At work, on long car journeys, over lunch, at the pub, on Zoom, on the phone, we have spent years talking about writing. We’ve probably spent more time talking about writing than writing. This is something we need to address, and something of a situation we have often found ourselves writing about. In recent years, we’ve both spent a lot of time writing about forms of writing, and both dedicated much time to generating, facilitating and ushering these forms into being through creative-critical practices, and through publishing and editorial work. And we’ve both spent sizeable chunks of our career teaching (what we loosely call) ‘art writing’, in art schools, at Edinburgh College of Art and Glasgow School of Art.

Susannah’s doctorate, in art history, was about artists’ writing. It looked at writing and publishing by visual artists who were developing what seemed to be new forms of art criticism between the 1960s and 1990s. Laura’s doctorate, in creative writing, considered the personal-political as contemporary post-critical device and literary genre. Our different educational backgrounds—Laura’s in sculpture and art theory, Susannah’s in art history and criticism—have resulted in quite distinctive frames of reference, different approaches to our own writing, and different (but complementary) understandings of what ‘art writing’ is or might be. Susannah’s writing (by which we mean the writing she publishes outside of academia) has probably become less ‘creative’ over the years, while Laura’s has become increasingly literary and creative. We took the opportunity of the colloquium try and figure out why this has happened but didn’t expect any clear conclusions.

Our presentations exemplified some of these differences, offering a snapshot of some of our interests and projects over the last few years. We’re not sure either of us answered whether or not ‘categories of criticism are an imposition or an opportunity’.[1] But for us, we think, they’ve been both, allowing us to refine, revise, and reposition our own writing, reading and teaching according to the definitions that suit us. The way Laura defines, teaches and practices art writing, for example, is quite different to the way Susannah defines, teaches and practices it. But it is in these very divergences that we are able to learn from one another. Our dissimilarity in style, approach and form energises our discussions and debates. Our crossovers, parallels and shared concerns are in the realm of theme and subject and in our shared feminist and class politics which underpin our approach to just about everything. We don’t see the differences between our styles and sensibilities as oppositional or contradictory, so perhaps we see the ‘imposition’ of categories, taxonomies and genres as the opportunity to start unpicking, blurring or stretching them.

Vignettes
Susannah Thompson

I was a lot younger and less risk-averse when I wrote what might be called creative criticism. Those texts—stories, plays, strange dialogues, odd little fragments, never (ever) poetry—were published by small presses, in art fanzines, exhibition catalogues and gallery leaflets. They were never online. Their small-scale distribution and minimal readership acted as a kind of damage limitation if the writing didn’t work.

As RAE and REF and other horrifying acronyms loomed, I pulled my research socks up and wrote more, longer, harder. I wrote about creative criticism instead of writing creative criticism. It took its toll, even when I pushed and stretched the conventions a bit. Academic writing, once past the savage gauntlet of reviewers one, two and three, past the obstacle courses of funding, ethics, Open Access and institutional repositories, still takes forever. By proofreading time, it’s hard to care and I wonder why I ever started it. Short form criticism seems easier—faster, no time to fret, focussed, no fucking footnotes. Creative criticism is even simpler—you can write what you like, can’t you?

For the colloquium, I panicked. I was out of practice. I could talk *about* creative criticism, but to do it? I felt embarrassed just thinking about delivering a ‘notes on’ or a set of ‘reflections’ so I turned to what I’m good at: gossip, chat, stories. I decided to gather episodes and little scraps of ideas, other people’s writing, and tales told to me. All of them have influenced my thinking about art criticism, writing and the art world. Trotting after Jane Gallop, can anecdotes be theory? I would try.

*

In 1985 the art historian Michael Baxandall wrote that ‘most of the better things we can think or say about pictures stand in a slightly peripheral relation to the picture itself’. I’d like my own writing to be more off-kilter.

The artist Stephen Sutcliffe once told me that for people who are anxious about public speaking, ‘you can be so worried about your own presentation that you’ll just talk in quotes constantly’.

The novelist and poet Vladimir Nabokov was once cited as saying he ‘did not like to talk off the cuff or, as he put it, ‘Off the Nabocuff’.

When the artist Maud Sulter, who loved neologisms, slang, dialect and compound words, received a shitty review that criticised an essay she’d written, she replied haughtily, in writing, that she ‘refused to be constrained by male grammar’.

About twenty years ago, a senior academic at Glasgow School of Art was so enraged by the publication of a ‘hip’ ‘tangential’ and ‘fragmentary’ essay in the degree show catalogue, instead of an explanatory or interpretative text that was directly relevant to the works on display, that he called a meeting and insisted the text should be pulled from the catalogue. The students voted against this decision. As a compromise, the senior academic insisted on the inclusion of his own essay to ameliorate the impact of the other contribution, but years later he could still be heard muttering about critics who ‘wrote about their record collections’ instead of discussing the paintings in front of them.

In the late 1990s, a(nother) senior academic at Glasgow School of Art was so incensed that an invited artist presented a screening of her latest film rather than deliver a conventional artist’s talk for the Friday Event lecture series that he jumped up and screamed ‘discourse! We want discourse!’. His demand was met with a look of utter disdain, and complete silence. To quote someone else, you can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you get what you need.

I once presented what I thought was a serious, reflective and sophisticated paper at a conference on the poetics of critical writing. I dressed formally to make myself appear ‘confident’ and authoritative. The conference was in English but it wasn’t held in an English-speaking country, so I spoke clearly and tried to dampen down my accent. Afterwards, the attendees told me they thought my paper was a manifesto and that my ‘performance’ had been aggressive. I was then asked to re-stage the ‘manifesto-performance’ on two further occasions, which was awkward.

The woman who was on before me on the same panel was heavily pregnant, or so the audience thought. She was a student at an elite European university. We had high expectations. As she lumbered awkwardly around the stage, she kept pulling the scrunched-up papers of her script from under her swollen jumper until there was no bump at all. I’m not sure how poetic her gesture was. No one could remember a word. It was a kind of woolly, clothed, confusing version of Carolee Schneeman’s ‘Interior Scroll’. Laura was outraged. Her abstract hadn’t even been accepted, and she’d been usurped by this bloated imposter!

At another conference, my abstract was rejected, but Laura’s wasn’t, so I went to support her in the audience. Her performance was unusual, almost too relaxed, extremely evenly paced. Not quite ‘Laura’. I thought she was trying to rebrand herself a bit because she was in front of a bunch of art historians. She kept tripping over the word ‘torpor’, almost deliberately, and then laughing, which I thought was a bit arch, especially in a paper on Chris Kraus. I was slightly jealous of her stage presence, which I later found out was due to a minor overdose of pre-stage Diazepam.

In my course on Art Writing at Edinburgh College of Art, I had a few faves I’d return to each year. I had a real bee in my bonnet about a debate doing the rounds at the time. The argument, in the British art press, was that art criticism was no longer evaluative or critical and had become purely ‘descriptive’. I’d bore contemporary art students with Charles Dickens’ description of John Everett Millais’s ‘Christ in the House of His Parents’ to prove my point: ‘In the foreground of that carpenter’s shop is a hideous, wry-necked, blubbering, red-headed boy, in a bed-gown, who appears to have received a poke in the hand, from the stick of another boy with whom he has been playing in an adjacent gutter…’ And so it continues.

In another lecture, I’d quote Marina Warner on the use of stories and read exhibition catalogue texts in the form of short stories. I’d almost always read the preface to Brian O’Doherty’s ‘The Eye and the Spectator’ from Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space where he asks if Modernism could be taught to children as a series of Aesop’s Fables. Fables, he wrote, give you more latitude than art history. I got a lot of fables to mark over Christmas.

At the artist and critic Matthew Collings’ book signing event at Edinburgh College of Art in the early 2000s, one of the MFA students couldn’t afford to buy a copy of Collings’ new book Art Crazy Nation so he took his copy of Isaac Deutscher’s biography of Stalin up to the table to be signed instead. Matthew Collings said, ‘Oh great!’ and got his pen out.

A few weeks ago I received an email from an esteemed art historian asking me to review his recently published, highly theoretical book. I immediately recognised the quote in the subject line and responded quickly to acknowledge our mutual love of Steve Coogan’s comedy character Alan Partridge, pleased with his attempt at humour and informality. Imagine his confusion, and my dismay, when I remembered, in a 3am panic, that the quote was from Hegel, not Partridge: ‘The owl of Minerva takes flight only at dusk.’

At a posh dinner party thrown by a British art philanthropist recently, I was asked to present an ‘elevator pitch’ of my current research. After beginning to outline the project, I said I could try to condense it to a 45-minute summary but by then the conversation had moved onto the size of an insect’s testicles. Somewhat slighted, I looked around the table thinking ‘elevators are called “lifts” here’ anyway...

The artist and writer Laurie Figgis was once commissioned to write a short gallery text for a publicly funded city-centre art museum in Scotland. A member of staff at the museum returned the text to him and said she’d made ‘a few minor corrections’ in order to comply with the museum’s access policy. To—in her words—‘ensure that the text catered for as wide an audience as possible’, the  ‘minor corrections’ on Laurie’s one page essay were detailed across three pages of notes and six pages of annotations. To ‘simplify some of the language used’ and ‘spell out the points being made’, the editor changed the word ‘novels’ to ‘writing’, ‘variety’ to ‘range’, ‘need’ to ‘desire’, ‘links’ to ‘similarities’, ‘components’ to ‘elements’, ‘delineation’ to ‘depiction’ and ‘still lives’ to ‘still lifes’. The text been so heavily edited, colour-coded and revised it looked like Dada poetry and was almost incomprehensible.

In his 1983 essay, ‘The Object of Post-Criticism’, Gregory Ulmer wrote that ‘post-criticism is constituted precisely by the application of the devices of modernist art to critical representations—that the principal device taken over by the critics and theorists is the compositional pair collage/montage’.

Kitchen Island
Laura Haynes

Kitchen Island was commissioned for a group exhibition under the same title presented during Glasgow International 2024[2]. It’s part interpretative, part expansive, part parallel, part peripheral, part responsive, part improvisation, part riff. It’s about the show, it’s not about the show. It’s pretty standard prose. It’s a collaged poetics? It’s not about my record collection. It’s an exhibition text. It’s a personal exegesis. It’s the ‘dirty secret’ that Eileen Myles reminds us of that ‘it’s of course all about me’[3]. It was written following the invitation, from the artists, to ‘write from the same position’. The show didn’t exist at this stage, the title did. I took this position as kitchen island politics: of a/the kitchen island as a symbol of, or metaphor for, aspiration, class and gender politics. I took it as a symbol for conspicuous consumption mired by alienation, ambivalence and apathy. My Kitchen Island structures my own associations with these themes and somewhat writes with two seminal film works: Maya Deren’s 1943 film Meshes of the Afternoon and Martha Rosler’s 1975 parodic performance to camera, Semiotics of the Kitchen.

Kitchen Island, the exhibition, included new work and performance by Glasgow and Edinburgh-based artists Ariane Jackson, Shona Macnaughton, Casey Miller, Katie Orton and Chris Walker.

*

I waited for a while. I waited for an hour and a half outside the pharmacy. I waited for: if I were me if I were you. If I were really me. I came across. I came across the trouble of noting down on paper what I had said. I know I blindly groped. And yet I have a sense. I have a sense I’m feeling worse, I’m going to lie down. I heard or half heard. I heard I had come so close to touching death. I knew that under this lipstick I had come so close to touching death. I knew I had almost touched it with my fingers. I lay down, I was not sleepy yet. I looked around me. I looked around and I no longer knew with which sense I perceived. I felt my mouth dry and arid. I felt I had an ailing heart. I mentioned anxiety. I mentioned and I asked why he had taken on the mood of a wandering circus. I asked what it was he saw, what he had inevitably made of life. I asked what had he made of life and saw what life had made of him. I saw the knife. I saw the knife and how it span. I span it more, it span a while, its axes shifting on the kitchen island. Its metal driving, its metal scratched. Its scratches buffed; it drew a line across the counter. I watched it shift. I watched it travel quite a lot. It’s close and close and all I’ve done is go with shift. With shift I travel quite a lot, with shift I’m in this very instant, or with shift when I stopped to answer the phone. I asked what will happen next. I asked of all the dark. I didn’t dare to speak. I did not wish to write. I knew it had been longer now. I knew I had waited to not come here nor had they brought me there. With heavy hair he was meant to overhear. It isn’t any. I came across. I shifted at the kitchen island. I asked if I were really me. I would tell my hosts I didn’t know the drugs they used. I didn’t know I was sent alone. I didn’t know the brief official bulletin. I pondered and he awed. I made a vow and spoke no more. I spoke no more, I felt as if he did, my ears as if I stood. I chose a question. I heard that I had come. He dropped the case and stood from foot to foot. He dropped the case and I sent you packing too. I had to use the word. I had to pass the gate. I had to read his lips. I had to if I wanted to. I wanted to, no more than if you already do. I know I now present. I know it isn’t any. I came across the fuss he made. To what extent there was a choice? I felt that time alone. I felt that justice done. I felt I knew its range. I waited in the anteroom. I waited for what life had made of him. I saw the knife upon the bread, I saw the falling key. I took the stairs; I passed the phone. I dreamt it too: I saw the mirror face, silent when she turns. And if it was I didn’t understand. And if it was I didn’t know voodoo. I felt it in my mouth, I felt it there, in there, there was an apparition. I found no luck but chance was not involved. I found what I was about to say was odd. I moved from A to Z. I camped that night; I didn’t take the bed. It had been afternoon and strips of light had sailed then died, unwilling shreds creeping up the northern wall. I counted to thirteen. I have made some guesses as to what it might have been. Sitting there, some thoughts on what I mean. I saw the troop of jugglers; I saw the fallen stone. I came across I lugged across. I lugged across the kitchen. I go to no more islands; I lack the trick of it.

*

It will not let you pin it down, and it might only come into view when you aren’t trying to discover it. If you look too directly at it, it may not show itself, or will vanish. And the minute it does materialize, life is sure to break in, and poof, it’s gone.[4]

In an interview with Julija Šukys, Mary Cappello reminds us of the impossibility of looking at a subject square or slant, focus is always fleeting, diffuse or absent. In Lecture she asks, ‘what is the bridge between the politics of our daily lives and of our art?’ In retrospect, our contribution to the colloquium was borne out of this question. As ‘a performance of what it describes’[5] what are conversations, gossip, kitchens and care work but the meeting places between our quotidian and creative lives? This was a story of digression. Where do we begin?