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Plastic Words was a six-week series of thirteen events which described itself as ‘mining the contested space between contemporary literature and art’ It did not describe itself as anything to do with ‘art writing’   It seems, at first, a useful enough term: a kind of mise-en-abyme created by trying to write about how art uses writing, how writing uses art, and the endless permutations of each entering the other’s space But as he introduced the second event, ‘Taking a Line for a Walk’ (16 December 2014), the critic Brian Dillon claimed the spectre of this term had almost stopped him from coming He even called it ‘venerable’: an effective taboo in a series which was just as concerned with ideas of contemporaneity and the avant-garde Instead, he asked his panellists – the novelist and artist Tom McCarthy, the artist Janice Kerbel, and the writer and theorist McKenzie Wark – to define their stances, by choosing an object – textual or visual – to discuss   McCarthy greedily announced he’d chosen three, but, if we count his mention of the digressive graphic and textual lines in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, he actually chose four His first proper was Royal Road Test, an artist’s book in which Ed Ruscha documented the act of flinging a typewriter from a moving car’s window Next, he showed a Google Street View image of 9 place Saint-Sulpice, Paris: in An Attempt to Exhaust a Place in Paris, Georges Perec novelises three days spent there, collecting kernels of stories which never develop The last and most interesting of McCarthy’s choices was another artist’s book, Shadow, in which Sophie Calle got her mother to hire a private detective to follow her Calle, the auto-/biographical subject, was actually directing the project, and the detective who wrote it up was not It provides a handy distinction between the terms ‘author’ and ‘writer’ respectively, which McCarthy sums up with a line from Roland Barthes’s S/Z: ‘Always ask who pays’   McCarthy explained that he’d chosen each of these examples as types of le livre avenir, ‘the book to come’, into which Mallarmé thought everything would eventually