What is the role of writing in relation to art, and specifically Cathy Wilkes's art? What can writing add? What function might it play? Certainly writing about art can operate as an apparatus of capture that can halt the very work of art.

This is often the arrogance of 'theory' that positions itself as master discourse and reads the work through its own particular optics and logics. Here the work becomes an illustration of certain theoretical models - a prop for certain arguments and suppositions. And yet Wilkes's work, in particular, stymies any such interpretive moves, rendering them clumsy if not obsolete.
In fact we might say that this is a key modality of Wilkes's work in general: it does not pander to our desire for reassurance; it does not multiply the 'fantasies of realism' as perhaps Jean-Francois Lyotard would say.¹ It 'stops making sense'. Indeed, although there are certainly art-historical references, fragments of other signifying regimes and distinct expressive elements that a critic/art historian may be able to seize upon, there is also, as other commentators have pointed out, a resolute toughness that prevents, or at least renders partial, any such 'reading'.

This does not mean that Wilkes's art is without intentionality. There is certainly something going on in and with the work, but rather that this 'going on' is irreducible to writing, operating as the work does, for this writer at least, predominantly on a register of affect - or as what Raymond Williams once called, in relation to emergent cultures, a 'structure of feeling'.² It is this internal affective complexity, this consistency and cohesiveness,