critical modes of writing under scrutiny in
the current volume, which therefore raise a different set of, nonetheless
pertinent, questions.
This collection, conversely, is characterised by two distinctive fea-
tures. First, the emphasis is placed on specifically on contemporary artists
and their outputs, and the issues that are uniquely raised by research-
ing and writing about living or recently deceased figures, as distinct from
those whose lives have taken place further from the present. Second, it
brings together discourse on personages across the disciplines of music,
1 RESEARCHING AND WRITING ON CONTEMPORARY ART AND ARTISTS 5
literature, dance, theatre, the visual arts and more, in order to give
sharper focus to issues shared across the arts as well offering opportu-
nities for dialogue between different artistic fields (involving differing
numbers of individuals in the creative process, some very much focused
on a single creator, others in which a range of people contribute) on the
theory and practice of research. In these respects, the anthology aims to
fill a valuable gap in scholarship by subjecting the theory and practice of
writing about contemporary art and artists across the disciplines to sus-
tained critical scrutiny from a range of different artistic viewpoints, dis-
cussing issues of writing about recent developments in the arts in order
to raise the visibility of this area of scholarly enquiry.
The scope of the volume concerns figures active in the contemporary
arts, understood to incorporate those living or recently deceased artists
who have produced innovative, distinctive or otherwise leading work
within the last c. 30 years. Coverage ranges from performers and perfor-
mance artists, through dancers and choreographers, to composers, visual
artists, literary authors and more, in addition to artists writing about
their own creative practices and corresponding output, and those with
whom individual authors have worked. It focuses upon the act of writ-
ing and the strategies, ideologies and assumptions contained therein, as
well as the boundaries of what constitutes ‘writing’ about contemporary
artists in its multifarious forms, involving iconoclastic and experimental
approaches to such writing alongside more conventional representations.
It is primarily concerned with critical modes of writing, as distinct from
fan-based writing or descriptive writing, insofar as these discourses can
be separated at the current time (on which point, see Wiley 2020, and
Pace’s chapters in this volume), and it looks reflexively at such writing in
the hope of providing more rigorous and ethically sound foundations for
future practices of this type. Matters of ethics in relation to researching
and writing on contemporary artists are to be found throughout the col-
lection, for example, in Lorraine York’s chapter on scandal.
The advent of practice as research in the arts disciplines (various key
texts about which are cited above) is a secondary concern of the vol-
ume, since many of the questions raised by researching and writing
on other contemporary artists also relate to writing about oneself and
one’s own practice. This became a particularly cutting-edge issue ever
since greater recognition in the academic realm of practice as research,
beginning in Finland in the 1980s and 1990s and Australia in 1987,
followed by the USA in the 1990s and elsewhere later in that decade,
emerging in the UK around 1997 (see Kershaw 2009, 106; Cook 2015;
Pace 2015b). This phenomenon engendered a range of debates about
when and how exactly practice can be said to embody research, as have
occupied many academics in the UK who are required to submit outputs
to the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), subsequently the Research
Excellence Framework (REF), such that they are forced to justify their
work in this respect. Some maintain that certain forms of creative prac-
tice can only become research when accompanied by writing (see, for
example, Nelson 2013, 71–73; Vaes 2015); others believe that that the
research can be embodied within the creative practice itself, a key issue
in the debates following from John Croft’s article (2015a), responses by
Ian Pace (2015a) and Camden Reeves (2015), and a further contribu-
tion from Croft (2015b), in the journal Tempo, on music composition
and performance. Others have grappled with the meaning of quality in
such outputs (for example, Schippers 2007; Biggs and Karlsson 2011).
Our volume incorporates contributions from artists as well as incorpo-
rating different forms of art—a visual essay and a music composition—in
later sections alongside more conventional modes of scholarly enquiry,
while Christopher Leedham and Martin Scheuregger’s chapter on
the written component of music composition PhD degrees addresses
the matter directly. It therefore responds to timely questions such as the
validity of creative practice as research and its parity with more traditional
humanities-oriented output.
In the wake of various revelations relating to artists’ private lives and
activities, some alleged to have committed sexual harassment and assault,
and the subsequent #MeToo movement which began in Autumn 2017
following allegations against film producer Harvey Weinstein, new com-
plications have arisen concerning how those writing about such artists
respond to such knowledge. In Part II of the volume, Lorraine York
offers a particular perspective on the vexed question of how to continue
to undertake academic study of contemporary artists at a time during
which they have been embroiled in disciplinary scandal, with reference to
three interrelated controversies of Canadian literary celebrity that devel-
oped in 2016–2017. First, a case involving allegations of sexual harass-
ment at the University of British Columbia associated with the writer
Steven Galloway, and articulated through a series of online statements
including the ‘UBC Accountable’ letter (signed by household names
including Margaret Atwood) and a subsequent counter-letter (though
the case was eventually dismissed and UBC forced to pay damages to
Galloway [Eagland 2018]). Second, the criticism on social media and

other platforms faced by Joseph Boyden, author of the seminal UBC
Accountable letter, disputing his claims of Indigenous identity and herit-
age. Third, an editorial written by Hal Niedzviecki in which he endorsed
the appropriation of the stories of Indigenous communities by non-
Indigenous writers in the name of diversity, including a suggestion for
an ‘Appropriation Prize’ that, although tongue-in-cheek, nonetheless
received high-profile support via Twitter. Drawing on the field of celeb-
rity studies as well as scholarship on scandal itself, York argues that while
it has often been expected that scandal violates prevailing morals, the
above controversies represent instances in which hegemonic institutions
were among the sources of scandal, yielding an enhanced understanding
in which scandal is no longer associated solely with the agency of an indi-
vidual who is seen to be transgressive. She further suggests that scandal
should be understood as lasting rather than fleeting and that rather than
merely excising scandalous artists from the institutions that once upheld
them, we should knowingly question their past and present place within
them mindful of scandal’s persistent nature, in order to appreciate the
full extent of the artists in a given field whom that scandal affects.
Hywel Dix’s chapter engages with issues pertaining to the reception
of contemporary writers, in particular those whose later work is nega-
tively affected by comparison with their earlier successes upon which
their reputation is primarily founded. Drawing parallels with career guid-
ance counselling and using career construction theory as a springboard
for discussion, Dix theorises the range of different career trajectories that
may be experienced by authors depending on the level of critical acclaim
they experience over time: some enjoy initial or sustained success in
their careers, while others attain success more gradually or experience a
mid-career peak or trough. Noting a common trajectory of decline in an
artist’s later output, Dix argues that the late-stage career—which may,
in reality, fall at different stages of life for different authors depending
on their unique career trajectory—should itself be scrutinised as a dis-
tinct category. He suggests that writers may become more self-reflective
and self-aware about their practice in their later output, even when their
earlier work has attained significant success, as exemplified by such phe-
nomena as retrospective commentary on one’s own work, the revisiting
of previously employed literary techniques, as well as specific modes of
fictionalised criticism and autobiography.
The subject of Christopher Leedham and Martin Scheuregger’s

c hapter is the written component that accompanies the musical portfo-
lio of many composition PhD degrees in the UK, which finds a parallel
in current practices with respect to the Research Excellence Framework
for which submitting composers are expected to contextualise their work
through a 300-word narrative statement (Pace 2015b). By means of an
anonymous online survey of current and former UK PhD students, the
authors uncover a range of different opinions concerning the value of
this written component to the candidates’ overall development as com-
posers. While the survey yielded much evidence of a shared understand-
ing among the students of the need for such a written element, there
was less agreement as to whether this component should comprise a
technical commentary, a reflective account or a conceptual and aesthetic
context for the portfolio. Other key findings include that this writing
was typically undertaken only in the latter stages of the PhD (thereby
precluding contemporaneous reflection on the totality of the composi-
tional process), and that the supervisor was the single biggest influence.
Ultimately, Leedham and Scheuregger ask whether the purpose of the
doctoral degree is one of training in composition or research through
composition, and argue for a common understanding of the purpose of
the written component to be adopted across the discipline, with defined
approaches to writing.
In a two-part study, Ian Pace provides a rigorous critique of an exist-
ing body of work that applies ethnomusicological approaches specifically
to writing on Western art music. He founds this critique upon a com-
parative examination of different definitions for the term ‘ethnography’
and a consideration of the history of the development of the field and
the internal methodological and other criticisms it has generated, con-
cerns that are also highly relevant for ethnomusicology, which frequently
employs ethnographic approaches. Certain ethnomusicologists have
also posited their discipline as oppositional to what they hold to be the
more traditional field of historical musicology, said to be focused on
musical texts and sounds while resistant to more contextual, sociologi-
cal approaches; conversely, Pace argues that this is a straw target dichot-
omy, while the overlooking of sonic and aural evidence in such studies
significantly confines their coverage. Exploring the differences between
journalistic and scholarly modes of writing and between descriptive and
analytical discourses, Pace suggests that much ethnographic w riting
on music is indebted to simple description and taxonomy rather than
analysis, as well as to long quotations from participant testimonies, and

hence retains the external appearance of non-academic writing. This is
demonstrated in some of the most lauded ethnographies of Western art
music and its institutions that have appeared in recent decades, some of
which he compares to more sensationalist journalism: both types lack
a measured critical stance with respect to their subject matter, ignor-
ing perspectives that do not accord with their one-sided presenta-
tion, and often arrive at relatively obvious and predictable conclusions.
Nonetheless, he identifies a shift in this body of work, from early dis-
paraging studies of institutions to the ascendancy of a more neutrally
descriptive approach. In the second of his chapters, Pace applies some
of these critical perspectives to recent ethnomusicological studies of the
latter type, on a work by the composer Michael Finnissy, performed by
the Kreutzer Quartet (by Amanda Bayley and Michael Clarke), on pro-
fessional music-making in London (by Stephen Cottrell) and on the life
and work of composer Kaija Saariaho (by Pirkko Moisala). While these
vary in nature and their response to wider ethnographic debates, they
share a reluctance to expose their objects of enquiry to due critique and
questioning or to embrace competing perspectives, which ultimately
leads authors to adopt what can be an uncritically reverential, even hagi-
ographic tone for their work.
The volume’s Part III switches attention from more general critical
perspectives on researching and writing about contemporary art and
artists, to individual case studies from across the arts disciplines. Andy
W. Smith explores the writing by and about acclaimed radical playwright
Howard Barker, whose political plays of the 1970s gave way to a new
dramatic form, the Theatre of Catastrophe, from the late 1980s, charac-
terised by a reimagining of history. This, in turn, led to the founding in
1988 of Barker’s own theatre company, The Wrestling School, in order
to realise his unique artistic vision, with Barker himself assuming artis-
tic control from 1993. Its productions have elicited a range of, mainly
critical, reviews noting the lack of accessibility of his fringe theatre. To
insulate himself from criticisms of the playwright who doubles as direc-
tor, Barker created multiple secret alter egos to disguise the extent of his
aesthetic contribution to The Wrestling School productions, as well as to
write about himself in a playfully innovative manner. His own m emoirs
were penned under the name of one of these pseudonyms, Eduardo
Houth, with Barker referenced in the third person. Other of his alter
egos include costume designer Billie Kaiser and stage designer Tomas
Leipzig, who were credited, complete with invented biographies—surreal

to the point of absurdity—in production programmes. Barker’s writ-
ings have developed in parallel with his artistic practice and hence reflect
these outputs as well as his removal from the milieu of the theatrical
mainstream.
Jill Brown discusses the challenges associated with writing about the
lives and careers of two ballerinas, Sylvie Guillem and Misty Copeland,
consideration of whose biographies exemplifies the changing status of
the artist between different generations. Notwithstanding the appear-
ance of various media interviews as well as biographical books on each
figure targeted at a general market, the information available on both is
relatively scant, and few have critically appraised their activity as dancers
in a scholarly manner. This paucity of material yields only disparate and
conflicting snapshots of the artists’ lives, leaving the biographer tasked
with somehow reconciling them with one another. Guillem’s eschewal
of public attention in her career prompted Brown to turn instead to
such sources as television appearances to supplement the dearth of
more traditional forms of evidence, in the process discovering under-
standings of the subject that could not have been gleaned from more
conventional texts. While Copeland hired a manager and became estab-
lished as a brand identity, being apparently forthcoming about aspects
of her personal life in the media, Brown discovered lacunae in writing
about her life as well, since her early career was much less widely docu-
mented than Guillem’s. Brown describes the biographer’s processes of
piecing together a story mosaic-like from this partial evidence, depart-
ing from a position of ignorance in order to reach one of new insights
into the subjects, all the while aware of the biographer’s mediating voice.
Ultimately, she suggests, the difference in the ways in which the lives of
these ballerinas have been chronicled speaks to the shift between the two
from celebrating the artist in public to desiring engagement with their
private self.
Vered Engelhard’s chapter concerns the artist and philosopher
Adrian Piper and the challenges that she presents to writers on her work
owing to the multifaceted nature of her activity. Specifically, Engelhard
explores three of Piper’s key works from the 1970s: Context #7, Untitled
Performance for Max’s Kansas City and The Mythic Being. Context #7
(1970) was a piece of concept art in which viewers were encouraged
to contribute responses on a blank notepad, and hence simultaneously
constitutes a form of writing as art and writing about art; while Untitled
Performance for Max’s Kansas City (1970) placed Piper’s body on d isplay
as an object of art, silent, blinded and wearing earplugs. Both raise
important questions relating to the ontological manifestation of the art-
works, resulting from the tension between the works’ difference from,
and similarity to, existing artistic tradition. The Mythic Being (1973–
1975) took the idea of the subject itself being the object of art a stage
further, being a collection of mantras recited from Piper’s personal jour-
nal at public gatherings and published as a series of periodical advertise-
ments. Developed over a period of three years, The Mythic Being assumed
the guise of a ‘black man’ persona whom Piper held to be oppositional
to herself, and thereby prompted viewers to confront issues of race, gen-
der and morality. In directly addressing the viewer, Engelhard argues,
Piper’s artwork aspires to universality.
Joel M. Baldwin discusses Louis Andriessen and Elmer Schönberger’s
1983 monograph on Stravinsky, The Apollonian Clockwork. This text
stands out among the substantial body of literature on that composer,
both for its coverage of lesser-known music alongside the more popu-
lar works, and its central inclusion of personal thoughts and anecdotes
concerning the subject. In this respect, it eschews some of the meticu-
lousness and objectivity of modern scholarly work studies in favour of
a more playful, ironic approach. It therefore raises questions about the
challenges and limitations faced by authors writing about contemporary
artists to whom inevitably they are temporally close, prompting Baldwin
to suggest that the adoption of a more subjective tenor may be just as
valid and meaningful when it is not possible to write with the bene-
fit of hindsight. Yet this need not lead to hagiographic writing, which
would entail uncritical adoption of the ‘official’ position perpetuated
by promoters and other champions of the subject. Rather, Andriessen
and Schönberger are honest and upfront that the residual memory of
Stravinsky’s output is such that they can only hope to offer a perspective
coloured by those elements with which the music has historically been
associated, and implicitly encourage readers to form their own opinions
by presenting a personal position with which they might therefore agree
or disagree.
Mimi Cabell and Phoebe Stubbs report on Contributors Inc., an artis-
tic research project founded in 2015 that explores the contents lists in
art and culture magazines archivally. Its purpose is to identify gender
imbalance as well as other commercial and ideological shifts in the estab-
lishment and perpetuation of canons in the writing about contemporary
art and artists, thereby calling into question the nature of art criticism
as documented in key publications including Cabinet and particularly
the leading New York-based art magazine Artforum. The ‘Artfrom’ and
(ongoing) ‘Arton’ projects associated with the latter are concerned with
the effect of both writers and the artists who are the subjects of their
discourse upon art world canons, in order to identify the contribution of
the magazine to the shaping of art criticism and correspondingly to the
establishment of frames of reference for students and educators of art.
Discussing a number of other recent investigations into gender imbal-
ance in the art world, Cabell and Stubbs describe the procedure whereby
they converted Artforum’s contents lists into quantitative data for analy-
sis. This process revealed the disproportionately small number of authors
who had written for the magazine, especially at its inception, as well as
its initially North Atlantic focus and its apparent avoidance of art that
explicitly engaged with politics. The authors further detail the workshops
they have consequently developed in order to advocate for greater aware-
ness of the limited and highly subjective sense of the art world offered by
some of its foremost publications.
Part IV of the volume seeks to enable art to be considered on its own
terms, and to hear the voices of the artists themselves, through a series
of innovative modes of discourse. The first of these, by Joanne ‘Bob’
Whalley, is written as a visual essay that reveals a practice-as-research pro-
cess using photographs as an integral part of its presentation. Practice as
research is here conceived as the product of the totality of a practitioner’s
experiences as brought to bear on their research, reading the epistemo-
logical spaces, navigating the various changes of direction, necessitating
self-reflexivity. Considering practice as research as a process of occlusion,
Whalley questions its nature as a dance-like engagement between writer
and reader, in which the subject of the research is closed off to both.
Ultimately she suggests whether the process of practice as research in fact
reveals more than it occludes, whereby the less we are able to see, the
more becomes visible to us.
The inclusion within this collection of Richard Birchall’s composition
Abstracts demonstrates the possibilities for music itself to constitute an
act of writing about contemporary art, if not also of its originating art-
ist. Inspired by the works of the distinguished painter Christopher Le
Brun, and in particular the use of colour in his paintings in an exhibi-
tion at Colnaghi Gallery, London in 2015, Birchall’s piece is written for
solo piano in four sections. The creative stimulus derives from the entire
experience of visiting the studio but more specifically from a single paint-
ing, ‘Cloud’. Birchall’s music represents this as viewed from four differ-
ent distances and explores the contrasting understandings this generates
of Le Brun’s work. The composition also constitutes the transference of
art from one medium to another, drawing on parallels between colour of
the painting and musical harmony, between the texture of the artwork
and the texture of the music, and between the gradual recognition of
colour-curves (as one moves closer to the painting) and the emergence
of discernible melodies in the music.
Annie Yim, in conversation with Christopher Wiley, discusses the
MusicArt London initiative that she founded in 2015. Under Yim’s
artistic directorship, MusicArt has striven to celebrate the relationships
and intersections between different arts disciplines, as well as to bring
together old and new music. Its activities have comprised collabora-
tions with gallerists, painters, composers, dancers and poets—including
the painter Christopher Le Brun, the composers Richard Birchall and
Raymond Yiu, the book artist Pauline Rafal, the choreographer Patricia
Okenwa, and the poets Zaffar Kunial and Kayo Chingonyi—that have
generated new multidisciplinary artwork in a series of ‘conceptual con-
certs’. Through its various projects, MusicArt has thereby sought to
explore dialogues between the constituent arts, their shared aesthetics
and the ‘poetic concepts’ concerned with the artistic imaginative pro-
cesses themselves. A feature of MusicArt’s performances has been the
staging of public conversations between different contributing artists,
intertwined within curated programmes of historical and contemporary
music that are creatively combined with the other arts. It has thereby
aspired to establish new musical contexts for existing art as well as to
commission new work, including Richard Birchall’s Abstracts, the con-
text of whose composition is explored in this chapter.
Researching and writing about contemporary art and artists present
unique challenges for scholars, students, professional critics and creative
practitioners alike. In exploring a range of different forms of discourse on
living or recently deceased subjects, this volume seeks to bring to light
the common ground shared across the arts disciplines as well as setting
the agenda for rigorous critical thinking on the nature of the relation-
ship between those who write about art and the artists about whom they
write.
Bibliography
Allegue, Ludivine, Simon Jones, Baz Kershaw, and Angela Piccini, eds. 2009.
Practice-as-Research in Performance and Screen. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Barnet, Sylvan. 2015. A Short Guide to Writing About Art, 12th ed. Boston:
Pearson Education.
Batchelor, John, ed. 1995. The Art of Literary Biography. Oxford: Clarendon
Press.
Biggs, Michael, and Henrik Karlsson. 2011. ‘Evaluating Quality in Artistic
Research’. In The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts, edited by
Michael Biggs and Henrik Karlsson, 405–42. London: Routledge.
Cook, Nicholas. 2015. ‘Performing Research: Some Institutional Perspectives’.
In Artistic Practice as Research in Music: Theory, Criticism, Practice, edited by
Mine Doğantan-Dack, 11–32. Farnham: Ashgate.
Croft, John. 2015a. ‘Composition Is Not Research’. Tempo 69, no. 272: 6–11.
Croft, John. 2015b. ‘Composing, Researching and Ways of Talking’. Tempo 70,
no. 275: 71–77.
Eagland, Nick. 2018. ‘Fired UBC Prof Steven Galloway Awarded Damages in
Arbitration’. Vancouver Sun, 19 July. https://vancouversun.com/news/local-
news/steven-galloway-awarded-damages-in-arbitration. Accessed 2 August
2019.
Freeman, John. 2010. Blood, Sweat & Theory: Research Through Practice in
Performance. Faringdon: Libri.
Hatcher, Evelyn Payne. 1985. Art as Culture: An Introduction to the
Anthropology of Art. Lanham, MD and London: University Press of America.
Herbert, Trevor. 2012. Music in Words: A Guide to Research and Writing About
Music, 2nd ed. London: ABRSM.
Herndon, Marcia, and Norma McLeod. 1979. Music as Culture. Norwood, PA:
Norwood Editions.
Kershaw, Baz. 2009. ‘Practice as Research Through Performance’. In Practice-Led
Research, Research-Led Practice in the Creative Arts, edited by Hazel Smith and
Roger T. Dean, 104–25. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Krüger, Simone. 2008. ‘Ethnography in the Performing Arts: A Student
Guide’. https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/Ethnography-in-the-
Performing-Arts-A-Student-Guide.pdf. Accessed 3 August 2019.
Meyers, Jeffrey, ed. 1985. The Craft of Literary Biography. London: Macmillan.
Morphy, Howard, and Morgan Perkins, eds. 2006. The Anthropology of Art:
A Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Nelson, Robin. 2013. Practice as Research in the Arts: Principles, Protocols,
Pedagogies, Resistances. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Pace, Ian. 2015a. ‘Composition and Performance Can be, and Often Have Been,
Research’. Tempo 70, no. 275: 60–70.
Pace, Ian. 2015b. ‘Those 300-Word Statements on Practice-as-Research for the
RAE/REF—Origins and Stipulations’. http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/17489/1/
Those%20300-word%20statements%20on%20Practice-as-Research%20for%20
the%20RAE%20%26%20REF.pdf. Accessed 27 February 2020.
Reeves, Camden. 2015. ‘Composition, Research and Pseudo-Science: A Response
to John Croft’. Tempo 70, no. 275: 50–59.
Schippers, Huib. 2007. ‘The Marriage of Art and Academia: Challenges and
Opportunities for Music Research in Practice-Based Environments’. Dutch
Journal of Music Theory 12, no. 1: 34–40.
Smith, Hazel, and Roger T. Dean, eds. 2009. Practice-Led Research, Research-
Led Practice in the Creative Arts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Vaes, Luke. 2015. ‘When Composition Is Not Research’, Three Parts. http://artis-
ticresearchreports.blogspot.com/2015/06/when-composition-is-not-research.
html, http://artisticresearchreports.blogspot.com/2015/06/when-composition-
is-not-research-2.html, and http://artisticresearchreports.blogspot.com/2015/
11/when-composition-is-not-research.html. Accessed 2 August 2019.
Wiley, Christopher. 2020. ‘Between “Scholarly Treatments” and “Fanzine
Hype”: The Mediation of Adulation and Academic Discourse in Popular
Music Studies’. In Writing About Contemporary Musicians: Promotion,
Advocacy, Disinterest, Censure, edited by Ian Pace and Christopher Wiley.
Abingdon: Routledge.
Williams, Gilda. 2014. How to Write About Contemporary Art. London: Thames
& Hudson.
PART II
Critical Perspectives
CHAPTER 2
The Artist Is Present:

Scandal and the Academic Study
of the Living Artist
Lorraine York
My title references the Serbian performance artist Marina Abramović’s

remarkable work ‘The Artist is Present’. In its 2010 Museum of Modern
Art incarnation, Abramović, dressed in a long gown, sat silently at a
wooden table looking forward towards the empty chair across from
her, every day the museum was open, for 7–8 hours a day, for a total of
736 hours. Over one thousand people lined up to take their place in the
empty chair and to simply sit across from Abramović and meet her gaze.
They were instructed not to speak to her or to touch her. Many were
moved to tears. Media coverage and academic analysis alike largely dealt
with attempts to articulate the nature of this ‘presence’ of the artist or
to dispute its very existence; as the visual culture scholar Amelia Jones,
who was one of the people who sat across from Abramović, argued in
The Drama Review, ‘Paradoxically, Abramović’s recent practice, in its
desire to manifest presence, points to the very fact that the live act itself
L. York (*)
Department of English and Cultural Studies,
McMaster University, Toronto, Canada
© The Author(s) 2020 19

C. Wiley and I. Pace (eds.),
Researching and Writing on Contemporary Art and Artists,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39233-8_2
20 L. YORK
destroys presence (or makes the impossibility of its being secured evident)’
(2010, 18). As a scholar invested in what fans make out of celebrity,
I am inclined to accept and not to worry overmuch that the ontologi-
cal status of the artist’s—or celebrity’s—presence may never be ‘secured’,
but the far more pressing point is this: many of Abramović’s sitters
made a notion of her presence work in some way for them. I approach
the question of the ‘presence’ of the contemporary as an object of study,
not so much to determine its philosophical status, but, instead, to con-
sider how it works upon us as viewers, readers or scholars, and how we,
in turn, work upon it. This reciprocity of artist and audience immedi-
ately launches us into the realm of ethics, for the study of contemporary
culture makes demands of us, as enigmatically sometimes as that calm,
searching gaze of Marina Abramović. And we choose, in a variety of
ways, to respond—or not.
The ethical demands of art are heightened at moments of pub-
lic scandal, as we decide how to respond to a controversial set of public
events, and so, in this study, I will ponder the thorny issue of how to
conduct academic study of a contemporary artist in the midst of scan-
dal. In my field of expertise, Canadian literature, three high-profile scan-
dals that erupted in 2016–2017 and are ongoing have been popularly
referred to as ‘the CanLit dumpster fires’ (the term ‘CanLit’ signifying
the institutionalised, canonised version of the broader and more diverse
terrain of writing in Canada). As Laura Moss and Brendan McCormack
note in their editorial to the Spring 2017 issue of Canadian Literature,
the flagship journal in the field, ‘After a year in which the asymmetries
of power and privilege operating within and upon the field have been
newly illuminated by a number of high-profile flare-ups, we have seen
many people drawing on fire metaphorically on social media, often with
images of dumpster fires accompanied by #CanLit’ (7). Drawing upon
these specific episodes and, self-reflexively, on my own critical practice,
I will query the metaphors of sudden incendiary crisis that attend such
discussions. Moving into praxis, I ask, how do we conduct academic
research at a time of widespread disciplinary scandal? How do we write
about or perform the work of contemporary artists who are engulfed in
scandal’s flames? In questioning discourses of apocalyptic destruction, I
suggest that major scandal in the contemporary artistic celebrity realm
can be better understood as disclosing a situation, whether of inequity,
harassment or discrimination, that was already fully in place: a cultural
space already in flames. I propose various critical means of writing about
2 THE ARTIST IS PRESENT: SCANDAL AND THE ACADEMIC STUDY … 21
contemporary artists and their scandals in ways that bring this extended
temporality of scandal into plain view, rather than avoiding or abandon-
ing the burnt-out field of the discipline or the individual scandal-ridden
artist completely.
The theoretical foundation of this analysis combines the burgeoning
field of celebrity studies and the study of scandal, which, while related to
celebrity studies is most often carried out within the discipline of soci-
ology. Indeed, it might be more accurate to say that this study brings
those two fields of inquiry into collision, for the question of how to write
about or teach living artists who are engulfed in scandal poses a direct
challenge to the ways in which some scholarship, mine included, has, to
date, theorised celebrity as a force for potential resistance to enforced
norms and hierarchies.
The field of celebrity studies has, from its inception, sometimes been
riven and sometimes enriched by two countervailing tendencies: to per-
ceive that potential for resistance at work, on one hand, and to see celeb-
rity as ultimately and only ever circumscribed and driven by the forces of
capitalism, on the other. The former tendency derives from the popular
culture and fan studies threads running through the field, and the lat-
ter often issues from a Marxist-inflected, specifically Gramscian, under-
standing of hegemony and the continuing influences of Horkheimer and
Adorno’s critiques of the culture industries. Sometimes, in the best work
in the field, those two threads are intertwined and brought to bear on
each other in complex acts of mutual inquiry, but often they appear in
isolation. For example, Milly Williamson’s valuable 2016 study Celebrity:
Capitalism and the Making of Fame, is, as its title suggests, a Marxist
analysis of the history and emergence of celebrity. And while Williamson
is mindful of the problems with critiques that see celebrity as a symp-
tom of a perpetually bewailed social decline, such as Daniel Boorstin’s
concept of the pseudo-event (11), she primarily understands celebrity as
an instrument of capitalist control and as a phenomenon that displaced
earlier working-class cultural formations that were more responsive to
the needs of the collectivity. Opposed to that theory, for Williamson,
are understandings of celebrity as an unduly idealised democratisation
or as the charismatic manifestation of audience desire (157). But those
are only the extreme versions of consumer-focused theories of celeb-
rity. Other possibilities, such as the strategic and affective-political uses
of celebrity for working-class and other subaltern—i.e. raced, gendered
or sexual—projects receive less consideration in Williamson’s study.
22 L. YORK
In a great deal of celebrity studies, there is a steadfast, hard-to-shake

belief that celebrity can only ever be the product of capitalist hegemonic
will. It is often that, of course—or, it can be as well.
On the other side of the disciplinary divide, equally problematic analy-
ses of celebrity that uncritically celebrate the ‘subversive’ content of even
the most industrially manufactured celebrities continue to appear, and while
there is room even in cases of blatant manufacture for considerations of
audiences ‘making do’ with celebrity texts, analyses that do not acknowl-
edge manufacture at all, particularly in a neoliberal moment, are rendered
theoretically weak. There is also a good deal of celebrity studies work
that nervously inhabits the binary ‘analytic framework’ that Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick and Adam Frank claim ‘can all too adequately be summarized as
“kinda subversive, kinda hegemonic”’ (1995, 5). To reach the conclusion
of an analysis of a celebrity only to be given this hedging, mixed diagnosis,
is disappointing, unless it is anchored in specific ways that bring the hegem-
onic and the subversive into an illuminating relation to each other.
The first systematic theoretical study of celebrity, Richard Dyer’s Stars
(1979), is a model of this more fully articulated stance, for he critiqued
both extremes of production- and consumption-focused theories of
celebrity. Dyer painstakingly showed how production-focused theories of
celebrity—as an outcome of economic exigencies or as pure manufacture
of empty cultural products designed to dupe naïve consumers, say—are
just as incomplete as considerations of celebrity as the manifestation of
an idealised individual ‘magic’ or as something built up and destroyed by
the forces of consumer desire. And while his analysis might be assumed
to fall into Sedgwick and Frank’s ‘kinda subversive, kinda hegemonic’
trap, it is, on the contrary, both rigorously dialectical and grounded in
the specificities of historical moments and genres of cultural production
(in Dyer’s case, cinema). But it is more. In the very closing moments of
Stars, Dyer makes sure that, in remaining conscious of celebrity’s ideolo-
gies, we do not forget its pleasures:
finally, I feel I should mention beauty, pleasure, delight … The emphasis

in this book has been on analysis and demystification, and I would defend
this emphasis to the last. … When I see Montgomery Clift I sigh over
how beautiful he is; when I see Barbara Stanwyck, I know that women are
strong. … [W]hile I accept utterly that beauty and pleasure are culturally
and historically specific, and in no way escape ideology, none the less they
are beauty and pleasure and I want to hang on to them in some form or
another. (1979, 162)
My work in celebrity studies has been formed by a similar desire to pre-

serve audience pleasures while pursuing ideological critique, to refuse
a long tradition of finding celebrity culture worthless and its pleasures
delusionary. As a result, I see celebrity as more of a testing ground for
the performance of personae, both on the part of the celebrity and the
fan, and I have pointedly criticised work in my field that automatically
reaches for the denunciation of the popular or its circumscription by cap-
italism. I am wary of knee-jerk assumptions about celebrity or related
subjects of social media and fandom that see them as attacks on All That
We Hold Dear, whether from a socially conservative, nostalgic point of
view or from a tradition of political critique that overstates the hegem-
onic contents of popular culture and understates its potential for various
types of resistant fan meaning-making. For example, bringing together
the realms of popular culture and the literary, I have formulated a theory
of Canadian literary celebrity that has tried to counteract views of celeb-
rity as false or empty cultural value, and I reinforced that message at the
close of my book Literary Celebrity in Canada: ‘I hope that the present
study adds to the growing tendency to avoid, or at least try to avoid,
automatically negative assumptions about celebrity and its workings. In
this analysis, I have steered away from gloomy prognostications about
increasing commercialization and from nostalgic yearnings for a golden
age when writers were valued for their achievements alone’ (2007, 176).
I acknowledged that ‘Celebrity has had its benefits as well as its pitfalls
for writers’—which is hardly surprising—and I ended with the follow-
ing call: ‘we need to acknowledge frankly the workings of celebrity in
all cultural venues’. But this is where the silence of my work on celeb-
rity begins. My stance, leaning more towards the capacity of audiences
to produce and consume polysemic celebrity texts, left me unprepared to
respond fully to the scandals that plagued ‘CanLit’, for they put on full
display the capacity of celebrity to do harm.
To provide a context for readers not familiar with the field, the scan-
dals in question unfolded as follows. The first of these is the sexual har-
assment case at the University of British Columbia’s Creative Writing
department and the controversy that erupted in November 2016,
when 89 Canadian writers, publishers and other powerful literary peo-
ple signed an online open letter, ‘UBC Accountable’, drafted by writer
Joseph Boyden supporting the accused, fellow author Steven Galloway,
Chair of the Creative Writing department, and making only the brief-
est of mentions of the young women complainants from the Creative
24 L. YORK
Writing programme. A second group of 640 writers, academics and liter-

ary people, myself included, signed a counter-letter that protested against
the silencing of the complainants and the automatic, unquestioning sup-
port for Galloway in the absence of full process and the knowledge it
would have offered (‘Open Counter-Letter’). ‘Acknowledging frankly
the workings of celebrity in all cultural venues’ needs to include the way
in which celebrity in the literary field can act as a silencing, intimidat-
ing, harassing force, though I retain enough attachment to my previous
position to add that it can also, potentially, be brought to bear in resist-
ance to that silencing. The events that unfolded at UBC and the conse-
quent response across the country show celebrity power at work in both
of these ways.
If you survey the defences of Galloway mounted online by some of
the established writers who signed on to the first UBC Accountable let-
ter, you will witness the language of cultural respectability, and clout that
gets connected with his name; writer Karen Connolly, a staunch sup-
porter of Galloway, stated in a Facebook post, ‘what a force for [the]
literary community he has been—how many students he has helped, to
find work, to access agents, to meet publishers’ (Lederman 2016a), little
realising how this very encomium cements Galloway’s degree of power
in the industry. How chilling for women seeking to bring a complaint, to
be thus ‘schooled’ in the degree of power wielded by the object of that
complaint.
So many of the defenders of Galloway who signed the UBC
Accountable letter find the notion that they embody institutional power
laughable, and the very fact that they can so easily dismiss that possibility
is paradoxical evidence of that power’s normalised, routinised operations
within the literary field. Responding to writer Larissa Lai’s statement,
‘No to the star machine using celebrity power to reinforce already estab-
lished careers on the backs of young women’, Karen Connelly demurred
in another Facebook post that she certainly was not a powerful force to
be reckoned with in the world of Canadian literature, and that Lai’s pro-
test, in Connelly’s words, ‘…does seem a little hyperbolic—for surely
the opposite is happening?’ (2016): that is, those who protest the UBC
Accountable letter were building their own celebrity visibility by attack-
ing canonised writers in public. Such a suggestion overlooks the fact that
many of the signatories of the counter-letter risked much in signing it,
and there were others who felt unable, for so many reasons involving sys-
temic power, to sign their names in protest against this silencing.
The most striking denial of celebrity power, though, was voiced by

Canada’s most visible global literary brand, Margaret Atwood, who told
the journalist Marsha Lederman that she was shocked and surprised that
her signature on the UBC Accountable letter had prompted a vexed
response: ‘I think one of my problems is that I don’t realize that I’m a
big deal. So I think I can just sign a letter like anybody else and I’ll just
be one of these signatories. I didn’t actually realize that all of the gazelles
in the herd were going to turn and look at me’ (Lederman 2016b). My
research on Atwood, especially the reading of her voluminous archives
that informed my study Margaret Atwood and the Labour of Literary
Celebrity (2013), established in my mind, beyond the shadow of a doubt,
that she is fully cognisant of her celebrity and accurately reckons the
extent of its power. The archives that span several decades of her career
offer ample testimony to the sexism she had faced as a young, newly
successful writer, everything from being called a man-hater to being
denounced in a national Canadian newspaper for, among other things,
breastfeeding her child.
The denials of Connelly and, especially, Atwood would seem to add
fuel to the argument that celebrity, like other forms of privilege, is pow-
erful when it is taken for granted. And yet the UBC harassment case also
provides evidence for the capacity of celebrity to operate against these
very systems of denial. First of all, consider the public representation of
the refusal to sign the UBC Accountable letter that received national
coverage when the author Lawrence Hill referred to the controversy as
part of his remarks at the November 2016 McMaster University convo-
cation that were published in another national newspaper. Noting that
‘In the last days, dozens of Canadian writers have risen to’ Galloway’s
‘defense’, he added: ‘I am not one of them. … When a woman steps
forward to say that she is not safe or has been ill-treated in her univer-
sity studies or in the office with her boss or at home with her partner,
there can only be one response: You are welcome to speak. We will inves-
tigate and you will be safe’. These remarks, distributed widely through
Facebook and Twitter, became a rallying instance of how literary celeb-
rity can be turned to the purposes of counteracting unrecognised privi-
lege. Countering the economy of visibility that the signature of an open
online letter participates in, Hill managed to place the usually non-visual-
ised, non-verbalised act of not signing a letter into representation.
One should also recognise here, as part of the counter-uses of celeb-
rity, the acts of many writers who removed their signatures from the
26 L. YORK
UBC Accountable letter (even as others, of course, joined). I knowingly

place them into representation here, for the removal of a name typically
operates under conditions of invisibility too: Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer,
Wayne Johnston, Jean Baird, George Murray, Carrie Snyder, Sheila
Heti, Sameema Nawaz Webster, Camilla Gibb, Miriam Toews, Andrew
Westoll, John K. Samson, Erik Rutherford, Christine Fellows, Dave
Bidini, Carolyn Forde, Ryan Knighton, Noah Richler, Shandi Mitchell,
Yann Martel, Alice Kuipers, and Dede Crane. Some of these writers also
undertook crucial pedagogical work, in thinking publicly about why they
rethought their decision to sign. Camilla Gibb was exemplary in this
regard, and her Facebook post movingly explained that ‘I had to remove
my name from this letter. It was causing so much pain. I have had to
sit back and really reflect on why I failed to understand how much pain
it would cause—to think about ways beyond this letter that I may have
been inadvertently complicit in contributing to a culture of shaming and
silencing’. Even more impressive was Gibb’s closing acknowledgment of
the way in which the gendered blandishments of celebrity power oper-
ated in her case: ‘I am also guilty of being insecure and susceptible to
flattery and the desire for inclusion when a man in a position of power
asks. Despite being almost 50. Despite being established. Because I am
still a woman’. So to the counter-argument that, after all, not everyone
who signed UBC Accountable was a household name, we must point out
what Gibb is teaching us here: that one of the powers wielded by the
celebrity is to confer celebrity-by-association. Scholars of celebrity call
this, after film critic James Monaco, ‘paracelebrity’. And in the literary
world, it is powerful, as Pierre Bourdieu recognised decades ago:
the field of cultural production is the site of struggles in which what is at

stake is the power to impose the dominant definition of the writer and
therefore to delimit the population of those entitled to take part in the
struggle to define the writer. … [E]very survey aimed at establishing the
hierarchy of writers predetermines the hierarchy by determining the pop-
ulation deemed worthy of helping to establish it … [T]he consecrated
writer is the one who has the power to consecrate and to win assent when
he or she consecrates an author or a work—with a preface, a favourable
review, a prize, etc. (1993, 42)
We may regard an invitation to sign a public petition similarly.

The second crisis of Canadian literary celebrity power that erupted
late in 2016 was in part an outgrowth of the UBC harassment case. The
first open letter’s author, Joseph Boyden, the widely celebrated author
of Three Day Road and Through Black Spruce, came under scrutiny for
his claims of Indigenous identity and ancestry. And while these ques-
tions had been raised in many Indigenous communities well before this,
it took the UBC Accountable letter, and the counter-letter to give those
questions an added urgency, direction and visibility. In particular, many
Indigenous women in the literary field were taken aback by Boyden’s
minimising of the issue of violence against women in the open letter in
support of Galloway, and they took to social media, in particular, to crit-
icise him for it. As the Anishnaabe writer Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm, from
the Chippewas of the Nawash First Nation, observed, ‘There have been
questions about Joseph and who he claimed to be for quite a long while.
But it was really nothing that any of us individually could put their fin-
ger on’ (Andrew-Gee 2017). In December 2016, APTN, the Aboriginal
People’s Television Network, ran an extensively researched story about
Boyden’s claims of Indigenous ancestry that drew upon two sepa-
rate research portfolios that they independently verified before asking a
third party to review the methodology of all of the genealogical research
involved. They found that Boyden’s claims were, essentially, baseless.
Part of the issue concerned Boyden’s claiming various community con-
nections at various times, few among them making much sense: Ojibway,
Metis, Mi’kmaq, Nipmuc and Wendat. These are distinctly different
communities. Another part of the issue related to Boyden’s accepting
awards for his fiction, including one that was specifically designated for
Indigenous writers, the McNally Robinson Aboriginal Book of the Year
award, which he won for Three Day Road in the award’s inaugural year,
2005.
The UBC Galloway case and the simmering questions about Boyden’s
identity claims came to a head around the same time, and they were
linked. A few weeks before the APTN broadcast, on 24 November 2016,
in a surprising tweet, Margaret Atwood seemed to credit Boyden with
the authority to vouch for the Indigenous identity of others, specifi-
cally, that of Steven Galloway: ‘Confirmed @josephboyden that Steven
Galloway is #indigenous + was adopted. @ubcaccountable Well known
but not so far mentioned in the convo’. Twitter erupted at this state-
ment, with many Indigenous tweeters deploring the implied linkage of
Indigenous identity and the question of Galloway’s innocence or culpa-
bility. The journalistic research that culminated in the December APTN
profile had, of course, been underway long before Atwood’s tweet,
28 L. YORK
but the notion of Boyden being a trusted Indigenous authority on the

identity claims of others sharpened the inquiry into his own claims. It
also sharpened the sense of Boyden being taken up as an Indigenous
spokesperson by very powerful white Canadian literary and political fig-
ures, thus taking up cultural space that might otherwise have been filled
by Indigenous voices. This goes right to the top, to Canada’s Prime
Minister Justin Trudeau, who declined to comment on Boyden’s iden-
tity, but who added, ‘On a personal level I have to say I’m a big fan
of Joseph’s storytelling abilities and his passion and compassion, and
I certainly hope we hear voices like his and other voices in this conver-
sation very loudly and clearly in the weeks, months, years, decades that
it’s going to take to create true reconciliation’ (Andrew-Gee 2017). The
Globe and Mail journalist Eric Andrew-Gee set this quotation beside
that of the Anishnaabe scholar Hayden King, who observed, ‘Canadians
don’t want to let him go. They want him to be the voice of reconcil-
iation’, and noted that the term reconciliation, used approvingly by
Trudeau, is conversely used disparagingly by King and other Indigenous
intellectuals and activists, who criticise its suggestion of mutual respon-
sibility for the traumas of colonisation. King’s assessment is borne out
by the title of a Globe and Mail column that appeared in the heat of the
controversy: ‘Amid Heritage Controversy, Publishing Heavyweights
Stand By Joseph Boyden’ (Lederman 2017). Some of those same pub-
lishing industry powers unquestioningly stood by Steven Galloway too.
As the Canadian literary community struggled to come to terms
with both of these events, a third broke out in May 2017, and this
one was also intricately tied up with the UBC and Boyden affairs. The
internal magazine of the Writers’ Union of Canada, Write, published
a special issue on Indigenous writing, and its non-Indigenous edi-
tor Hal Niedzviecki prefaced it with a short piece called ‘Winning the
Appropriation Prize’. In it he defended the appropriation of other
groups’ stories by white Canadian writers as a means of increasing
the diversity of Canadian literature, and he facetiously called for an
‘Appropriation Prize’ to be given to the best performance in the stealing
of other communities’ stories. Indigenous contributors to the magazine
were horrified to see their work thus introduced. Members of the Union,
who automatically receive the magazine, wondered how the editorial
collective had approved this preface. The appearance of the editorial,
and the consequent publicity, would have been harmful enough, but in
the early hours of 11 May 2017, as the story broke, several high-profile
publishers and journalists took to Twitter to voice their support for such
a prize. Ken Whyte, the founding editor of the National Post and edi-
tor of Maclean’s magazine, stepped in first, offering to donate $500,
and the others followed: Anne-Marie Owens, editor in Chief of the
National Post; Alison Uncles, editor of Maclean’s; Steve Maich, head of
digital content and publishing at Rogers Media; Scott Feschuk, a col-
umnist for Maclean’s; Christie Blatchford, columnist for the National
Post; and, shockingly, Steve Ladurantaye, the managing editor of CBC
News which is produced by Canada’s national broadcaster, the Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation. The editor of The Walrus, a high-profile
Canadian arts and current affairs magazine, and a frequent commen-
tator on CBC National news, Jonathan Kay, retweeted Whyte’s call
approvingly. Many of these same people had defended Joseph Boyden
and blamed those who investigated and questioned his claims, and many
also had defended Steven Galloway. Kay wrote a piece in The Walrus
called ‘Why is Joseph Boyden’s Indigenous Identity Being Questioned?’
(2016). And his short-form answer was, essentially, because of ‘politically
correct’ activists and the evils of Twitter. Showing an alarming ignorance
of how Indigenous people trace and communicate their community
belongings, Kay explained Boyden’s contradictory claims of Indigenous
identity by recycling the racist notion that Indigenous people do not
really know who they are. Christie Blatchford, for her part, published a
column in the National Post defending Steven Galloway, entitled ‘Again
a Man’s Life Left in Ruins while his Sexual Assault Accuser Goes About
Hers’ (2017).
So, anti-racist and anti-sexist Canadian literature academics had, in
a few short months, to confront head-on the existence of a powerfully
interconnected white elite in the publishing world that, in their words
and deeds, sought to block access to cultural expression to others. For
those of us who were drawn to the study of contemporary Canadian lit-
erature largely because it offered a space to think about, teach and write
about progressive visions of social justice, it has been a painful time. For
my own part, my scholarship on Canadian literary celebrity as a not nec-
essarily disastrous condition had received a timely, contemporary rebuke,
and I needed to rethink it.
Seeking out how the concept of scandal might inflect my thinking
about literary celebrity in Canada, I returned to the scholarly work on
scandal that I already knew from celebrity studies, and consulted other
theories of scandal from sociological criticism that I had not previously
30 L. YORK
consulted because they did not foreground celebrity. A substantial

amount of the latter theory adopts what I call a dominant morality
approach: that is, an assumption that scandal erupts in contravention of
hegemonic moral nostrums, and the scandalous subjects are those who
transgress those majority views. (One thinks here of Oscar Wilde’s epi-
gram ‘Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality’; 1962, 53.) James Lull
and Stephen Hinerman’s introduction to their 1997 collection Media
Scandals: Morality and Desire in the Popular Culture Marketplace falls
into this category, even though they acknowledge the power of scandal
to function ‘simultaneously as a moral anchor in a sea of conventional-
ity, and as a vigorous challenge to mainstream values conditioned by the
substantial forces of ideological and cultural hegemony’ (2). But whether
scandal ultimately reaffirms or challenges ‘dominant morality’ (3), Lull
and Hinerman explain, it is in any event set off by a transgression of it;
in fact, their first, ‘fundamental’ criterion of scandal, out of ten, is that
‘social norms reflecting the dominant morality must be transgressed’
(11). Briefly they acknowledge that ‘dominant morality’ is a tricky con-
cept that is ‘never completely fixed’, never geo-culturally constant. But
they confirm that the basic question remains: have the scandalous agents
in question violated ‘social norms’ (4)? ‘Competing emergent interpre-
tations of what the narrative [of a scandal] means are negotiated against
a backdrop of a dominant moral code’, Lull and Hinerman reaffirm,
‘articulated and reinforced by major social institutions’ (3). But what if
it is a dominant institution—say, the Writers’ Union of Canada—that is
scandalous?
John B. Thompson, while he contributes to Lull and Hinerman’s vol-
ume, departs from the interpretive framework that his editors have pro-
vided and builds the foundation for an understanding of scandal that is
flexible enough so that the transgressive party can be those who repre-
sent institutional power. Scandals, he points out, ‘often involve much
more than the transgression of values or norms’; they are ‘struggles over
power and the sources of power’ and they ‘can … have long-term con-
sequences for the character of the social relations and institutions asso-
ciated with them’ (1997, 58). Such a formulation better captures the
erosion of trust in a whole range of cultural institutions that was occa-
sioned by the CanLit scandals of 2016–2017: not only the Writers’
Union but also publishing houses, literary publicity industries, universi-
ties and journalism itself.
Once this flexibility is granted, it follows that the scandalous subject

need not be individual, as much of the dominant morality theory would
have us believe. Returning to Lull and Hinerman, consider their second
criterion for scandal: ‘specific persons who carry out … actions that reflect
an exercise of their desires or interests’ are ‘identified as perpetrators of
the act(s)’ (1997, 11, emphasis in original). Lull and Hinerman allow
that, ‘while scandals must be of a personal nature, it is not just persons
who are perceived to act scandalously. We must also hold institutions
responsible for breaches in moral conduct’ (9)—breaches performed by
offending individuals, that is. But holding on so determinedly to the per-
sonal seems to yield diminishing theoretical returns, for it restricts scan-
dal once again to the realm of ‘dominant morality’. What if the scandal
discloses not a breach but a confirmation of unjust conduct that is the
unspoken norm within an institution?
Departing from this individualistic paradigm, Herman Gray, who
studies the way in which representations of black American subjects as
scandalous have upheld white racist hegemony, notes that ‘the notion
of scandal is usually applied to personal, often moral acts of transgres-
sion and behavioral lapses of the normative boundaries of the collec-
tive’; however, he wants ‘to extend and broaden this understanding of
scandal by proposing that we consider it as a … discursive regime that
has invested in representing social, cultural, and political struggles over
power in racial terms, framing such struggles to the racial and economic
order in moral terms’ (1997, 86).
Once scandal is theoretically freed from its attachment to the individ-
ual body, we can conceptualise it as a discursive regime that determines
which representations of justice are allowed to hold sway in influential
outlets of expression. Returning to the UBC Accountable scandal once
again, the title of National Post journalist Christie Blatchford’s column,
‘Again a Man’s Life Left in Ruins while his Sexual Assault Accuser Goes
About Hers’, operates discursively in just this way, with its recursive
opening ‘Again’ positioning women complainants in general as the scan-
dalous bodies and accused men as the injured parties. In an interview
Galloway gave to The Globe and Mail after he was awarded a settlement
with UBC in June 2018 for the university’s improper announcement
of the charges against him, he referred to the ongoing allegations as a
‘lynching’ (Mason 2018), a racially charged term that relocates the
provocations of scandalous behaviour to a group composed of the
32 L. YORK
complainants and their supporters and that figures that group as sheet-
clad Klansmen.
There are signs that theorists of scandal have moved away from dom-
inant morality theory and its individualistic underpinnings. Ari Adut, in
On Scandal (2008), defines scandal without any reference either to a
homogeneous standard of morality or to the necessity of an individual
agent: ‘A scandal is an episode of moral disturbance, marked by an inter-
action around an actual, apparent, or alleged transgression that draws
sustained and negative attention from a public’, and it is ‘experienced
differentially by different parties’ (23). This is the full flexibility that is
required to build a theory of scandal capable of explaining what Laura
Moss and Brendon McCormack called ‘the asymmetries of power and
privilege’ (2017, 7) in the Canadian literary fields and, by implication, in
other fields of cultural production as well.
As part of the project of moving this theory forward, I propose a
further revision to Adut’s definition. His mention of the ‘sustained …
attention’ that publics grant scandals brings to the fore the question of
the duration of scandal. Often, ephemerality is considered a feature of
scandals; Adut, who acknowledges that scandals can brief or sustained,
specifies that they last ‘as long as there is significant and sustained pub-
lic interest in it’ (11), a precept that does appear to tip the balance
towards the relatively fleeting. In common parlance, scandal is strongly
associated with ephemerality; the coinage ‘dumpster fire’, for exam-
ple, evokes a brief but spectacular flameout. This language, in turn, is
connected to the individualist cast of many understandings of scan-
dal because the duration of scandal is correlated to the extent of pub-
lic attention offered to the individual, who often rapidly retreats from
social visibility; accordingly, to the extent that the scandals of 2016–2017
brought Steven Galloway, Joseph Boyden and Hal Niedzviecki into the
uncomfortable spotlight, they were for the most part brief. (Owing to
the role of legal proceedings in the case of Galloway, however, pub-
lic attention stretched out longer, through 2016–2017 and reviving in
June 2018 with the news of his settlement with UBC.) But considering
scandals like these to be political and institutional entails thinking differ-
ently about their duration. As Smaro Kamboureli writes about the ten-
dency for multiculturalism to be presented as scandalous in the Canadian
press, ‘the representation of multiculturalism through the sign of scan-
dal obscures the need to examine the historical coordinates of minority
subjectivities … multiculturalism as a media-manufactured scandal
circumvents the systemic structures of which it is both symptom and

effect’ (2000, 89). And I argue that it does so because it individualises
and therefore temporally foreshortens scandal.
When literary scandals of the recent past have been considered in
Canadian criticism, they have not surprisingly been understood to be,
as Kamboureli suggests, a means of othering and discounting subaltern
experience, and such experiences are of long duration, and indeed are
routinised, for minoritised subjects. Larissa Lai, looking back at two
scandals in Asian Canadian literature and culture in the late 2000s (the
publication of the 2010 magazine article ‘Too Asian’ that criticised the
proportion of Asian Canadian students in universities; and a plagiarism
lawsuit launched by three Asian Canadian writers), writes that ‘media
scandals dramatize mainstream anxieties about its others’ (2014, 16). In
a similar vein, Kamboureli extensively surveys the ways in which media
accounts represent multiculturalism as an ‘explosive issue’ (89) and
‘minority Canadians’ as ‘threatening subjects’ (84). She focuses on what
she calls the ‘hysterical response’ to the Writing Thru Race conference
in 1994: a conference run by writers of colour that excluded white reg-
istrants from the workshop proceedings (though they were welcome to
various public events). Such critical takes on the scandals of the recent
Canadian literary past are attuned to Herman Gray’s theory of scandal
and American racial politics; as he explains, ‘such racialized discourse’
(1997, 86)—that is, the ‘overt assignment to blackness of the signs of
danger, excess, and social decay’ (89)—‘works by naming and rendering
as “scandalous” transgressions and oppositions to the dominant order of
things’ (86). He underlines the kinds of ideological work that the assign-
ment of scandal does by distinguishing in his writing between ‘scandal’
and scandal, the former denoting the imputation of scandalous excess to
black bodies and the latter indicating the actual scandal of such an impu-
tation and the racism it upholds.
What is to be done? As I observed at the opening of this chapter, scandal
intensifies the ethical questions prompted by our writing about, teaching
and consumption of living artists. They are therefore crucial sites of peda-
gogy and critical self-reflection. However, I have noted a tendency among
colleagues in my field to respond to these scandals by wiping the artists
who have become subject to scandal off their syllabi and research projects.
One Facebook post, I recall, asked contacts whether they would continue
to teach the work of Margaret Atwood or not. Among the responses that
flowed in, I was equally dissatisfied with those who came to Atwood’s
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Grets, 132
Grevelingen, Grevelynghe, 77, 95
Griet, 262
Griet Backer, 271
Griet Heynes, 264
Grietje (Grytsje), 217, 228
Grijpskerk, 56
Grimbergen, 72, 73
Grisdale, 128
Grisendale, 117, 128
Groede, 87
Groene Poep, 84
Grolloo, 59
Groningen, 7, 55, 56
Grootaert, 144
de Groote, 134, 141
Groote Jeldert, 262
Groot-Schermer, 63, 64
Grootsprekers van Thorout, 77, 78
Grotstic, 120
Grouw, 36, 41
Gruppendrieters van Oldenzaal, 7, 8, 59

de Gryse, 141
Grythie Onbeleefd, 272
Grytsje (Grietje), 217, 250
Gualtherus, 160
Gudula, Guedele, Goedele, 190
Guillaume, 131, 149
Guiten van ’t Ameland, 27
Guiten van Krommenie, 63
Gurbe, 212, 226
Guurt, Guurtje, 188
Gysbert, Giselbrecht, 132, 200
Gysbert Tymmerman, 267
Gyselhus, 121
Gyselynck, 146
Gyssens, 146
Gyvelde, Ghyvelde, 95
Haaften, 60
Haarlem, 5, 63
de Haas, 137
Haasrode, 73
Hachborn, 117
Hadewei, Hedwig, 201

Hadlef, 201
Haeike (Haaike), 215, 216
Haeise (Haaise), 214, 216
Haeite (Haaite), 214, 216
Haeitsje (Haaitje), 215, 216
Haemelinck, 137, 146
de Haene, 134
Haentsje (Haantje), 220
Haerlebeke, Haarlebeke, 77
Haesaert, 144
d’Haese, 138, 143
Haeske, 132
Haeye (Haaye), Hayo, 212
den Haeze, 143
Hagen, 233
Haghestraet, 120
Haike, 228, 230
Haikje, 231
Haite, 221, 230
Haitsje (Haitje), 231
Haitse, 221, 230
Haitske, 231
Halba, Halbe, Halbo, 212, 229, 273
Halfhouten van Brecht, 73
Halle, 73
Hallum, 20, 35, 50
le Ham, 101
Hamar, Hamr, 161, 242
Hamareshusun, 162, 243
Hamarithi, 161, 243
Hamarolf, 161, 242
Hamconius, 242
Hamelinck, 146
Hamer, 161, 242
Hamerard, 161, 242
Hameringa, 161, 243
Hamerrich, 161, 242
Hamers, 148, 158, 161, 243
Hamersma, 161, 243
Hamerstille, 161, 243
Hamke, Hamko, Hamco, 242
Hamkema, 242
Hamkes, 242
Hamme, 73
Hammer, 242
Hammeka, 242
Hammekens, 242
Hammerga, 161, 243
Hammers, 243
Hammersma, 161, 237, 238, 243
Hammerum, 161, 243
Hamringa, 161, 243
d’Hane, 143
Haneknippers van Enspijk, 60, 61
Hangkousen van Hillegom, 66
Hangstic, 120
Hanke, 249
Hanne, 249
Hans, 148, 211
Hans Cruysschar, 272 [307]
Hans Hess, 272
Hans-Michel, 83
Hanssen, 146, 147
Hanthie, 273
Hantsje (Hantje), 220
Hantum, 36, 51
Hanz Wyelmaker, 269
Harald, 201
Hard, Hardo, Hart, 100, 129, 130
Hardberg, 127
Hardenthun, 110
Harderwijk, 60
Hardewijn, 100
Harding, 126, 127, 130
Hardinga, 130
Hardingessem, Hardingshem, 126
Hardingham, 129
Hardinghem, 129
Hardinghen, 96, 100
Hardink, 130
Hardinvast, 110
Hardinxent, 126
Hardivilliers, 110
Hardo, 129, 130
Hardouin, 100
Harelbeke, 7, 51, 72
Harinck Slotemaker, 268
Haring, 216
Hark, Harke, Harco, 215, 220, 225, 228
Harlingen, 5, 14
Harm, Harmen, 226, 233
Harmke, 233
Harre, 212
Hartger, 100, 201
Hartman, 100, 163, 194, 201
Hartmod, 201
Hartogh, 140
Hartwig, 100
Hase, 134
Hasewinkel, 121
Hatebrand, 201
Hattem, Hattum, Harthelm, 201, 202
Hatheburgis, 201
Hauk, Hauke, 233
Hauwert, 63
Havik, 233
Haya, Haye, 231, 273
Haya Sywrdz, 258
Hayco, 230
Hayen, 132, 133

Hayinga, 98
Haye, Hayo, 98, 133, 216, 227, 230
Hayolina, Hayonetta, 228
Hazebroek, 82, 95
Hazebroekje-Passetemps, 82
Hazewindt, 134
Heabele, 214, 221
Heare, 230
Hebbele, 214
Hebbelinck, Hebbelynck, 146
Hebele, 214
Hector, 207
Hed, 274
Hed Wielmaker, 269
Heeg, 34
van Heeghe, 134
Heems, 146
Heer Albert, 265
Heeralma Heerallema, 152
’s Heerenberg, 193
Heeren van Gent, 72, 76, 79
Heeren van Huisingen, 73

Heeren van Malderen, 73
Heeren van Meldert, 73
Heerenveen, 37, 54
Heeres, 236
Heer-Hugo-Waard, 63
Heerke, 215
Heerke Takaz, 258
Heidenskip (Heidenschap), 281
Heila, 231
Heill-moer, 264
Heiloo, 63
Heiltsje (Heiltje), 192, 231, 264
Heilwig, 185, 190
Heilwig dochter wilen Hermans Dircs Guedelen soens, 183, 190
Heimrik, 149
Hein 150, 211
Heine Heinse, 233
Heinis, 259
Heinric, Heinrik, Heynric, 102, 132, 167
Heintje, 213
Heist, 77
Heist op Zee, 77
Heite, 214
Hekelghem, 73
Hel, 281, 284, 286
Helbird, 282
Helde, 121
Helden, 67
de Helder, 63, 83, 89, 284
Heldoar, 283
Helena, 228
Helichbruna, 118
Helium, 284
Helle, 156, 157, 158
Hellebaut, 146, 167
Hellebecq, 158
Hellema, 157
Hellenga, Hellinga, 157
Hellens, 146
Helles, 157
Hellevoet, 284
Hellingbern, 201, 202
Hellinck, 146, 156, 157
Hellinckx, 157
Helling, 157
Hellinga, Hellenga, 157
Hellinga-sate, 158
Hellinga-state, 158
Hellinghausen, 158
Hellinghen, 158
Hellinghill, 158
Hellum, 158
Hellynck, Hellynckx, 157
Helmich, 274
Helmrik, 201
Helsdoar, 283, 284
Helsken, 157
Helskens, 146, 157
Heltje, 156
Helwart, Helwert, 158
Hemert, 161, 243
Hemke, 215
Hemme, 212
Hemsing, 216
Hen, 275
Hendrickx, 146, 149

Hendrik, 149, 150, 184, 211, 213, 272
Hendrika, 184 [308]
Hengeloo, 59
Henk, 150, 211
Henne, 212
Henneke Gerrit Celensoen, 191
Henneken Jan Deynensoen, 177, 191
Henneken Roeselmans, 194
Henneke Roeselmans Melys brueder, 179, 191
Henning, 216
Henri, 131, 149, 225
Henric Bylefelt, 271
Henrinkinghem, 102, 126
Henric Kuylman, 181
Henrick van Sloten, 271
Henric Mortel, 180
Henric Roefssoen, 173
Henric Scuerman, 181
Henric Stocs, 182
Henric (Heyn) Touwers, 182
Henric Trudensoen, 186
Henric van den Hoeghenhuys, 181

Henric Waunays, 181
Henriette, 131
Henrik, 100, 102
Hense, 214
Hente, 214
Hentse, 215
Hepke, 215
Heppe, 212
Herbelle, 127
Herbern, 201, 202
Herbert, 100
Herbilda, 201
Herbinghem, 97
Herbrand, 201
Hereke Koeperslager, 268
Her Douwe sacrista, 265
Herdrad, 201
Her Dowe, 265
Her Dythio by Galilee, 265
Here, Heere, 212, 230
Herewog, 120
Her Feddo, 265

Her Hotthio, Her Hottye, 265
Her Johannes Jorretz, 265
Herke, 215
Herke Feykez, 258
Herke Ketelboter, 268
Herman, 100, 163, 194, 233
Hermana, 261
Herman Dirckz, 258
Herman Eycmans, 182, 194
Herman Fleyshouwer, 269
Herman Mesmaker, 268
Hermanna, 233
Herman Scroer, 267
Herman Straetmaker, 269
Herman Swevers, 182, 194
Hermanville, 101
Hero, Heero, 213, 227
Hero Wever, 267
Her Peter commissarius, 265
Her Pier to Leckum, 265
Herre, 212
Herrebrand, 146
Herreman, 134
Her Sipke, 265
Her Syffriet, 265
Her Sywck Peters, 273
’s-Hertogenbosch, 193
Hertse, Hertsen, 215
Hervelinghen, 96
Hessel, 214, 227
Hessel Backer, 267
Hesselen, 87
Hessel Intema, 260
Hesselius, 227
Hessel Martena, 260
Hette, 207, 212, 272
Heugters van Uddel, 60
Heuland, 110, 111
Heuringhem, 102, 126
Heusden, 67
Heuvelmans, 193
Heyle, 192
Heyle van den Put, 192
Heylgar, 201
Heyltjen, 132
Heyncke Willem Duysschensoen, 177
Heyndrick, 272
Heyndryckx, 146
Heynken Heynen Diddeken Tsweerts soens soen, 177
Heyn Queyen, 181
Heynric, 132
Heynric van den Kerckhove, 180
Heynssens, 146
Heyn Teulinx, 182
Heyn Truyen, 186
Heyn van den Berken, 181
Heyvaert, 144
Hidda, 231
Hidde, Hiddo, 212, 213
Hijum, Hyum, 35, 37
Hike, 217, 231, 238, 250
Hikke, 217, 231, 233, 250
Hilaard, 36, 38, 51
Hilbert, Hildbrecht, 201
Hilbrand, Hillebrand, Hildbrand, 201, 214, 227
Hilda, 231, 233

Hildegrim, 201
Hilderik, 201
Hildhard, 145
Hildheri, Hilder, 126
Hildheringahem, 126
Hildmar, 201
Hildo, 233
Hildrichem, 126
Hildulf, 201
Hildwin, 201
Hilke, Hilkea, 228
Hilke Gabbis, 259
Hilck Naaister, 270
Hillaert, 144, 145
Hille, 132, 214, 233
Hille Coster, 269
Hille dochter Arts Stippelmans, 183, 194
Hille Scuteferger, 269
Hillegom, 66
Hilleken, 132
Hilthyen Leydecker, 269
Hiltrude, 186
Hiltsje (Hiltje), 217, 231, 233, 250
Hindeloopen, 14, 29
Hingene, 72
Hiskje, 220
Hitje, 231
Hjerre, 230
Hliodbern, 202
Hlodhart, 145
Hoaite (Hooite), 214 [309]
Hoaitse (Hooitse), 215
Hoatse (Hotse), 215, 221
Hobbe, Hobbo, 212, 228, 259
Hobbenaker, 120
Hoberch, 116
Hoboken, 72
Hobrigge, 121
Hocquinghem, 97
Hoegard wilen Jans Godartssoens van Bruheze, 177
Hoite 221
Hoitse, 221
Hol, 286
Holbeck, 128
Holda, 231
Holdhart, 145
Holkje, 231
Hollaert, 144, 145
d’Hollander, 143
Hollanders, 143
Holle, 212
Hollebecque, 128
Hollebrekken, 286
Hollegrêft, 286
Hollemar, Holmar, 286
Holpoarte, Holpoartepoel, 287
Holsgrêft, 286, 287
Holwerd, 35, 50, 236, 246

Holwerda, 236, 246
Holwierde, 56
Hombrecht, 146, 164, 168
Hommo, 262
Hondedooders van Leiden, 66
Hondeknagers van Elsene, 73
Hondschoten, Hondscote, 71, 77, 78, 95
d’Hondt, 143
Hongercoutre, 121
Hooft, 134
Hoogbrugge, 121
d’Hooghe, 137, 141
Hoogstraten, 73
Hooite (Hoaite), 214
Hooitse (Hoaitse), 215
Hooksyl, 97
Hoorn, 63, 65, 71, 88
Hoornaert, 144
Hoornsma, 237
Hopbellen van Schijndel, 67

Researching and Writing On Contemporary Art and Artists Challenges Practices and Complexities 1St Ed Edition Christopher Wiley All Chapter

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Researching and Writing On Contemporary Art and Artists Challenges Practices and Complexities 1St Ed Edition Christopher Wiley All Chapter

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Researching and Writing on

Contemporary Art and Artists:

ISBN 978-3-030-39232-1 ISBN 978-3-030-39233-8 (eBook)

Cover image: Vikas Kumar/EyeEm

Part I General Introduction

1 Researching and Writing on Contemporary

Part II Critical Perspectives

2 The Artist Is Present: Scandal and the Academic

3 From Vocational Calling to Career Construction:

4 The Purpose of the Written Element

5 Ethnographic Approaches to the Study of Western

6 When Ethnography Becomes Hagiography:

Part III Case Studies Across the Arts

7 Writing Catastrophe: Howard Barker’s Theatre 151

8 Writing the Contemporary Ballerina: Sylvie Guillem,

9 Amend the Arena: On Adrian Piper’s Work 191

10 Writing About Contemporary Composers:

11 Artfrom: Researching the Canon Through

Part IV Art Considered on Its Own Terms

12 Occlusionary Tactics 241

14 MusicArt: Creating Dialogues Across the Arts 259

Joel M. Baldwin is a composer based at St Hilda’s College, University

Vered Engelhard is an artist and scholar based in New York, whose

Ian Pace is Reader in Music at City, University of London, UK, and

Miriam Cabell and Phoebe Stubbs Miriam Cabell is Associate

Christopher Wiley is Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of

Fig. 3.1 Only a low level of success is ever achieved 43

Fig. 14.1 Annie Yim, Richard Birchall and Christopher Le Brun

Researching and Writing

Christopher Wiley and Ian Pace

Researching and writing on contemporary art and artists take many

© The Author(s) 2020 3

Galloway [Eagland 2018]). Second, the criticism on social media and

The subject of Christopher Leedham and Martin Scheuregger’s

analysis, as well as to long quotations from participant testimonies, and

Leipzig, who were credited, complete with invented biographies—­surreal

The Artist Is Present:

My title references the Serbian performance artist Marina Abramović’s

© The Author(s) 2020 19

In a great deal of celebrity studies, there is a steadfast, hard-to-shake

finally, I feel I should mention beauty, pleasure, delight … The emphasis

My work in celebrity studies has been formed by a similar desire to pre-

Writing programme. A second group of 640 writers, academics and liter-

The most striking denial of celebrity power, though, was voiced by

UBC Accountable letter (even as others, of course, joined). I knowingly

the field of cultural production is the site of struggles in which what is at

We may regard an invitation to sign a public petition similarly.

but the notion of Boyden being a trusted Indigenous authority on the

consulted because they did not foreground celebrity. A substantial

Once this flexibility is granted, it follows that the scandalous subject

circumvents the systemic structures of which it is both symptom and

Grevelingen, Grevelynghe, 77, 95

Griet Backer, 271

Griet Heynes, 264

Grietje (Grytsje), 217, 228

Grisendale, 117, 128

de Groote, 134, 141

Groote Jeldert, 262

Grootsprekers van Thorout, 77, 78

Gruppendrieters van Oldenzaal, 7, 8, 59

Grythie Onbeleefd, 272

Grytsje (Grietje), 217, 250

Gudula, Guedele, Goedele, 190

Leipzig, who were credited, complete with invented biographies—surreal