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To become an author (necessity)

This essay was commissioned by Maria Fusco for The Happy Hypocrite, a biannual journal led by artists’ writings. Lomax posits that, in becoming an author, an individual becomes subject to, and the subject of, an apparatus.

Lomax conducts scholarly enquiry in relation to experiments and expositions in writing and with language. Her research is undertaken through maintaining an inseparability between form and content. For this essay, informed by the findings of her REF Output 1, Lomax drew upon the work of Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault on the ‘unwritten’ and the ‘author-function’ to argue that writing can be an apparatus – in as much as writing, itself, can be captured by apparatuses. The essay provides a new context for a longstanding research concern that emphasises writing as a practice in relation to the art of writing and the art of writing theory.

The essay plays upon a ‘pressing necessity’ for a work to address the division between human and animal. In the context of Lomax’s essay, however, the work does not come into being, thereby drawing attention to the significance of that which remains ‘unwritten’. Developing research into the non-division between practice and theory, criticism and creativity, Lomax’s methods of Art Writing in ‘To become an author’ open out the question of ‘pure means’.

Lomax presented this research widely, including a keynote lecture, ‘Figure, gesture, pure means’, at the ‘A Breath for Nothing…Approaching the Limit’ research colloquium held at Central Saint Martins College of Arts & Design, London (2012), and a writing workshop at the Slade School of Fine Art (2012). This research culminated in a sole-author book, Pure Means: Writing, Photographs and an Insurrection of Being (2013).