TEXTUAL ACTANTS: INFRASTRUCTURES OF CONTEMPORARY ART (2024 ->)

An ongoing project comprising several interconnected 'texts' which interweave with one another.

Textual Actants is artistic practice while also being about artistic practice: a back and forth iterative, reflexive interplay between 'being the thing' and 'being about the thing'.

Rapidly accelerating technological change premised on the growing affect of text, including in code and algorithmic form, is changing the parameters of increasing aspects of life. The project works through the critical possibilities for art in this changing context, historicizing this in relation to prior infrastructural paradigms as well as speculating forward.





Texts 1 and 2 have been developed into audio performances, broadcast in Summer 2024 with TACO / RTM.FM (Best listened to through headphones or speakers.)

Voices: Jane McDowell and Rosalind Stockwell
Steel I-beam percussion and additional voice: Adam Walker
Mixing and mastering: David Pilcher (Calibre Sound)

Supported by the Manchester School of Art Research Fund

Text 1: THE THINGS IN PLAY



An art-historical journey from the mid-twentieth century to the present. From the desert as a metaphorical (or literal) presumed 'tabula rasa' to 'canonical' abstract sculptural practices such as those of Caro, Serra and especially Judd, it traces the place of steel in twentieth-century art history, and how and why such 'material' practices have been joined (or, possibly, superseded) by textualized, conceptual and research-based practices in more recent decades. It explores Garth Evans' Artist Placement Group (APG) work within British Steel as part of a trajectory through to the new material conditions of artist-hood within the neoliberal present.

Text 2: A TOUR OF THE MONUMENTS OF CHARLEROI, BELGIUM



Text 2 operates in close dialogue with Text 1, but examines the historical circulations of the steel industry itself. It centres on an autoethnographic writing journey to Belgium, both to the suburbs where I grew up and to the former steel making centre of Charleroi, where the steel I-beam (from which the 'I-beam cursor' takes its name) was first produced. There are coincidental parallels between the timeline of the closure of the steelworks in Charleroi and my own move to the UK, in-sync with the Arcelor Mittal Orbit arriving on the skyline of my new home city. Arcelor Mittal was the eventual final owner of the Charleroi steelworks.








More to come.