Four Essays on Experience, Looseleaf, London, 2000
Essays by Darian Leader (psychoanalyst), Kate Love (cultural theorist) Susan Morris (artist) and barristers David Wolchover and Anthony Heaton-Armstrong
Designed by Frank Schröder London
Each essay in this small collection attempts an analysis of what it is to ‘speak out’, either as a witness of certain scenarios or as an individual who has ‘experienced’ certain events. The contributions, from four distinct disciplines, each place a different emphasis upon the subject matter, thus offering the reader a way of stretching out the interpretative possibilities of the following question… What is experience?
This publication attempts to ask what the effects and/or value of experience might be if specific autobiographic detail or personal experience is not foregrounded by the subject as evidence of their own ‘authenticity’ (in contrast to the contemporary trend for ‘candour’) but instead emerges as traces, which manifest themselves as a certain way of looking (i.e. making images in the case of artists) or as a way of constructing sentences (i.e. the recording officer who, unwittingly or not, writes his own viewpoint into a witness’s statement).
If the ‘content’ of experience is withheld yet still spoken or ‘confessed’ in this indirect manner, what status does this leakage have, that bleeds through the subject’s way of being and into their form of expression?
Download the essays below.
Experience Preferred – Kate Love
Testing The Evidence Of Witnesses – David Wolchover and Anthony Heaton-Armstrong
On Looking, Now – Susan Morris
Some Thoughts On Telling The Truth – Darian Leader
Press Release
Author’s Biographies
Footnotes to Essays
Read On Looking, Now essay by Susan Morris on Heyzine below.