Artists can no more speak about their work, than plants can speak about horticulture.
Jean Cocteau
Is it just me who finds artist statements painful to read? Yes, part of my discomfort is that artists are writing about their own work, and Cocteau has a point. I end up wincing at the awkward self-consciousness, and my viewing experience is in no way enlightened by what I have read.
But it is more than that. I once read that the only way to respond to a work of art is with a work of art. The increased interest in ekphrastic poetry* for example certainly speaks to that idea.
I am a painter because verbal language just can’t do it. What’s the it? Hard to say. Visual language has its own syntax and semantics, and it cannot be reduced to resemble the structure of verbal language. Attempts to flatten it into a comprehensive taxonomy are counterproductive and irritating.
There are gifted writers who can translate between the visual and the verbal, but that level of writing is the exception, not the norm. I would classify writing of that quality as responding to a work of art with a work of art.
In the meantime, here’s the artist statement I’d like to submit: 1. Stop (what else you are doing.) 2. Look (for a long time.) 3. Feel (whatever comes up for you.)
*Ekphrastic poetry responds, comments on or reacts to an original piece of art.
Well I think you’ve succeeded quite well with yours, you certainly have all the potential in the world to write an “unflattening” artist statement.
It’s funny this is basically what we treated in a PhD course in the summer 2006; art historians need to be aware of he process of writing about art, since that is what they mainly do. There are basically two “poles”: the dry analyzing classical art historical writing, and the more literary artistic writing oftentimes with a very engaged and participating point of view. But when it comes down to it, it’s related to the act of interpretation.
You gave me a research idea: looking at artist statements and their act of self-interpretation… This could be a good idea for an essay…
In Finland artists can become doctors of art, that is they can treat their own work scientifically and receive a degree for it. The discussion around this relatively new institution relates very much to what you wrote.
“Words and I are not friends,” Georgia O’Keeffe famously remarked. And every artist who struggles with writing an artist’s statement — usually the night before the day the gallerist needs to tack it on the wall — knows what O’Keeffe meant. The artist would go on creating if there were no reason to write about her own art, because she does not need to make her art more real to herself by other means. And yet, and yet. The statement is not a diary or any other method of self-confrontation, but a form that’s crafted for other people. People for whom, without word + image, there is no door thrown open, people for whom perception will not otherwise occur. When you’re painting, you’re doing something personal, aren’t you? When you’re writing about your own painting, you’re orchestrating an experience for someone who is not you. There doesn’t have to be a conflict.