A Manifesto for Artistic Expression: Meditations on Creative Practice

This manifesto, as with our art and teaching, should not problematise the practice (being aware of it as a potential hindrance to artistic expression. Of course, 'problems' of a related but temporary nature are integral to the practice itself through its multifarious phases and procedures.) This manifesto is an open project distilling some of the things written about the practice that we sense are reflected in and by the practice. The points may be approached as 'thought-nodes', ripe for expansion and reaction, as concepts to think with.

1. Making special: Art is about the selection of things to 'make special' and is a necessity for civilisation. Making special is noticing experience, recognising its ritualistic significance and giving it a kind of shape that makes it aesthetic.

2. Dialectical resonance: Art is about the process of becoming, and the social self. It resonates with dialectical structure and meaning: from alienation, otherness and difference to reconciliation, appropriation and ownness.

3. Creative imagination: Having learnt the lessons of i) immutable causes and 'original' meaning (premodern) and ii) the overemphasis of the autonomous individual as sole source of meaning (modern), art is about the invention of alternative modes of existence - imaginary worlds that tell the tales of human experience.

4. Significance: Art is about ways stimuli can be configured as systems of significance.

5. Perceiving bodies: Art is about the elemental forces of the physical world and in particular the body's experience of them.

6. Plasticity: Art is about a process through which the artist transcends self by going beyond will and ability into surprise, involving:

a. Being 'in touch' with prior expression, traditions, problems, standards and solutions

b. Generation of material; blindly (without foreknowledge of final results) but not randomly (under a kind of plastic control relevant to a)

c. Critically interact with this material; again, under the plastic control of the task and its background

d. Generation of more material; again, not only 'blindly and not randomly' but under additional plastic control informed by what has already been achieved (b)

e. Repetitions of c and d towards a conclusion

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