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Materiality of theory

This collection edited by Dronsfield follows on from a symposium under the same name he organised and chaired at the ICA in 2009. The book proposes new methodologies for understanding the relation of theory to practice via different ways of using theory as a material for practice. Each author contributes a theoretical part and a practice part. All three of Dronsfield’s contributions show how textually spatialising theory reveals something about theory that theory ‘by itself’ cannot: 1. an essay on Jean-François Lyotard and Joseph Kosuth putting forward the idea that art does not so much ob-ject its materiality as an-ject its immateriality, and that theory too can do this; 2. running underneath this as both a response to it and a different theoretical take on the same problem, an argument that the little-known writing project ‘Épreuves d’écritures’ for the Pompidou’s 1985 exhibition Les immatériaux, curated by Lyotard, is the first public showing of theory as practice through its spatially dispersing theory electronically; 3. a writing piece performing the problem of which it treats, spacing in the work of Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés, responding to a question raised but not answered by Jacques Derrida – what would a picture of French literature look like? – and linking this to the concern with spacing in the work of Beckett, Celan, and Genet. All three pieces unfold the question of where and how the theory/practice distinction falls. The final part of the project, for its launch at Wilkinson Gallery London, was a performative reading of texts responding to it by Dronsfield and Steinweg, followed by a q&a. The volume is supported by Wilkinson and Cortex Athletico, Bordeaux, and is one of a series of five by the Art-Writing-Research Network comprising the Universities of Reading, Birmingham City, Goldsmith’s and UCL.