REcent written publications
“the Messiness is the message”
Clegg, Sally. (2024). Messiness is the Message. IMPACT Printmaking Journal. 4:7
Abstract:
To refer to an artwork as “masturbatory” has historically been to call it self-indulgent, self-absorbed, and excessive. In 1996, Tracey Emin created a trace monotype titled I Used to Have a Good Imagination. Through text and imagery at once portraying masturbation and ideation, this print expertly visualizes how the Derridian operation of auto-affection both admits the outside world and speaks to certain fundamental qualities of monotype and, more broadly, theories of creativity itself. These qualities: supplementarity, singularity, and non-procreative sexuality, like Emin’s work at times, are unduly dismissed as profane or uncritical. This essay will argue otherwise. In conversation in part with Kathryn Reeves’ 1999 essay “The Re-Vision of Printmaking,” which in part argues for plate matrix as “womb,” I seek here to add what I view as a critical facet, that is the assertion of the practices in printmaking that would refuse categorization as procreative.
“That dangerous supplement”
Clegg, Sally. "That Dangerous Supplement." ASAP/Journal, vol. 6 no. 3, 2021, p. 519-524.
From the Introduction to the Special Issue:
In the dossier, enactments of autotheory as art and art writing represent a range of transmedial, literary, and conceptual art practices. This section features performance, video, sculpture, painting, poetry, art writing and criticism, and artistic text-based interventions, including experimental writing as forms of self-knowledge production and institutional critique in contemporary art and academia. Where Sally Clegg’s “That Dangerous Supplement” engenders a comedic intervention in response to the work of Jacques Derrida, for example, Arezu Salamzadeh’s “The Tyranny of Language” creates a series of conceptual word puzzles that both reveal and conceal her lived experience in a graduate program in the visual arts. Together, dossier contributors demonstrate the myriad ways that contemporary artists, curators, and critics engage autotheory through critical-creative writing, citational strategies, and materialist play. —Alex Brostoff, Lauren Fournier