Assembly without manual

Gemma Sharpe on traces of disappearance

From Hélène Cixous the perfect opening to a meditation on the relationship between writing and invisibility, and of writing as a practice of 'making visible'.  Cixous is spread among the pages of my desk at a public library; it is my workshop and I am engaged in the fabrication of a collage. This collage is the life of an artist, still living though largely forgotten. Let us call her Miss Brown. I'm confronting one of her films – recently extracted from the archive – because I wish to know what it is, or what she meant when she made it. My method involves a haul from the library shelves and a process of selecting, rejecting and tidying my information into a compound narrative. Seemingly my concern is not with the film, but with embedding it as a Thing within a document that pertains to the life of its maker. A craft that, they say, began with Giorgio Vasari, author of The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects. In 1550 Vasari received a letter from Michelangelo, the only artist who had not been posthumously rendered within his volume. Michelangelo wrote, 'I do not marvel that you who restore dead men to life, should lengthen the life of the living, or rather, that you should steal from death for an unlimited period those barely alive.'

So at my desk, engaged in this collage I ask what I may hope of it? The student by my side, who was copying assiduously from a scientific manual, was, I felt sure, extracting pure nuggets of essential ore every ten minutes or so. His little grunts of satisfaction indicated so much. Yet I am displaced. Cixous impels me to remember that: "Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing… woman must put herself into the text – as into the world and into history – by her own movement." Julia Kristeva would then tell me that poetic (or indeed literary) language is a means of making visible the maternal body and subjugating the paternal one, of disrupting, subverting and displacing his law. What I hope of my collage and its very enumeration is that it will more powerfully inscribe Miss Brown into a canon that remains weighted against her, and that there is transformative potential in this project precisely because there is no such manual as the one my neighbour at the desk enjoys. New histories demand new historicisms and bringing the historically annexed into visibility requires test of method.

In February 2009, historian and literary theorist Hayden White spoke at the Courtauld Institute. In his talk, 'Novalesque Histories' White considered the relation between literature and historiography in the twentieth century, launching himself from the following quote by Barthes, regarding his autobiography: 'It must all be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel.' As White continued, 'History', in its reliance upon narrative, could itself be considered a brand of fiction. Furthermore, literary narrative may offer more truth-potential, and more scope for the disclosure of information and understanding, than 'scientific' history can. I'm reminded of Doris Lessing's delight that her seminal novel The Golden Notebook is often to be found on reading lists for politics or history classes in universities, and of White's citing Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway as a more evocative and revealing representation of life in London after the Great War than any history book could be. The Courtauld was felt to bristle as White provocatively asked: 'when does bad history cease to be history?' and continued that the inherent role of narrative in historiography – and visa versa – is in fact no betrayal of 'good history'.

So I'm dashed against that problem of form and content: the content being the fruits of my archival haul and the form being the problematic of what exactly to do with it. How will I shape the content into a new form and maintain the integrity of both? This creation may be fragmentary, a failure, for where so much strength is spent on finding a way of telling the truth, the truth itself is bound to reach us in rather an exhausted condition. Also, my writing is a usurp, as my activity of 'making visible' is appropriative of Miss Brown, a kind of pirating or a maternal-Oedipus. Take for instance, the plagarisms of Virginia Woolf woven into this text, included to make the point that I am choosing my cultural heritage and I am more her daughter than Giorgio Vasari's: 'for we think back through our mothers if we are women'.

Feminist art history fights and has fought to acknowledge the possibility of a matrilineage within the field of art making, of inscribing lost artists within the canon and securing the place of emerging women on their own terms. But the field of art writing may not offer such a fruitful or genealogy, as Mira Schor argued in her important essay 'Patrilineage' in 1991. Her words are worth quoting at length:

One indicator of this separate but unequal system and the lack of communication between systems of discourse and art practice is the degree to which, despite the historical, critical, and creative practice of women artists, art historians, and cultural critics, current canon formation is still based on male forebears, even when contemporary women artists – even contemporary feminist artists – are involved…. Combined with the patrilineal tendencies of art writing and canon formation noted in this essay, the art student, female or male, has few tools for disrupting patrilineage. To cause such a disruption is not a question of creating a Marceline Duchamp; it is exactly the opposite. The end game of postmodernism turns on the eternal ritual killing and resurrection of a limited type of father. Other models might provide a path to a new art history and a different system of validation and legitimation.' (my emphasis)

It is not then insignificant that I have culled from the words of Virginia Woolf within this text, or made reference to Doris Lessing and the literary theory of Hayden White. In hoping to locate my writing within a matrilinear pattern I find a great many formal precedents, and many rich and variant tones of narration and enumeration from the literary field. Women's fiction writing satiates my matrilinear gaze. Here a circle: 'It must all be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel.' Indeed, as Barthes would argue, what essentially we are doing at our desks in libraries, is writing fictions anyway.

An enjoyable complexity at this point would come from Jacques Rancière and his notion of 'literarity' as described in The Politics of Aesthetics. After the so-called ‘aesthetic revolution’ of the Romantic Age, there came: 'a regime in which the logic of descriptive and narrative arrangements in fiction [are] fundamentally instinct from the arrangements used in the description and interpretation of the phenomena of the social and historical world.' 'Literarity', as such, is a condition of literature and literary locution. Yet 'literarity' is all pervasive, and thus constitutes literature's very limit, for it shows it to be indiscernible from any other form of discourse. This philosophical breakdown of 'Disciplinary' hierarchies is expedient to a negotiation of what is possible, and what we may hope for from the writing of Miss Brown.

As our ideas of what can constitute 'art writing' become ever more expansive, now would be the time to actively retrace these arguments of Cixous, Woolf, Schor, and their forebears and followers, and to allow one's (political) feelings of what is to be done and what can be done to manifest within one's writing. Also, to chart one's own textual genealogy, and on one's own terms. 'You don't know what you know until you start writing,' Hayden White charismatically joked at the Courtauld, motioning towards the freedom (and the responsibility) of the writer to be identified and then lost within his or her own language and writing practice.

Back to the desk. This time it is a 1950's yellow-topped Formica desk, upon which my library haul is resting. This desk is my own. What exactly I will dowith the writing of Miss Brown is a postulate absent from this essay, for it will show in practice. Bringing Miss Brown and her film into wider visibility involves myriad choices: from the material to be included to the voice adopted. She is there-not-there and her place in the canon is fragile. Yet within an expanded field of textual choice, new work can breathe within new parameters as it moves its way through those zones of the visible and the invisible.