My friend Jean Fisher, who has died aged 74, was one of the most distinctive British writers on art of her generation. She believed in art as a radical practice, something which opened up “unauthorised” realities.

The artists she championed and wrote about – who included Steve McQueen, James Coleman, Jimmie Durham, Judith Barry, Jack Goldstein, Willie Doherty, Francis Alÿs, Avis Newman, Susan Hiller and Avis Newman – were all, to some extent, wrestling with issues of what it means to make and understand art. Jean’s multidisciplinary approach drew on classical mythology, colonial studies, art history, philosophy, post-structuralism, film studies and psychoanalysis. Her dense, forensic writing style owed much to her early training as a scientist, but she had a keen ear for rhythm, meter and pace.

Jean was born in Aldeburgh, Suffolk, daughter of Eric Warner, a merchant seaman, and his wife, Mary (nee Smith). At Newcastle University, she studied zoology, followed by fine art. In 1963 she married Tony Fisher; they had a son, Tony, and separated in the 70s.

In the short, pithy reviews she produced for Art Forum in New York in the 1980s, Jean adopted a playfully rhetorical style which, in its erudition, exposed the threadbare jargon of many of her contemporaries. Longer assignments were approached as if she was starting out afresh and involved extensive reading and re-reading. Much time was spent with the art and, if possible, with the artist – many artists talked of Jean’s acuity in identifying implicit themes which allowed them to see their work in new ways. It is hardly surprising that her painstaking textual analysis resulted in many missed deadlines.

She became an influential teacher at institutions including Goldsmiths College, the Royal College of Art and Middlesex University in London, the School of Visual Arts and the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York and the Jan Van Eycke Akademie in Maastricht. Jean was also an important enabler of other writers, particularly during a 10-year stint from 1989 at the journal Third Text, much of it spent as editor.

What Jean achieved in the richness of the finished text is rare: it existed both as a parallel narrative to the art it sought to contextualise and as a completely independent investigation into the meaning and function of art. What she wrote about the function of art could just as easily be applied to her own work – “to keep alive the will to imagine [and] to invent new ethical landscapes, new narratives and new agents of social change; it is utopian without promising Utopia”.

Jean is survived by her son, Tony, and by two grandchildren, Beatrice and Matilda.