Fictocritical Encounters: Rethinking Criticality and Writing in Contemporary Art

What is fictocritical writing? How to retain cognitive value through the use of fiction? How to use writing methodologically? These questions will serve as the springboards for a postdoctoral research project that strives to examine the introduction of notions traditionally ascribed to creative writing (such as imagination, fiction, narrative, identification) at the service of critical enquiry in the context of the visual arts.

In recent years, there has been an ongoing discussion on the inadequacy of the critical language used to write about contemporary art (crisis of art criticism, International Art English, etc.). Fictocritical writing is a transdisciplinary practice that seeks to blur and problematise the generic distinctions between fiction and criticism, fiction and non-fiction, and research and literature. As a mode of experimental writing, it holds significant potential to reinvigorate the current state of critical art writing. My research project focuses on how fictocritical writing engages in the production of knowledge and the creative possibilities it offers within contemporary art.

This will be a practice-based research project, where the research questions are explored in the writing process itself. The project will relocate research in narrative writing, creating and describing its own form. The intention is not only to write about fictocriticism, but to write fictocritically. In other words, the text will perform its own contents. Writing will be methodological in that it will dictate the way the research is conducted, and the contents are organised – blurring the boundaries between style and content, theory and fiction, art practice and research.

My research is structured as a series of encounters with salient authors in the field (e.g., Michael Taussig, Lynne Tillman, Paul B. Preciado): personal interactions to unravel their personal motivations to turn away from conventional writing models, what kind of specific problematics they faced, and why fictocritical writing appeared to them as a solution. This sort of information is usually not committed to writing but conveyed by oral transmission that will produce priceless testimonies.

The form in which the results will be presented will be twofold: an international seminar taking place at Vilnius Academy of Arts, and a peer-reviewed monograph published in collaboration with an internationally renowned publisher.

The aim is to provide a tool to other artists, art critics, curators, writers, and researchers who seek to integrate the creative aspect of their practice with the necessary analytical rigour; to those who are considering venturing into the hybrid terrain where literature, criticality, and the visual arts merge, in any experimental form that their fictocritical writing may take.

This project has received funding from the Research Council of Lithuania (LMTLT), agreement No. S-PD-25-23.