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I try to avoid the ‘based in’ because it suggests you spend your whole life jetting around. I suppose writing is the centre of it. In the past few years I’ve done a lot of teaching, which I love, and I’ve also curated two exhibitions and seen myself described as ‘writer and curator’ recently. It’s not that I’m uncomfortable with it but I don’t have the ambition to be one of those people who has that many job descriptions going on. Writing is somehow and always the thing that I come back to.

He’s somebody whose thinking about exhibitions has been grounded in his reading. His relationship with various writers, which comes out most obviously now in the Serpentine Marathons, is really important for him. As a critic, I feel like curating is a sort of adventure and an education. But then writing about art has also been an adventure and an education, because it’s not my training. I’ve been doing it for about twelve years or so, and it feels very much as though it’s been a process of learning. I feel about curating in the same way. Doing the Curiosity exhibition was really thrilling but it was also totally unpredictable.

Roger Malbert, who runs the Hayward’s Touring program, put it to me simply. He said if you were to curate an exhibition for us, an exhibition which had its roots in Cabinet, what would its subject be? And it was immediately clear it had to be curiosity.

Or contemporary museums thinking about their historical roots in that way. Both those things seemed like clichés. I’ve seen some exhibitions that propose themselves as cabinets of curiosities that really haven’t worked; it’s a very difficult thing to do. But it’s interesting that it suddenly came back as a possibility.

Partly because the visual motifs and texture of, say, the seventeenth-century cabinets of curiosities suggest a look or an atmosphere for an exhibition that’s a bit too familiar. We were lucky in that we had at Turner Contemporary these very beautiful, very clean, very spare spaces designed by David Chipperfield, who was also involved in designing the exhibition. We could make something that wasn’t trying to mimic visually the fabric or the look of the cabinet of curiosities. I suppose that’s the danger. You want to avoid a flip over into kitsch. We were looking for something that felt a bit more restrained. Curiosity at De Appel in some respect is going to be more contemporary still.

Each version of the exhibition – Margate, Norwich, Penzance and now Amsterdam – they’ve all been different and for different reasons that have to do with space and loans and so on, but that’s an opportunity. Amsterdam is an interesting place to be putting on an exhibition on curiosity because we’re able to draw on some of the local collections. We’re borrowing from the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam and the Teylers Museum in Haarlem. We have certain objects to do with magic, with colonial history, and we’re carrying on some of the sub-themes from earlier versions of the exhibition that had to do with secrecy and mystery. But there will be surprises too, I hope.

Not really. Apart from a few thousand books, not especially. If there’s a kind of collecting impulse, you can find it going back through things I’ve written for Cabinet. It’s hard to describe your own work but there’s probably a narrative that runs through stuff I’ve written in the past decade that really is about things: about objects and bodies and landscapes. And that would have been surprising to me ten years ago, when I thought that if I’m going to be a writer I’d be a literary critic or I’d be writing about writing. But the thing that really excited me to begin with writing about contemporary art was learning how to describe things. With respect to art criticism, people often talk about something called ‘mere description’. I always want to stop them when that phrase comes up. Description is the hardest thing for me and in some ways the most exciting. Just describing an object, describing a thing.

I’d always had an interest in photography and the history of photography. As a postgraduate student, I’d written a lot about Walter Benjamin. That led me into the history of photography and then into contemporary photography. So when I started out, I was mostly writing about photography and photographers. But practically it happened because I started writing for art magazines, first of all for frieze and then for other magazines in London like Modern Painters and ArtReview, and then discovered Cabinet. It seemed as if art magazines were much more open to an essayistic, generalist, a kind of eclectic approach than certainly the mainstream literary world was at that time.

That might be accidental but things go in waves in terms of where I publish things. I started out writing for really mainstream publications like national newspapers, TimeOut. But I guess at the moment I quite like the idea, after writing a lot in the past for art magazines, of trying to take some of the things I’ve learned in that process back to a wider readership. There is a challenge involved in writing 2000 words for The Guardian on an artist that might not be on everybody’s radar.

Only very briefly with photography, but I realized that I was completely and utterly incompetent. But I don’t think I would bother to teach art criticism, for example, unless I really believed that criticism is more than a handmaid to art, that it is an art. I find it just as difficult, just as challenging in terms of the writing to write a 700-word exhibition review as I do to write books. As a writer I don’t feel there’s a gap between those things.

The novella, Sanctuary, was probably the most difficult because I wasn’t used to inventing things, and I wasn’t sure that I had an imagination. A kind of essayistic voice and structure is the thing that I always had an ambition towards in the first place. I would have had models in mind for that, and they’re really obvious models: Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes, and so on – they’re all the heroes of anybody my age and background.

That was it. The Waves was totally the model. I recently thought that if I write another novel or novella, if I write fiction again, it would probably still have Virginia Woolfish interludes. I don’t know quite how else I would do it. There are certain writers who I turn to all the time and will never rid myself of. Woolf is one of them, Barthes is another, Sebald is another, David Foster Wallace, even though I sound and write nothing like David Foster Wallace. He’s always present in my mind as I’m writing and I suppose there are moments when you feel like you have to get away from those voices, to tell them to shut up. And it doesn’t always work.

I find editing other people’s work actually quite difficult. At Cabinet, my colleagues Sina Najafi and Jeff Kastner are much better at it than I am, much more patient. I don’t think I would be a very good editor really. Partly because when I write I tend to plan things in great detail, so that when it comes to writing there isn’t an awful lot left to be changed. When I’m edited myself, I always prefer that somebody else does whatever they want with my text. I don’t mind being really heavily edited.

I would much prefer to just hand my writing over and have somebody completely change it than to actually engage because writing always feels to me like a sort of performance. Once the performance is done then that’s it and other people can make of it what they want. My relationship with editing is partly masochistic, I don’t mind people butchering my prose.

My work for Cabinet has been more in commissioning and finding writers than the kind of hands-on editing, which we also do. It involves long trans-Atlantic phone calls going through line by line. I do enjoy that, it has to be done, but mostly my editorial work at Cabinet has been about discovering authors and commissioning.

I had notes that I wrote on the plane to New York that amounted to really no more than some names and a few quotations. I ended up with about five or six pages of notes. That’s a fascinating way to write a book: the game determines the thing to some extent but then at the same time its reference points are my reference points. It’s leaping inside yourself, even in that kind of quite extreme circumstance.

Yes, but I think writer’s block for me is a thing that’s thankfully temporary. I’ve never been in a position where I’ve just stopped and not been able to write for more than a matter of days. But that doesn’t mean that like any other writer I’m not constantly convinced, practically every day, that I can’t do it any more. Someone said that writers are people who find writing more difficult not easier than everybody else.

That’s a good question. I think it’s probably more difficult as time goes on.

Absolutely. At the moment I’m writing a book and I will sometimes just sit down and write without really thinking about the shape of what I’m doing and then go back and try to salvage something from it. I think writing habits and the rhythms of writing change all the time and they should change, just as moving between writing and curating, editing, teaching and so on, is probably a good thing for the writing as well.

It’s called The Great Explosion and it’s a book about an explosion at a gunpowder factory in Kent during the WWI in 1916. The landscape still has some of the ruins of this explosives factory. So it’s the last, probably the last product of my long-term research into modern-day ruins.

I had a research fellowship for three years which produced the novella, an anthology of writings on ruins for the Documents of Contemporary Art series, and then I was asked by Penelope Curtis at Tate Britain if I would be interested in curating an exhibition from the Tate collection on the history of ruins in British art from essentially the late seventeenth century onwards. So that’s what it is. It traces from Piranesi up to the present day, people like Tacita Dean, Jane and Louise Wilson, Gerard Byrne. For an exhibition that’s drawn almost entirely from one collection, it hopefully feels quite diverse. There’s a temptation with this subject – ruins – towards a contemporary picturesque or sublime in images of abandoned Detroit, for example.

I only write about things falling apart. Once I’m finished with the present book, then the next task, I hope, is to write a book about the essay as a form.

I suppose. That book ends with the ‘essay on essays’ but I think there’s a great deal more to be said about a resurgence in the essay among writers and among artists and filmmakers at the moment. There are quite conservative versions of that, an idea of the essay as something that’s contained, self-contained. People have gone on to talk about a rebirth of the essay online as something that’s manageable, that can be read quickly, that’s portable and so on. But I think at its best the essay is something much more unruly, unpredictable than that. And for me has a great deal to do with a way of thinking about style and voice as well. That’s something that I want to explore in the book.

It satisfied a lot of curiosity; I have absolutely no plans and I just can’t say. It may happen again. Who knows? For curators who curate exhibitions all the time, they probably come into their minds in the same way that books do for writers, which is that they don’t arrive fully formed, as propositions. They arrive in your head as hints and rumours and small constellations of images and sentences, and they take time to come together.