Art vapours: ways of seeing, hearing and speaking again

This performative paper was co-presented with Juliette Kristensen at 'Thinking with John Berger', 4-5 September 2014, Cardiff Metropolitan University. Engaging with the conference themes of drawing and writing, theory and practice, the paper discussed a special issue of the Journal of Visual Culture published in 2012 (marking the 40th anniversary of Ways of Seeing), and introduced a related project, Art Vapours.

The journal issue was co-edited by Raiford Guins, Juliette Kristensen and susan pui san lok, and comprises eighteen short contributions and reflections from historians, theorists, writers, thinkers, curators and makers, from across the fields of art history, visual culture and practice. The issue also includes an interview by Kristensen with Mike Dibb (producer, filmmaker and collaborator on Ways of Seeing), and a selection of visual essays commissioned by lok. In addition, lok produced a visual response to Dibb’s personal archive, called ‘Making Ways’, under the rubric, ‘Archivery’.

Art Vapours is an occasional collaboration between lok and Kristensen, with a view to writing, drawing, thinking, making, publishing and curating across a range of platforms. Art Vapours seeks to hear, recognise, and re-inscribe the voices and bodies that haunt the spaces of feminism, art and the everyday, past and present. The first Art Vapours project, Six Women, turns on two encounters: a letter written to Berger in response to watching Ways of Seeing, from an apologetic ‘ordinary housewife’; and the women talking in the programmes’ second episode, who speak to Berger and to each other, and before but (unlike Berger) not to the camera.