The Creative Critic

Writing as/about Practice

Katja Hilevaara, Emily Orley, Katja Hilevaara, Emily Orley

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138674820
• eBook ISBN: 9781317200130
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Teoria e critica dell'arte

As practitioner-researchers, how do we discuss and analyse our work without losing the creative drive that inspired us in the first place?

Built around a diverse selection of writings from leading researcher-practitioners and emerging artists in a variety of fields, The Creative Critic: Writing as/about Practice celebrates the extraordinary range of possibilities available when writing about one's own work and the work one is inspired by. It re-thinks the conventions of the scholarly output to propose that critical writing be understood as an integral part of the artistic process, and even as artwork in its own right.

Finding ways to make the intangible nature of much of our work 'count' under assessment has become increasingly important in the Academy and beyond. The Creative Critic offers an inspiring and useful sourcebook for students and practitioner-researchers navigating this area.

Please see the companion site to the book, http://www.creativecritic.co.uk, where some of the chapters have become unfixed from the page.

Folding outwards 1

1 I am for an Art (Writing)

Susannah Thompson

I first delivered this text in the context of a workshop on creative approaches to critical writing. The length of the paper necessitated brevity, so my argument had to be succinct. The result was manifesto-like oratory, all strident, impassioned and rhetorical. After the event, the written paper seemed flat and conventional in comparison, without the cadence and timbre of the piece ‘as performed’. A re-editing and revision of the writing attempted to distil the key points from each section into the form of a classic art manifesto, modelled on – and in some cases directly appropriating from – Wyndham Lewis’s Blast (1914), Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s ‘Futurist Manifesto’ (1909 [2011]), Claes Oldenburg’s ‘I Am for an Art’ (1961) and Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Critic as Artist’ (1888 [1999]). The lack of qualifying statements to support or substantiate the arguments emphasises the playful, bold and irreverent tone of the piece. There are a few clunky, obvious puns and art in-jokes scattered throughout the text too, so while the overall points I try to express are serious, the manifesto itself (perhaps by necessity, in adopting a form with such historical baggage) is intended to be somewhat wry or tongue-in-cheek. It is my firm conviction that critical and creative writing need not be mutually exclusive endeavours, that criticality is often (whether deliberate or not) embedded in the form and style of writing as much as in its explicit ‘content’. In my own writing I have often attempted to resist the hierarchies and taxonomies imposed by academia or disciplinary convention, writing across a range of often hybrid genres and forms which neither reject nor privilege the creative or critical but attempt to synthesize the two.

I am for an art (writing) . . .

Down with Jonathan Richardson! I sit with Ernest and Gilbert in a library overlooking Green Park.

The critic may be an interpreter if she wishes, but our object is not to explain the work of art.

For the critic as artist, art writing is creative practice.

Art writing is not contingent or reliant upon the art to which it ostensibly ‘responds’.

With Diderot, Baudelaire, Wilde and Pater, I am for an art writing for art writing’s sake.

We’re not special, and we’re not new

Art writing is just one manifestation of ‘creative critical writing’.

‘Criticism in the expanded field’ has bolted right over the fence, dragging an ever-increasing slew of terms and genres with it . . .

New Journalism, gonzo, faction,
ficto-criticism,
new nature writing,
site-writing, theory-fiction,
auto-theory,
aesthetic journalism,
anecdotal theory, object biography,
anti-memoir, critico-fiction . . .

We will not be constrained by categorization. We are the antithesis of Greenbergian medium-specificity. We are impure!

Don’t choose your side

To those who proclaim the death of criticism . . .

To those who ask if more allusive, tangential, stylized, or creative forms of art writing replace evaluation, judgment, politics . . .

. . . I say: Must it be either / or?

We alter voice, mode and tone across our writing. We don’t take sides in style or form.

To be oppositional is not to be critical. They are not synonymous.

Down with didacticism, paternalism, objectivity, critical distance!

Blast the explicit argument! Down with dogma! Long live wit!

Bless minor literature, ephemera, zines, small press, pamphleteering!

What even is it?

We are sculptural practices anchored by textual narrative.

We transgress borders between media and mode.

We exist as visual art practice, criticism, extra-literature.

We – artists, writers, historians, all – transgress our disciplines and conventions. (Sometimes we maintain them.)

We meld anecdote and theory.

We foreground the subjective voice.

We speak our own argot, our own vernacular.

We revel in puns, polari, plagiarism.

Are you theory or practice?

Brickbats to academia! To slavish adherence to outmoded convention, to the avoidance of personal pronoun.

Brickbats to the objective voice, to the deletion of adjectives!

Bouquets to art schools who embrace writing as a studio practice.

(We have taken less ‘visual’ forms into the fold – music, theatre, social science!)

Brickbats to the reductive equation with Concrete Poetry and text-based Conceptual Art.

(Art writing can be all of these, none of these and more!)

Kick out those who insist on the estrangement of theory and practice, of ‘creative’ and ‘critical’. (They are NOT exclusive endeavours.)

Bring back critical writing that rejects its adjunct, parasitical status, that reflects, reciprocates with other forms of practice.

Writing in art schools should not = The Department of Dead Essays.

The non-artist, cast adrift . . .

Art writers who don’t define their work as art so often find themselves at sea. The tide is turning.

Behold the creative critic! We spurn the grain of tradition, vault taxonomies! We defy the ‘output’ imposed upon us!

Our criticality is embedded in form, voice, timbre. We have no need of the ‘explanatory’.

We respect our audiences – we dumb UP!

Only shallow people do not judge by appearances . . .

Down with those who call art writing ‘criticism lite’! Bad writing is bad writing, whatever its form.

To those who decry poetic and creative criticism, I say: form and style are essential vehicles through which judgment can be inferred.

Bless David Carrier! Style is crucial, for ‘we cannot . . . extract an artwriter’s argument from the text in which it is presented’.

To those who bemoan the fall of criticism into the ‘merely descriptive’, my challenge: read Dickens on Millais. Description can be devastating.

The poetic, the creative, the narrative, the fictional, the allusive are not new.

We are returning to the liberation of writing from ‘service’ to art.

With Baxandall, I am for an art writing in which ‘most of the better things we can think or say about pictures stand in a slightly peripheral relation to the picture itself’.

I am for an art writing . . .

We will take a specific work of art as the departure point for an autonomous piece of writing.

We will occupy a parallel or tangential relationship with the work.

We will be released from our contingency or reliance upon an art work for its meaning.

We will allow both writing and art to operate separately, while offering the hope of dialogue, reciprocity, poetry between the two.

I am for an art writing that understands its history, which sees criticism as literature and literature as criticism.

I am for an art writing which is both.

With Baudelaire, I am for an art (writing) that is partial, passionate and political.

References

Lewis, Wyndham. 1914. Blast: The Review of the Great English Vortex. Issue 1. July.

Marinetti, Filippo T. 1909 [2011]. ‘The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism’ in 100 Artists’ Manifestos: From the Futurists to the Stuckists, edited by Danchev. London and New York: Penguin.

Oldenburg, Claes. 1961. ‘I Am for an Art’ in Environments, Situations and Spaces. Exhibition Catalogue, Martha Jackson Gallery.

Wilde, Oscar. 1888 [1999]. ‘The Critic as Artist’ in Intentions. Cambridge: Proquest LLC.

2 Lyric Theory

P.A. Skantze

Three areas of research as a practitioner came together in the inspiration for creating what I call lyric theory: (a) composing the songs, words and music for a musical in which the New York Public Library saves New York City; (b) years of teaching and directing Shakespeare; (c) a research initiative called Voicing Revolutions which explores sound and resonance as theoretical investigative tools, voice in its specificities of race, gender, class and in its larger dimensions of communicative instrument, revolutions of vinyl on a turntable and of the citizenry in streets and classrooms.

We speak often of the desire for the interdisciplinary in our practice and research, and here in these lines I met the discipline on another plane, the discipline of counting syllables. Of course these lines while pentameter do not resemble a crafted poem; in fact part of the point of theory in pentameter is not to write theory as poetry but to have theory meet the lyrical, the demands of excising to fit the pentameter demands, the hope for a reader who can knot the line and turn the rope for the next tug towards the completed braid.

At least three questions remain in the interstices between lines, in the patter and the sound matter accentuating thinking as an acoustic corporeal practice. The matter of argument. I am worn down by the academic love of and demand for endless argument. What’s your argument? How does that argument differ from other arguments? When is an argument a speck in the eye of the reader, a plank in the eye of the reviewer? One quality of practice is that it reveals: is revelation an argument?

The matter of occasional writing as a theorist. In the time of the scholar/practitioner, which is to say the time pressed down upon and squeezed by bureaucracies of nonsensical statistics or make-work email exchanges as proof of academic existence, much writing happens for an occasion, a conference, a collection, a festival. Does occasional writing constitute pursuing one’s research in practice?

The matter of manifesto. Things are very bad right now. To say they are not is to close your eyes to the class warfare that is the education system in the UK and the US (and probably many other countries but these are the ones I know). Students not rich enough to be schooled in places where the traditions of learning are married to the traditions of ruling either in government or in business appear in classrooms so underprepared to think and read they should be listed as unaligned combatants. If what happens in the classroom is triage, then much of the writing and thinking I do as a practitioner ends up in the key of manifesto. Is a manifesto an argument? What are the occasions for a manifesto? How do we address each other thinking aloud, sounding out the thought while supporting the moment of clarity when we see how the system would love for us to make the state of affairs our fault? To speak of the constructed cynicism that is the Teaching Excellence Framework is to shout out, to remind each other not to drink the Kool-Aid that will leave us worrying about how to be ethical in a system that wants us to make work accessible so that the undertaught can become the worker bees for the overvalued. Thus my practice never strays far from the company of those writing about the state of where we are, who write too in a language of manifesto, whose manifestos analyse while they also encourage.

Lyric Theory

A Key to Lyric Theory Listening
Time and concision, undertaking precision,
it won’t all rhyme but short lines do
demand time not for the speaking but for
the tweaking of meaning and the gleaning

Take the aphorism: a short sharp shock
That elicits a long duree of paus-
èd thinking to decipher and explore
Bob...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword: L'avant-coup
• Acknowledgements
• An introduction in five acts
• Folding outwards 1
• Folding outwards 2
• Folding outwards 3
• Index