The Artlink Archive Project [Preview]: Jacqueline Millner and the art writer’s marathon

In the first of a series of commissioned long-form online essays engaging with Artlink’s archive, Jacqueline Millner takes up the Art / Write / Read theme in a personal and historiographical narrative. Hers is a long-distance view of feminist art criticism and art writing, beginning in the mid-1990s in the wake of the high-water mark of critical theory in art schools. As a longstanding academic Millner has been attentive to links between philosophical developments (and fashions) in art writing across its various guises and aware of the swing from privileging the text to centring the art object in all its materiality. The parallel blurring of the lines between artist and writer alongside the rise of the artist-researcher and artist- curator are also noted. These broader conditions and their effects on art writing have particular interest because of their implications for the feminist project, a central concern of Millner’s practice as a writer and educator: