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Over and Over, Again and Again

‘Over And Over, Again And Again’ is an 8500-word book chapter published in an interdisciplinary collection edited by two U.S. academics, selected through an international peer-review process. It represents The Potentiality of Failure, a sub-section of my broader enquiry, Not Yet There (http://www.not-yet-there.blogspot.com/), which posits a critical value for failure as resistance to or refusal of the dominant progressive, teleological or goal-oriented tendencies of contemporary experience. The contribution to knowledge is the elaboration of a specifically Sisyphean model of failure, for investigating irresolution and incompletion as purposeful, generative strategies within artistic practice. The critical significance and originality of this work is evident in its selection as a 4000-word excerpt in Failure (ed.) Lisa Le Feuvre (Whitechapel Gallery/MIT, 2010). This survey collection includes contributions by world-leading thinkers including Giorgio Agamben, Samuel Beckett, Gilles Deleuze and artists John Baldessari, Francis Alÿs, Fischli & Weiss and Bruce Nauman.

The chapter’s ideas have been tested at international conferences (PSi # 15 Misperformance: Misfiring, Misfitting, Misreading, Zagreb, 2009) and interviews conducted during the research have been published (‘Flagging Possibilities’, in conversation with Vlatka Horvat', Dance Theatre Journal, 2009). An essay on Horvat’s practice was included in a monograph (In Other Words …, Bergen Kunsthalle, 2011). Parallel investigations have interrogated the critical potential of failure, irresolution and accident as ‘tactical’ methods within artistic practice including: (Re–) – performance lecture in collaboration with Rachel Lois Clapham in Accidentally on Purpose, Quad, 2013, ‘Moves Towards the Incomprehensible Wild’ – journal article in art+research (2011) addressing the critical efficacy of incomprehensibility within artistic practice through the prism of Alain Badiou’s philosophy; ‘Not Yet There: Endless Searches and Irresolvable Quests’ – book chapter in Telling Stories: Countering Narrative in Art, Theory and Film (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009); and ‘Salvaging a Romantic Trope’ – book chapter in Shipwreck in Art and Literature (Routledge, 2013).