I Am For An Art (Writing)

This text forms the introductory chapter to the 2018 Routledge book 'The Creative Critic: Writing as/about Practice', in the section on the Manifesto. I first delivered this text in the context of a workshop on creative approaches to critical writing at the Society for Artistic Research in 2016. 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 distill 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 (Lewis, 1914), Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto (Marinetti, 1909), Claes Oldenburg’s I Am for an Art (1961) and Oscar Wilde’s The Critic as Artist (1888). 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 my firm conviction that critical and creative writing need not be mutually exclusive endeavors, 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 synthesise the two