MARIA FUSCO
Maria Fusco is an experimental writer from Belfast. Currently teaching interdisciplinary writing at the University of Dundee, she developed the term “art writing” during her time at Goldsmiths. She is the founder and editor of The Happy Hypocrite, a semi-annual magazine for and about experimental art writing. Her recent works include Give Up Art: Collected Critical Writings (2018) and A Belly of Irreversibles (2021), in which she reflects upon her working-class background and the potential of using class as a writing method.
Interview by Valeska MangelPortrait by Ross Fraser McLean
Valeska Mangel You were an artist before moving into writing. What was your artistic practice about and what was the response to your change of focus?
Maria Fusco I trained as a sculptor and was always writing, but I didn’t consider writing an art practice. Thinking about it in retrospect, the texts I was writing were probably hypertexts. They were engaging critically with my and others’ work, but using fiction, and that was just a very natural, intuitive way to write. I didn’t really show them to anybody. I was always very dissatisfied with the art practice, in terms of being left with objects and not really knowing what to do with them. They felt like unwelcome guests that you couldn’t get rid of. Then I moved to London and started working n bookshops and galleries. I started reading more, because bookshops were often empty, so there’s plenty of time to read. Then I just thought, well, maybe if I started writing some reviews, I could make a bit of money. What a stupid idea, even if it’s a nice idea. I don’t really enjoy the writing process, but one thing I do really like about writing is the economy of how it just requires time and a page or screen. I think writing is a more attractive proposition, in terms of how you spend your time.
VM Would you say that writing as art practice is still in its infancy? Or quite the opposite, as you have said in the past, that the “art writing” term is already becoming redundant?
MF From a quite literal descriptive point of view, “interdisciplinary writing” fits more accurately for me. There is a persistent bifurcation in art and design education, around different forms of making; writing is kept very separate from other forms. That’s just nonsense. The utility of a phrase like “art writing” or “design writing” is to gather people who are trying to find a justification for their annoyance with this unnecessary division. Maybe there’s something in there about doing more than one thing at once.
VM Even just to start reading more than one book at a time, connecting the different topics with each other.
MF Yes! Some of us need to be occupied in a number of different activities, which then feed and sharpen each other. But I think within academia, or professional circles more generally, there is still that idea that doing more than one thing is quite challenging. Although it’s the reality of most makers’ lives.
VM That methodology aligns with new generations that engage with media at an accelerated rate, like watching YouTube videos at triple speed. It fits into that pattern.
MF The point about watching something at three times the speed is very interesting. How would we consume something like a novel, which is non-visual, at speed? That notion of the compression of time and space within experimental forms of writing is interesting, because experimental writing is very concerned with variations in tempo, pace and attention.
VM I wanted to ask you about The Happy Hypocrite, a magazine that gives a home to various experimental writing practices. I read that the latest issue, “Without Reduction”, will be the final one.
MF I know it’s sad, isn’t it? I had to persuade the publisher to let me kill it off. When The Happy Hypocrite started, there were no other journals or publications in the UK in which people could publish experimental work; I knew that it was up to me to create that. Now there are quite a lot of publications publishing more hybrid, experimental works, and I know that’s because The Happy Hypocrite cleared that space. It’s like hanging the broom up once it’s done the work. For me, each moment of creation, whether it’s a piece of writing, performance writing or editorial practice – and I consider editing a practice – needs to be generating something brand new, a tool to do a specific job. I’m always concerned with making the sharpest tool. One final thing about The Happy Hypocrite is that the theme of each issue has been a way of going about something rather than a subject. Some of the first were, for instance, “Linguistic Hardcore” or “Hunting and Gathering”. I’m more interested in how people go about doing stuff and what they are doing in all forms of life. That form of collectivity, which The Happy Hypocrite has, is because of its methodological rather than traditional, thematic approach that most journals take.
VM You can see the result of that in the contributions. How the overall format is used as the narrative itself, because it obviously doesn’t need a story. It creates a sense of humour that makes one feel a bit estranged.
MF That’s true. Estrangement is an important facet of criticality. To feel estranged or uncomfortable with something makes one a more active reader or participant. For instance, in performance work it’s always interesting to consider how one casts the audience, which is the same as casting a reader. If someone reads an entire artist’s novel it may be very boring, but they make a commitment to read it. Then you have to think, what was that actually about? Is it about comprehensibility? Is it about asking yourself what comprehensibility is? What is narrative? What gets you to the end? All these things are very important with something like The Happy Hypocrite, because of the amount of content – the final one is twice as big as normal.
VM “Without Reduction”...
MF Exactly. I wanted to stage a final event, a celebration of The Happy Hypocrite’s life and death, that was far too long. Twelve hours to be precise. I like the possibility to dip in and out and that you don’t have to get through the whole thing. Like when you go to a talk or lecture, and you don’t recall all of it. And sometimes it’s nice to go to sleep in a talk.
VM Or like watching a looped film in a museum from somewhere in the middle.
MF Yes, all those ways of paying attention, that we don’t necessarily realise we’re doing, are interesting when we begin to realise that we’re doing them. Of course, with all the Zoom stuff now, we’re walking around listening to something and engaging with it without necessarily looking at it, like ambient information collection.
VM Speaking of this apathy towards our direct environment, I was also thinking about how you spent so long with your course at Goldsmiths trying to define what art writing actually is, which ultimately led to the manifesto, “11 Statements Around Art Writing”. What can we learn from this process of debating the definitions and meanings of words?
MF That’s a really interesting question. If we’re writing, when we read, we need to be reading as a writer. Without that close engagement to the possession of the words, the specificity of the arrangement, there is no writing. I’ve been writing a couple of essays this year and I’m dropping a lot of references away. I thought, I won’t use other people’s words; I’ll just use my own words. Of course, other people’s words are often more elegant and they’re helpful for shortcutting through to an idea, or mood. But for me these ideas of definitions and being as specific as possible are really important. I think there is something in that specificity that you drew into the question. By definition there’s a mystery in there, a sort of mystical relationship between being really specific and demanding specificity, precision and attention, and then the blurred edges, non-division, and the insistence on that permeability of form.
VM In A Belly of Irreversibles, you wrote: “quite a lot of people came up to me, asking in a genuine way what I meant by working class-ness as method. And I wondered, ‘why are they so interested?’” What do you think is so interesting about it?
MF It’s a genuine question! I think that what’s at stake for me within writing in working class-ness is that I can’t pull all the different bits apart. That’s the first thing. I don’t think anybody can. We’re stuck with what we’ve got, and we just have to find a way through it. To have grown up as a working-class, Catholic, Northern Irish person during the Troubles, means that you have a nuanced and deep understanding of the power of words. This is true in an intersectional feminist sense, too, because within a militaristic, aggressive male environment, women need to find their own way through with their own languages, quite literally. For example, in the opera that I’m working on at the moment with the Royal Opera House, I draw on the BBC broadcasts throughout the 1980s to the early 1990s for which certain Northern Irish politicians would be overdubbed. It’s a fantastic image and it’s an absurd but real image. There are new definitions and specificities of experience to be learned from those positions of liminality. And the two main specifics that I have are being working class and Northern Irish. Those are brought to bear in my work, but also in my commitment and responsibilities.
VM We’re circling back to the idea of making the sharpest tool that you mentioned when we spoke about your decision to terminate The Happy Hypocrite.
MF It’s a position of realism. Growing up working-class there are no examples and no resources; everything must be self-resourced in every way, including intellectually. It is a possession of dream, dreaming oneself through labour into activities. The most important thing is this sense of liminality and creating it at the position of a border – of being on a border. Seeing that it’s there but choosing to ignore it, which of course is, thinking about it, a very obvious thing for a Northern Irish person. It’s obvious, but it’s real for anybody who has grown up in a conflict zone.
VM I think that’s a beautiful way of describing this balance between being specific about your identity and being open to your hybrids.
MF Thank you. A phrase that has been coming to me a lot recently in writing is to militantly cherish something. To cherish and care for it and to do it militantly. There is more for me to unpack with that, but it’s a useful phrase to combine those forms that we’ve been talking about. ◉