Collaborative Viewpoints: the writing of impossible descriptions | Ann Schilo and Anna Sabadini

Summary: Collaborations in Modern and Postmodern Visual Arts | Ann Schilo and Anna Sabadini This paper draws on Barbara Bolt's emphasis on a material approach to understanding art where the artist's engagement with her surrounds through bodily activity is all important and has alignment with Joanna Zylinska's call for an ethical dimension to the encounter with everyday life where, through the agency of the feminine sublime, materiality, body, language and ideas can be reconnected. The paper uses a form of decriture feminine - a writing of impossible description - and rather than making claims for a universal, all encompassing aesthetics, both writers ground their approach to understanding artistic practice in a specific and localised response in which an encounter with painting is both an act of looking at an object, an artefact with all its attendant meanings, and a realisation of the act of painting itself, the art of mark making and visualisation. The collaboration itself generated a parallel set of critical investigations and proved transformative for both authors in regard to the activity of painting and its theorization. It counters the conventional modernist approach to art criticism that delineates a single viewpoint and produces closure through one authorial truth. The creative partnership opened up new ways of considering art by revealing that perception is both elusive and inclusive. It allowed us to explore how another sees, and the relationship of this to the temporality of practice (both theoretical and practical), its devolution. Therefore, two ways of seeing (literally - viewer and artist, as well as metaphorically - theorist and practitioner) that are normally polarized find a rhythm of interconnection and an open-ness conducive to the transformation of each. Importantly in the process of collaboration, we were opened to the pragmatics of feminist ethical engagement. Ann Schilo is currently Director of Graduate Studies in Faculty of Humanities at Curtin University. Ann’s teaching and research concerns intersect in various areas and follow a number of key themes surrounding contemporary art theory and practice. She is particularly interested in the areas of women’s artistic practices, feminist art theory, the visualisation of place and folk material culture. As an experienced supervisor, she has also developed an ongoing concern for best practice in the delivery of postgraduate research programs and is recognised for her work in the area of creative production theses. As well as contributing to national and international conferences through the presentation of papers, Ann writes for local and national art journals and catalogues. Anna Sabadini graduated from Curtin University with a Doctorate in Creative Arts in 2007 and is establishing a promising career as an emerging artist scholar with a growing national reputation. She was selected for the Art of the Wall exhibitions in Brisbane and Melbourne in 2008 and is represented by key galleries in Australia. Underscored by her location as a woman artist living in regional Western Australia, her work engages in questions surrounding her Italian heritage, Australian culture, philosophy and art history/theory. Her first novel Father was short listed for the Tom Hungerford Prize in 2005. Anna contributes essays and reviews to a number of national journals.