In this paper I will address the formal and ideological implications of silence (and associated strategies of reticence, enigma, and failed or obstructed communication) when writing creatively in response to visual art. My presentation will give special emphasis to my prose poem ‘The Great Macguffin’, which I recited for a live audience at the Glasgow International Festival of Contemporary Visual Art in 2012, and which had evolved in conjunction with a large-scale drawing (also entitled The Great Macguffin (2005/2012)). In both text and drawing I deployed the concept of the ‘McGuffin’ (Hitchcock’s term for a hollow, arbitrary plot-device), in relation to the term ‘voice’ which (when used in respect of visual art objects – what they ‘mean’ or ‘say’) implicates not only their philosophic or literary subject-matter, but also their interpretation by third parties (promoters, viewers and critics). Acknowledging the challenges posed to artists and interpreters alike by the essentially non-verbal or abstract material character of visual art, we can state that to silence the art object (to obfuscate its meanings) and yet to force it to speak or to speak ‘for it’ can activate power relations in subtle and contradictory ways. My presentation will conclude with a reading of ‘The Great Macguffin,’ a piece of creative writing in which these ideas are animate
