Experience and the Expectancy of Speech

The book 'Making a Scene' explores and extends various debates developed through performativity and queer theory, such as notions of self-fashioning and identity politics, that inform contemporary art practice and its relation to political, cultural and social scenes. The texts draw on a number of positions while focusing on practices that create scenes by upsetting dominant discourses.
My text “Experience and the Expectancy of Speech” explores the category of experience in the context of contemporary fine art practice. It utilises the, then, new tendency towards a performative writing strategy by using the experience of a particular work of art (by the artist Gabriel Orozco) in order to analyse more generally, the experience of art and writing. The text outlines a philosophical and political history of the concept of experience. It also charts the development of experience as it is interpreted as being situated both in and outside of the structures of language, and considers the efficacy of both models to the practice and interpretation of art. In doing so the text is significant in that it attempted to break new ground in using art works as forms of theoretical analysis in their own right. The text also broke new ground in the discussion of 'writing as drawing', i.e. the idea that performative writing in fine art might be compared to the process of drawing in fine art, in that a text might be seen to be structured by its own internal dynamic as much as by reference to other analytical and critical models.
The book was one of the first to look at the relationship between Fine Art and Performativity in any theoretical detail. It is now an important text situated within the emerging field of performative arts and writing within fine art practice.