State(ment) of the Art
By: A Concerned Viewer
Ed. Note: Working Notes is finally multivocal! As I’ve mentioned elsehere, I’ve been trying to retool this blog to be a platform for people with similar intellectual orientations. This post therefore comes courtesy of a new contributor, “A Concerned Viewer.”
Artists’ statements. We all love to hate them. Artists hate writing them. For critics of the art world, they seem to confirm its pretentiousness and elitism. While they may contain useful context for viewing a body of work, more often they tend toward a confusing barrage of esoteric abstractions. Obnoxious in their say-nothing-ness, sometimes mildly amusing in their absurdity, it is usually best to ignore them and just move on to the art. Occasionally, one accidently reads one and it tarnishes an otherwise interesting exhibit. Most everyone agrees: the ubiquity of the artist statement is wildly disproportionate to its general reception. Yet it persists, like Edward Gorey’s doubtful guest, and shows no intention of going away.
It's not that artists should not write about their art. On the contrary, artists should be free to provide as much or as little written information as they choose to supplement their work. The problem is that the artist statement, particularly in its most irritating, French-philosophy-through-the-meat-grinder format, seems to be something of a requirement. As Jennifer Liese notes, “professors require them as supplements to critiques; grant-givers, residency programs, and grad schools request them as support material; galleries solicit them as fodder for press releases” — an artist statement must “sound like an un-coerced statement of principles” while also fulfilling “overlapping and shifting professional requirements.” It must sound un-coerced. Like a confession signed under police custody — only instead of a plea bargain, artists can win access to the institutions that administer and manage the art world.
In 2012, artists Alix Rule and David Levine brilliantly investigated the peculiar art-speech of Anglo-American artists’ statements, dubbing the phenomena “International Art English” (IAE). They point out that the style of writing that characterizes artists’ statements is highly exclusionary, in large part because much of the language can be traced to the adoption of French and German philosophical jargon that became popular in university arts programs during the 1970s. Terms like aporia, biopolitical and rhizomatic were lifted from philosophers like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze and quickly became the standard for speaking and writing about art. Meanwhile, universities became the most promising path to success for young artists. Anyone who has encountered IAE will note that it has two important effects. First, it is undeniably alienating to anyone who has not gone through similar university courses in art theory, philosophy and cultural studies. Second, for all its wackiness, it clearly sets apart those who can recognize and respond. By excluding, it simultaneously distinguishes a group of insiders. As a result, the artist statement has largely become a mechanism by which philosophical discourse, however unhinged, legitimizes a certain hierarchical institutional authority over artistic practice. Today, if you can’t deconstruct the talk, you’ll soon find yourself with an aporia of funding opportunities.
There is a notable similarity between the current state of art discourse and the age-old state of political discourse. In 1946, George Orwell observed that political speech tends to be bad writing. If he were alive today, he would make the same remark about the artist statement. In fact, his list of common language tricks found in political speech matches closely Rule and Levine’s characterization of IAE: both tend to be overloaded with dying metaphors, excessive operators, pretentious diction and meaningless words. For Orwell, the obfuscation is intentional: political speech is intended to create a specific effect, rather than to transmit a specific meaning. Similarly, the patent absurdity of so many artists’ statements suggests that the actual content of the philosophical terms is secondary to the effect of authorization. The average reader (or listener) is meant to feel confused, but also to be in awe of the apparent profundity. The function is the quieting of the crowd, the mob and the collective in deference to the museum curator and the grant administrator. The artist statement says: do not comprehend – simply submit to my authority as artist-expert.
Like political speech, artist statements marshal the authority of a specific kind of language to organize a hierarchy within the social world. In both cases, the display of specialized jargon signals a kind of knowledge and expertise that grants authority to members of that elite over what or who counts; over what is good politics and what is good art; and over distribution of resources in the community. This obscurantism, of course, hides the underlying truth that these practices contain their own internal and autonomous logic. Art and politics are, to borrow a term from John Gunnell, “first order practices,” meaning they need no outside justification, philosophical or otherwise, to carry on. Art and politics are the stuff and substance of free collective human activity, and the rules governing these activities are inherently open to modification by that community. The community of teenagers in South Bronx in the 1970s did not have to ask the director of MoMa whether hip hop was a legitimate form of creative expression (it ‘wasn’t’).1 The inhabitants of cities around the world who are taking to the streets in protest of their government’s participation in war, genocide and rising social inequality do not have to ask the police if their voice is legitimate (it’s ‘not’). What the experts have to say, of course, matters because people tend to listen to authority. Too often, however, such expert discourse operates to suppress and occlude the autonomous actions of others.
This may seem a bit harsh on the university faculty and other arts administrators. To be clear, the tyranny of the artist statement is not a case of individual malpractice or a conspiracy of saboteurs. The creation of meaningless bureaucratic ranking procedures is an inevitable hazard of hierarchical institutions, no matter the goodwill and common purpose guiding them. What’s more is that when it comes to the precarious social worlds of art and of the university, the drive for authority is shaped by the desire and need for individuals to legitimize their own place in these larger institutions and within society. In the 1960s, when art making had become a bona fide academic discipline, these departments had to jockey for resources, autonomy and prestige on the same or similar terms to other fields of academic research. This institutional striving for legitimacy is compounded by the ongoing political strangulation of public goods and services, which is directed in particular at the arts and, in the context of the university, at social sciences and humanities departments.
It is perhaps no coincidence that the wide adoption of the requirement of an artist statement for all manner of funding applications occurred in the 1990s, as this resource squeeze became acute. Starting in the 2000s, Art Colleges across Canada became accredited degree-granting institutions, adding “university” to their name in a bid to expand their marketability and financial viability. The hierarchical position of the institutional arts gatekeepers over artists belies their own precarity in a society that is less and less capable of or interested in maintaining democratic or at least publicly accessible forms of cultural production. Unfortunately, popular alienation from art and art making has only been sharpened by the demand that artists justify their work with 500–1000 words of philosophical bafflegab to compete for what little institutional resources and recognition are left to dispense.
All is not lost, of course. In both art and politics, it is the institutions that depend on the people, rather than the other way around. Current apathy toward the relationship between art and intellectuality doesn’t change the fact that people think through art. Artists who find a way to build a community outside of the institutions may find that they never needed Derrida in the first place.2
1. For a fascinating account and analysis of the emergence of hip hop as an autonomous artistic community see Jim Vernon’s Hip Hop, Hegel, and the Art of Emancipation: Let’s Get Free.
Apologies to Derrida.