Gary Indiana once wrote two brilliant essays titled ‘Janet Malcolm Gets It Wrong’,  in which he unveiled Janet Malcolm’s profile of Ingrid Sischy, then editor of  Artforum. In it, Malcolm, celebrated for exposing the fictions that underwrite  journalism, becomes Indiana’s mouthpiece for them. The essays proceed like de tective stories with a grudge. Indiana retraces Malcolm’s steps through the New  York art world of the mid-1980s, speaking to many of the same people and com paring their recollections to the versions that appeared in print. What begins as a  rebuttal quickly expands into something larger; underlying Indiana’s project is the  suspicion that criticism does not merely reflect cultural life but actively composes  it. That conviction sits at the centre of Bumper. Art and literary criticism are not  addendums to the cultural events and artefacts unfolding across Glasgow, the city  from which we publish; they are among the forces that shape how those events are  understood, remembered, and ultimately become enmeshed within the fabric of  the city itself. If criticism can manufacture myths, it can also challenge them and  create a space in which they can be argued over.  

Bumper emerges from a desire to record what is happening here and now. People  talk about the city’s art and literature scene like it’s a character from a film: a kooky  but resourceful charmer perpetually on the verge of becoming something else.  But cities have moods, and this one has been marked recently by a particular kind  of disappointment. Things cost more; spaces disappear. Through it all, there is no  accountability. As Alexander Leissle wrote in a review of Glasgow International,  there is a ‘feverish distrust in Glasgow Life and Creative Scotland’, which, truth fully, reads like an understatement. What remains are artists, writers, organisers,  and friends finding ways to continue, often outside the spotlight and sometimes  despite it. Criticism, at its best, can follow those movements. It can pay attention to  what is taking shape at the edges of a scene, before anyone has decided what story  to tell about it. But I’m not interested in fetishising the margins either. Every scene  has its own romance of exclusion but Bumper is for Glasgow as it exists: a loose and  often contradictory collection of people. 

Chris, Caitlin and I bring different assumptions about what criticism ought to be.  I’ve always been drawn to people whose tastes collide with my own rather than  confirm them. That contact zone being indicative of the larger beast in view, what  Peter de Bolla terms the ‘peculiar amalgam’ of subjective aesthetic experience:  the fact that they are unavoidably our own and yet, at the same time, necessitate our  belonging to community to exist. What we share is not a programme or a house  style, but a belief that cultural writing should be resistant to the flattening PR inflected language that surrounds contemporary criticism. People often ask me if  the magazine will be ‘critical’ by which they usually mean: will the magazine include  negative criticism? Short answer is yes. Longer answer is that criticism doesn’t  become critical when it’s harsh. One of my favourite critics, Peter Schjeldahl,  described his entry into art criticism as a process of ‘learning in public’, a sentiment  I’ve been obsessed with ever since I first read that (we even toyed with the title, LIP,  for Bumper). It suggests a criticism that remains provisional, open to surprise, and  accountable to the felt experience of aesthetic judgement. There are also import ant forebears. During our first editorial meetings, copies of Nothing Personal, MAP,  Variant and Art Review Glasgow were usually somewhere on the pub or living-room  table. These titles all demonstrated that criticism could be rooted in the city, atten tive to local conditions without becoming provincial. Bumper is not an attempt to  revive those projects or inherit their authority. It is an indebted effort to continue  what they helped make possible. 

This inaugural issue features work from some of the most exciting writers and  artists in Glasgow: an interview with Lisette May Monroe about her GI show Hard  Lines, an essay by Hannah Proctor about what 2016 was like, a quasi-ethnographic account of attending a weekend of GI openings from poet Oli Hazzard in our regular section which asks a scene report of those not in that scene. Bumper editor Chris Law, explores the sometimes uneasy relationship between academia and  arts spaces in his editorial. We also have a profile on Glasgow’s own France-Lise  McGurn, new writing from Akshi Singh, poems from Carle Gent and three exhibi tion reviews, including our regular co-authored Bumper review. Bunted together,  they offer a series of minor collisions with the city• 

– Leo Bussi, Editor