“The Creative and the Critical”: A Conversation with Artist and Writer Heather Bennett
Eileen G’Sell
Sept 2021
Heather Bennett is a senior lecturer at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. Earning a BA in political science and a BFA in printmaking at Washington University, Bennett earned an MFA in painting at Hunter College, New York. Her work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions across the United States and Europe.
An accomplished writer as well as artist, Bennett self-published a work in the form of text entitled Crush (2015), in addition to The Hey Baby Book (From April to August in Chrono-logical Order) (2016), which is carried by Printed Matter, Inc. in New York City. She has written catalog essays for artists Trine Lise Nedreaas and Lisa Roy Sachs, as well as reviews for various publications including Flash Art, 02 Magazine, and Gallery Bill, among others. She now lives in the Skinker-DeBaliviere neighborhood with her cats Etta and Rollins.
Eileen G’Sell I think of you as a creative person whose reading and writing processes inform your visual art process, which in turn informs your writing and reading. A lot of people think that these are separate parts of the brain — that you can't be analytical and also be creative, or that you can’t be critical and also be creative. Unsurprisingly, I believe this division to be untrue. Tell me about how you see writing as part of your art-making.
Heather Bennett Writing can be an opportunity for artists, though sometimes students, especially younger undergraduates, tend to think of it as a burden. Some think, “Why do I have to write if I’m making art? If I wanted to be a writer, I would be a writer!” But for artists, writing is an opportunity to help organize, contextualize, and elaborate on your ideas — to really take that kernel and to turn it into something. Writing is often the first thing I do. Sometimes, I make the work first, and then, writing afterward, I figure out what exactly I’m trying to say.
Writing is also about dialogue with other artists — which can be a really important part of inspiration and take a work to another level. It’s a huge part of my own process of creation, and sometimes the writing actually becomes part of the artwork. There are these conceptual games being played thinking through the realities in both media. There are also collaborations with other writers or artists. I did a string of videos once, and a book of images and text. And the short little texts I wrote verged on being artist statements or statements about the work, but they had a more poetic kind of approach. And I was really interested in the work not having to be necessarily just visual or written.
EG When did you start collaborating with writers for the first time? Jennifer Logan Meyer, for instance, has long been an important collaborator with you.
HB I’ve done projects with musicians before. But Jen was one of the first writers that I collaborated with. She wrote these small, short “tracks” — we called them tracks because she didn’t want to call them poems (they were more on the prose side) — which were all about four different women. And then I had a friend record them and read all in one voice. The piece was really talking about the idea of narrative and the assumptions that come along with it, specifically relating to the female character, who is often the side character rather than the protagonist. But what happens when she becomes the protagonist — what happens to those assumptions? What Jen wrote was another aspect which questioned those roles, reinforcing and embodying the concept of the work.
EG When you were an undergrad at Wash U, did you take any classes that exposed you to certain authors whose writing felt particularly impactful on the way you thought about the themes with which you often engage? In so many ways, narrative itself is a theme in your work, even though it’s also structural. But you often come back to themes of performance, gender, and power asymmetries — disrupting these asymmetries in creative ways.
VIB Shelf, recommended cool, relevant books, from Midnight Special exhibition
HB I was always very interested in literature in particular. I was a book kid — under the covers with a flashlight, the whole deal. At Wash U, I didn’t take a lot of creative writing courses, but I did take a few in French literature and subjects like that. And those were always my favorite courses. But that was still a time when there weren’t a lot of diverse voices. The literary canon is great, but the canon is also the canon. I remember reading On the Road, by Jack Kerouac, and I was pissed off. I knew that, even forty years after Kerouac wrote about his road extravaganza, I could never do that. And that made me angry.
Around that same time — and this is also going to sound cliché — I read Virginia Woolf. It was like a small bomb going off inside of me; the language was something that I had never read before. And it was something that I understood in a way that went beyond an intellectual or academic understanding. And I’d never really had that experience before because I wasn’t reading that many women’s voices. Woolf’s To the Lighthouse is still probably one of my top five books, and probably one of the best books about grief ever written, even though it's not obvious. It’s about how grief lives in your body; it’s in your cells.
EG Woolf inhabits a subjectivity in a way that feels all-encompassing, deeply unsettling, but also kind of kinetic. When we’re moving with the narrator, it feels very active, but also static — static insofar as you’re in a very specific someone’s brain. You’re roving from one neuron to the next in a way that imitates the way we experience what it means to be alive.
In some of your narrative photographic series, like Four Stories, in which you play a role as a protagonist, it feels like Heather Bennett performing this particular female subjectivity — we’re seeing her through the lens through which she imagines herself being seen.
On the Road, 2013, 42" x 42", digital photograph on rag, edition of 3, from Four Stories series
HB Those pieces are talking about the fictionality of so many female narratives, while also trying to let some kind of subjecthood bleed through. I’m thinking about how media and contemporary images of women convey a one-dimensional kind of character. How does that character coincide with a real one? What Woolf gets at is this incredibly elaborate, empathetic subjectivity, a kind of radical empathy, with all this obvious intelligence in the way that she writes. My work is pushing the coexistence of this cookie-cutter, one-dimensional sort of expectation of the female character or protagonist and what it is like to really be a subject. Trying to make these two coexist simultaneously can be very uncomfortable.
EG You’ve also shared with me that Audre Lorde — especially her essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” — has been relevant to you — as a thinker, as a feminist, as an artist. How has she helped you write about your own work or think about your own artistic practice in a more layered and rich way?
HB Talk about little bombs going off! Reading “Uses of the Erotic” helped heavily for me to grasp something I’d been trying to verbalize for decades. So many women at different times influenced me — like some of the early, groundbreaking 70s body feminist artists. Valie Export wrote a lot and incisively, and Carolee Schneemann was also a really prolific writer. Adrian Piper. All these brilliant women that were/are writing from a theoretical and academic viewpoint, but about these things that are exactly what I’m talking about in my work.
In classes where we are specifically focusing on artwork that deals with the feminine, I give students writings by these artists — there’s so much! Their art is not separate from their writing. These women are writing because they understand that they have to.
EG Writing is often an opportunity to think critically, but “thinking critically” or “critical engagement” can both sound like fuzzy amorphous phrases. What do they even mean? In film terms, it feels like a camera in crane shot mode. When the camera cranes back and up, and you can see whatever it is you created as part of a bigger picture, you gain a perspective on it that you didn’t before: a critical perspective.
A lot of students see whatever is written as an extension of the self. And as such, they adhere to a Romantic notion that whatever is created — whether or not it’s an essay or a poem, a manifesto, a painting, a sculpture, performance — that if it’s not the spontaneous expression of an intense emotion, then it’s not really art. There’s the idea that we shouldn’t revise, because revising is like corrupting or compromising that original feeling or emotion. As much as I have extraordinary respect for emotion, it is only on very rare occasions that I’ve made good art based on spontaneous, intense emotion. Instead, emotion is more like a catalyst — it’s not the only thing.
HB And meaning also changes, I think. Work changes over time based on context. Midnight Special, the show that I did in March of 2020 — that never opened because of the pandemic — was about a really specific subject, but as it sat unseen, the subject changed. Visually, the show was using a lot of blacks and darkness and exploring how flashy and open can fade back and be absent. That happened to the show itself, literally, and the whole thing changed. All these tongue-in-cheek, intellectual puns I was making became a lot more poignant during this time. It took me writing about it to really understand what I was thinking about that change — like, why I was thinking about this weird, ghostly presence when I thought about the show? And it was writing that helped those concepts come together. Now I think about the work differently.
EG In May of 2020 you held a socially distant reading in the space, and on a gallery wall you had a shelf of books by certain literary figures that were important to you — Lorde, Djuna Barnes, Carmen Maria Machado. A diversity of names, from different backgrounds and different eras. You have a really rare capacity to appreciate how the intellectual and the creative overlap — I say rare, because I think that in some ways, the creative and the analytical seem at odds with each other, and they don’t have to be.
Honestly, maybe it’s a matter of vulnerability that makes them similar, of feeling personally invested. I don’t feel less personally invested in a piece of writing if I'm not using the first person, because I am still the one writing it. So if I’m adopting a sassy voice-of-God tone in some of my feistier third person, thesis-driven argument pieces, it doesn’t feel less personal just because I’m not saying “I”. Of course, things that happened to people are moments of vulnerability if they’re shared. It’s important to share the self’s experience. But I still feel like having an original idea or posing a debatable claim is also being vulnerable, because people might disagree with you. I might be writing a poem in response to something really personal, or an essay where I’m making an argument that I know a lot of people might not automatically agree with, and it’s not the same vulnerability but it’s still there. Sometimes I feel even more vulnerable with the argumentative work, more exposed, even though it’s an idea and not an experience.
HB And of course, that sense of vulnerability depends on the artist. At this late stage of the game, in the last ten years, I’ve accepted more of the artist that I am than what is cool or trending. But for me, the creative and the analytical are an interlocking combination that can’t come apart. They might come at different stages — one before the other, or one might be more important — but they’re always both there.
In one of my classes we do a project called “Creative and Critical.” I would have them go review a visual art show; they would write one paragraph that was creative and had no limits, and one paragraph that was more traditionally critical and analytical. Usually the creative paragraphs were much better, revealed more, and students went much more towards what they really thought about the work, whereas the other paragraph would talk about all kinds of stuff and never actually offer opinion of what they really thought or felt about this work. So then, once they went through that, I’d ask why can’t some of this from the creative paragraph come into the analytical paragraph. Analytical writing can be creative and beautiful and emotional. And after that their writing would be different.
Installation shot, Midnight Special at Monaco, St. Louis, 2020
EG I had a similar lesson that I used to do on the first day of composition class. I’d ask students, “What do you think of when you hear creative writing? What do you think of when you think of analytical writing?” We put it all on the board and discussed the way in which our emotions inform our ability to analyze. I think emotions definitely inform our ability to analyze; we can pretend to be dispassionate, but we can’t ever fully be, and that’s okay. Of course, I tell my students to suspend judgment, and try not to say simply, “I dislike this,” or “This is good,” or “This is bad,” and actually see it for what it is. And then think about what evidence is there and then take that evidence and try to discover something new. Rather than think, “This is my favorite book, poem, movie, birthday cake ever. Ergo, it can’t be analyzed because I like it.”
The idea that analysis destroys something that you enjoy, or destroys something you’re emotionally connected to, makes me sad. For me, I often find the things I enjoy even more redeeming when I analyze them, because I learn something about myself in the process of unpacking what something is. If you’re more self-aware as a reader or as a viewer, you can also be more self-aware as a writer and as a creator.
HB So much of what we’re trying to get our students to resist is the idea that analytical or nonfiction writing is just about facts, and can only be written in one way. It’s just like how many people think about photography — that it’s about facts, reality. But actually, you’re choosing not only the literal frame for the photo, but you also have an emotional and an ideological frame from which you choose what to even photograph, and what to focus on. How you feel about the subject comes across there.
EG Absolutely. It’s interesting how the language of photography and film is often incorporated into the way that we discuss writing — like, “I’m applying this lens to this analysis,” or, “I’m coming at this from this angle.” We talk about the very abstract world of ideas in the lexis of photography because it helps us to actually see how what we’re doing is new and illuminating.
HB And also so subjective, even if you’re talking about something that is a fact. How you express it, how you talk about it, what way you choose to approach it can be wildly creative, even down to the word combination you use.
EG Exactly. So many students also think that facts and objectivity are great, but subjectivity, emotions, and opinions are all bad. But analytical writing demands that you make claims, and making a claim is taking a risk. It’s tempting to think that anything that presents itself as fact, as “correct,” as self-evident, is good. When I read this kind of writing it feels very safe. It’s not really risking anything. The writer isn’t learning anything, and the reader isn’t learning anything.
HB The idea that nonfiction has to be only rational and emotionless — I don't see that. My art isn’t just talking about the things that I wake up and feel, even if it’s based on my life, my experiences. I’m also really trying to think through those experiences, how they were built, through culture, through society. What are the implications of my personal experience in the larger realm?
EG In terms of the pandemic, I think that different types of creative people got to know their art in a different way. Are there ways that you thought about your own writing or your own art differently when you weren’t among your students in person on campus?
HB Everyone’s experience of that time is really specific. I did make things in the studio, and I let myself go a little bit more. I always think it’s important to let yourself go wherever the heat is, even if it seems like a total red herring. I feel the same way about reading, or attending lectures, or whatever you’re consuming. One student once asked, “Should I go to this lecture? Do you think it has to do with my work?”
EG And you’re thinking, “Everything may have to do with your work!”
HB Exactly. If the lecture makes you think about something new, it could totally affect your work. So yeah, I think you should seek out everything you’re interested in. I was doing collages that I had wanted to do for a while, but I didn’t really know why, which isn’t usually how I start work. During the pandemic I was also thinking about my hands and tactility in a way that I don't usually think about, especially with the photo and video work. I was doing drawings, and then the collages were kind of an extension of that. It’s nice to be in the studio and touching material.
Because I had Midnight Special ready to go two days before lockdown, that show had to transition. Having that show traverse the before-pandemic and the after-pandemic just showed me something that I already knew: that work changes through context. But it changed in such a personal way, even though the reason it changed was affecting everybody. The least important thing at that time was my show, but the show almost took on this independence, like in a way it was moving and transforming without me.
EG Usually we see a work change in meaning after ten or fifteen years, but with the pandemic everything moved so quickly. When the context changes so quickly, so violently, you start to see how it’s not just you as a creator who decides what something means. It’s also the context in which it's received. And that’s fascinating.
Anniversary (B&D), 2012, 42" x 63", digital photograph on Somerset Velvet, edition of 3, from Four Stories series
HB That whole experience makes me want to be more open with how I think, but also maybe makes me want to be more critical of myself.
EG What is the hardest thing to you about writing?
HB I think this is a pretty standard answer. The thing that’s so hard is starting. Pulling all of the nuances and intricacies that I see interconnecting so many ideas, and trying to make that understood in text, to honor that interconnectivity, it can be really difficult. Sometimes it’s based on a feeling. I don’t think I would make art if I could get at that exact feeling in another medium. I do think that writing does that as well; it gets at something that couldn’t be gotten at any other way.
EG It feels like I’m sweeping my brain for the best bits. There’s this cacophony up there with all these different ideas. And how do you honor the integrity of an idea that you suspect is there? I say “suspect” because I feel like I've written about certain things where I realized in the process of writing that I didn’t actually have a good idea yet. And other times, I’ll think that I’m going to write about something, and then in the process of writing I come upon something that’s more interesting than what I had planned. The process of making is a process of discovering. I feel like I get nudged in certain directions from an invisible force. But if you don’t start, you never get to that point.
HB There was a photograph that I had in my mind for years, and I never made it because I could never figure it out fully. I couldn’t figure out if it was meant to be a video or a photograph. And then I took this writing class in New York after graduate school. I thought, maybe it’s a story, so I wrote this story about this photograph that I never created, that had just been in my head for a really long time. I wanted to write the story centering around describing this photograph that didn’t exist. The story was talking about the elusiveness of that photograph, and its disappearance was a way of talking about the female subject, purportedly in the photograph. Her erasure. After I wrote the story, I thought, “No, I think that’s not it.” So then I later made the photograph. But the photograph couldn’t really exist without the story. At its end, the final book ended up containing the photograph that the story posits doesn’t exist. The circularity really answered why it was so hard for me to make it in the first place. Text and image together made it a complete thing.