On The Vile Arts Radio Hour, there is an ongoing joke about the host's ability to silence artists with a single question. Usually directed at a visual artist, but including variations that irritate theatre-makers, musicians, film-makers and curations, it revolves around asking how the artist would define their work.
Examples of this question include "What media do you work in?" and "Would you say that you are physical or visual theatre?" or the perennial favourite, addressed at dancers: "Is this ballet or contemporary dance?" What these questions share is an assumption that artists, when they make a piece, are consciously identifying with a particular approach, and have a theoretical understanding of what that approach means.
Vile has acknowledged that this question came from his personal interest in developing a dogmatic, Aristotlean understanding of art, and did not necessarily reflect anything that artists consider themselves. "As a critic, I am always grasping at a way to communicate the essence of a performance - or exhibition, or festival - as succinctly as possible. By dividing things clearly into genres, or media, I was hoping to be able to identify a context for the work that would appeal to particular audiences."
This kind of critical analysis, which belongs both in the academic and more populist forms of analysis, has a long and respectable history: Plato's dialogues are frequently obsessed with definitions - The Republic begins with two brothers challenging Socrates to define justice - and Aristotle took considerable pains not just to describe Greek tragedy but define the salient features that made individual tragedies important. And while aesthetics is a relatively modern branch of philosophy - Bumgarten is credited with giving the word its contemporary meaning in 1735 - attempts to pin down the nature of art and its impact have been a consistent part of the broader response to creativity.
Although Vile draws on academic traditions - somewhat half-heartedly at times, preferring a "wikipedia version of ideas" - his primary interest in definitions is as a tool for his more populist criticism. He is careful in his use of "populist' rather than "popular" criticism, as he observes in a later interview. "Criticism is never going to popular - there is always someone who hates on the critic, usually the performer who feels that their play has been misunderstood, or the actor who was doing that silly voice on purpose to explore the character's innate instability. By using 'populist,' I am simply setting the criticism that appears in newspapers, magazines and on-line against the more rigorous academic criticism in journals or in universities. 'Populist criticism' is more accessible, less precise."
This allows a broader series of definitions to be drawn: suggestions towards categories rather than absolute descriptions. The sporadic forays into more comprehensive analysis of genre or medium operate more as frameworks for closer examination of specific pieces or programmes and the use of terms like "physical theatre," "contemporary dance" (a phrase he abhors for its lack of precision) and "visual theatre" are merely signifiers, allowing the reader or listener to make a snap decision about the work's relevance.
Vile suggests that there are two reasons why his interest in definitions has become increasingly important in the past decade. "First of all, the rise of the festival has seen programmes of associated art-works, usually curated with a particular vision. In Glasgow, barely a month goes past without a new festival or programming strand, often dedicated to the sort of work that wouldn't have existed twenty years ago. I am thinking of Sonica, an audio-visual festival, or Buzzcut, which followed on from the National Review of Live Art... finding ways of talking about these performances is crucial to broadening their audience appeal and encouraging public engagement."
The second justification emerges from one of The Vile Arts' fundamental beliefs about the role of performance. Vile has occasionally claimed that individual art works are less important than the subsequent discussion - even to the point of believing that missing a particular performance can be as important as attending. This claim, made about The National Theatre of Scotland's Blackwatch, is beyond the scope of this essay but does explain why a series of working definitions are crucial. There needs to be a foundation for this discussion around art, even if they are abandoned.
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