This weekend I read a timely review of the Venice Biennale by New York magazine's Jerry Saltz. Earlier that day I had put down a book on narrative practice saying to myself, "there's nothing new here." In Saltz's review of this years Biennale, he called most of the work stuck in a cul-de-sac of regress, where everyone is deconstructing the same elements. He went on to warn about the conformity, calling it a super-attenuated gene pool of ideas which could lead to nothing more than coded language, and a safe rehashing of received ideas about received ideas leading to a new orthodoxy.
Yes it was an art review, but it caught my attention because of some questions I had been chewing on myself. Could narrative practice be accused of the same rehashing of received ideas? Are we headed to a closed coded language, a fixed orthodoxy?
There have been a couple of solid books released this year by Stephen Madigan, and Jim Duvall & Laura Beres that have either solidified narrative foundations or attempted to introduce new practices to narrative work. In my area, I know that John Winslade is attempting to generate new ideas via his experimental e-journal, or with his own writing that introduced the work of Gilles Deleuze. But I'm still left very curious what ideas, or writers, other narrative practitioners may be paying attention to? Are there people currently living that can add much to the practice? Are we looking? Would we welcome a little chaos to narrative practice?
In my own work I have recently begun to experiment, so far successfully, with the idea of sideshadowing written about by Gary Saul Morson. I've also become interested in the ideas of David Boje and his work around Antenarrative. Borje's has written about narrative therapy in storytelling organizational work and is familiar with our foundations. But his ideas around Antenarrative and its possibilities in helping people we work with develop a "pre-narrative," and then "bet" (ante) that you can co-create an antenarrative that will become a living story, holds interesting promise. I will attempt to write more about Boje's work here in the future.
I still look to the arts for much of my inspiration. I have been a fan of Jerry Saltz's writing for some time, and this most recent piece has again caused me to pause and reflect. I would be very interested to hear from others, who they might be reading, or who might be influencing their work. And I would also enjoy the collaboration of looking forward, as we wager that a proper narrative future can be constituted.
Comments