How We Practice by Carmen Winant

Edited by Karen Kelly, and Barbara Schroeder
Design by Michael Aberman
128 pages, 24 images, softcover, 5 1/2 x 8 inches
ISBN 13: 978-1-954947-17-7

$24.95

Awaiting Stock. Available for Preorder

The acclaimed American visual artist and writer Carmen Winant (born 1983) is best known for her multimedia works that center found imagery to explore representations of women. Her newest book, How We Practice, is part critical writing and part experimental essay, while also a self-portrait of Winant’s life in long-distance competitive running.
The book asks a single, knotty question: What is “practice”? Winant attempts to answer this by posing others, such as: What is the difference between going to a practice and having one? Are practice and theory dialectical? Does practice ever end? This project works to define the often contradictory term as it functions across contemporary art discourse, in the process offering new ways to read it. The book examines “practice” in relation to legitimacy in the newfound role of artist-as-professional and the influence of MFA programs in promoting creative work as white-collar labor. It imports influences from outside the field of art production—most notably, by looking to the world of athletics—to approach the implications, strategies and potentialities of practice vis-a-vis labor and exhaustion, repetition and pleasure, gender and rehearsal.

Praise and Press

Kineticism, creation, and embodiment: These are all central topics of discussion in Winant’s new book How We Practice, published by Dancing Foxes Press, which is simultaneously a departure from her previous work and a culmination of her theoretical concerns. It is also one of her most personal projects to date. Informed by her life as an artist as well as by her experience as a competitive college athlete (she was a distance runner on the UCLA track team), the book offers an incisive dissection of the word practice, exploring its multifaceted meanings in the seemingly antithetical contexts of artmaking and athletics. While How We Practice isn’t explicitly about photography, it nevertheless contends with photographic concerns, such as the optics of bodily representation and the perpetual tension between the seen and the unseen.
—Jessica Simmons-Reid, Artforum

For Winant, a practicing artist, writer, and teacher, the polysemy of the nearly ubiquitous term “practice” is an opportunity to explore the slippages of power relations between those various meanings. If the essays and collaged material in the book cannot answer the list of questions Winant asks at the beginning of her book in a definitive way, they at least give examples as to how we might respond… Winant’s questions are more than conceptual, they’re formal: in each collage, what seems like disorder is rearranged into new meaning. Given the rising aestheticization of all forms of violence, we could turn to Winant’s book for the ways it understands the body as a locus of politics. Winant’s mobilization of “practice” opens a place where aesthetics and its political ramifications can be considered in a new way: a practice that orients attention to the private, intimate sphere of the intellectual process.
— Lucy Sternbach, E3W