Deep Study Session
Poetics/Poetry on Myth, Caste, Race, Supremacy, and Emancipatory Practices; Deep Study Session with Prageeta Sharma
In this hybrid-genre workshop we will write with and through art. Moving beyond zombie criticism or traditional ekphrasis, we’ll discuss and create texts that dynamically engage visual and sonic works, proposing art-writing as an art itself.
Eliding boundaries of truth and fiction, poetry and prose, we will play with linguistic strategies of illumination, discovery, and subterfuge. Each session will focus on an action: to describe, to encounter, to inhabit, to speculate, and to spiral. With generative prompts inspired by our readings, participants will conjure different modes of living, thinking, and feeling with a chosen artwork. We will also investigate how art-writing constitutes art’s context and circulation—and can intervene in it.
Throughout, we’ll read formally diverse examples of literary writing on art and its institutions including those by John Keene, Saidiya Hartman, Gary Indiana, Teju Cole, Victoria Chang, Mary Ruefle, Rainer Maria Rilke, Christine Lai, Rosalind Krauss, and Gertrude Stein.
