There are indeed plenty of fish in the sea. This celebration of ‘practitioner-researchers of all disciplines who find themselves working within the context of the Academy’ (p. 1) is a mighty haul. Across thirty-seven diverse chapters and numerous additional fore-, middle- and afterwords, we wade, fishing for ‘ways to seduce the reader into caring, ways to communicate beyond disciplinary boundaries and university walls’ (p. 1). Here are lyrics, scripts, manifestos, parallel texts, annotations, memoirs, fictions, pseudo-fictions, reports, commentaries, illustrations and aphorisms, each seeking to write about, in or from performance-based artistic practices. A helpful selection of online supplements is available to catch via the book's website (www.creativecritic.co.uk).
Familiar landmarks appear on the shoreline soon enough: Deleuze, Guattari, Derrida, Barad, Butler, Nancy, Rendell. With this, the scope of contribution is set out with enough confidence to avoid the text being only a beachcombing exercise. Writing here is treated as a sculptural act, not only describing but uncovering and exposing a landscape with its own sense of texture and territory. Enter on page 10 the ‘standardising demon’ of the Research Excellence Framework (REF), along with an implicit permission to challenge the conventions not only of the REF but of the academy more broadly. This brings a welcome reassurance, although there is a concomitant risk that practitioners and students will face difficulties when they challenge those conventions.
Visually, the text offers interventions in the linearity of the written word. Within its own terms this is successful, offering annotation, illustration, photographic documentation and formatting which interrupt the left-to-right, top-to-bottom rhythms of scholarly writing as we know it. In chapter 9, Diana Damian Martin leads us via a parallel text into thoughts on ‘horizontalism’, which she characterizes as ‘a different way of conceiving the relationship between writing and its referent … from valuation to … exploration’ (p. 83). Just as in music all text is parallel, Ella Finer notes in chapter 16 how in sound ‘we listen to multiple temporalities at once, whether we are conscious of our practice or not’ (p. 135). In that spirit, this may be a text that is best approached as Deleuze (1987) suggests of A Thousand Plateaus: to be read as you would listen to a record.
The approach here insists that we receive the academic text in a new mode. This is perhaps most pronounced in accounts of personal caring situations, prompting in me a response to the famous T. S. Eliot line of questions in The Rock (1934). Here is the knowledge we have lost in information, here is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge, and out there is the life you have lost in living. An early warning comes in chapter 1, however, of lurking ‘art in-jokes’ (p. 25). This is played out delightfully later in Johanna Linsley's instructions in the ‘Catalogue of the Public Library of Private Acts’ in which the participant is indeed instructed, ‘Tell us a private joke. Omit the context’ (p. 274). There were several moments when I indeed came up against jokes I feared I wasn't getting, not to mention those I didn't even know were jokes. One such in-joke was the cunning Wilde quotation that only shallow people do not judge by appearances. By virtue simply of the brevity of each chapter here, we are often invited only to consider surfaces, and it can feel a little like wading occasionally in the shallows. Judging by those appearances, these waters are teeming with life and this will form an invaluable entry for those wishing to explore them.
