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In this issue of stock, launched to coincide with the 2008 Tasmanian Living Writers' Week, we focus on art and language, artists and writing. Adam Geczy reflects on the artist as writer and critic and speaks about his deep personal commitment to writing. Robert Stevenson asks “Is the anything particularly special about artistic creativity?” and whether its analogies and metaphors can contribute to our social and philosophical understanding to a world fuelled by economic rationalism and facing major environmental challenges. Bill Hart considers the relationship of image to symbol and the written word to image and Gay Hawkes’ meditations on everyday experiences throw light on the meanings behind her sculptures and furniture.

The spoken and written word are generally thought of as two related aspects of the one thing – language. However, images are thought of as belonging to a different order of communication. In recent years, I’ve become fascinated by the process through which images become symbols, not just the evolution of the graphic form, but the associated distillation of an ill-defined thought into a concept which can be labelled with a word or symbol and freely communicated. In this article I make the case that the written word may have a closer connection to imagery than it does to speech.

Below is a list in no particular order of some eminent artists. Apart from all being men, guess what they have in common: Eugene Delacroix, Emile Bernard, Maurice Denis, Wassily Kandinsky, Donald Judd, Robert Smithson, Barnett Newman, Robert Morris, Robert Motherwell?

I recently overheard a conversation between a group of twenty-year-old Tasmanian university students earnestly denigrating the institution of the arts degree. One of them dropped the name of a high-ranking employer in the government sector - the general manager of a large Tasmanian council. As a sort of coup de grace to their conversation, he knowingly informed the group that this figure had confided in him that people with arts degrees weren't much good for anything.

We were sitting on bar stools in the Lord Newry listening to people reading poetry. The bloke beside me, a plumber from Greensborough, clapped politely when someone finished reading some abysmal poems.

“What did you do that for?” I asked him. “That was shit."

“I know,” he said, “ but that’s civilisation."