Make It the Same Again: Rethinking the Past and Future of Conceptual Writing

Conceptual writing as a self-conscious movement in Anglophone literature began in the early 2000s, defining its literary novelty by asserting its belated position vis-a-vis conceptual art. And yet the application of conceptual art practices to literature was itself nothing new. Russian conceptual writers such as Dmitri Prigov and Lev Rubinstein, for instance, had done just that a quarter of a century earlier.

Conceptual writing as an active literary formation in Anglophone literature arguably ended in 2015 with the controversies over the alleged racism of works by its most prominent practitioners, Kenneth Goldsmith and Vanessa Place. And yet conceptual writing’s most vociferous critic, the anonymous online political art group The Mongrel Coalition against Gringpo, itself adopted the conceptual tactics that it simultaneously consigned to literary history.

By addressing these prehistories and afterlives of conceptual writing in English, this paper argues for a more capacious understanding of conceptual writing that would encompass a variety of literary and art practices involving the recycling and re-presentation of texts and images, or what I term “iterative poetics.” Such iterative practices are commonplace across a wide range of contemporary art and literature, from the work of contemporary New Zealand artists like Ruth Buchanan and Louise Menzies to the multilingual and multimedia work of contemporary poets like Hsia Yü and Caroline Bergvall. These iterative or copy practices constitute not just an increasingly dominant literary and artistic form but also a key means through which contemporary artists and writers contest artistic, literary, and cultural authority, including dominant accounts of the pasts and futures of conceptual writing and art.