Words, words, words

In the Lerner and Loewe musical ‘My Fair Lady’, Eliza Doolittle sings a song that begins: ‘words, words, words, I’m so sick of words…’

Another week passes and I have read and assessed 40 more submissions for the funding of creative endeavours from the small pot of money available. Most of them are straightforward and even upfront about how tough life has been for creatives during the coronavirus lockdown. Effectively they say: I feel compelled to be a …. (musician, artist, writer, actor etc – fill in the blank). I used to have work which has now dried up, I have an idea for a ‘really worthy project’ – please help!

However, occasionally there is a submission which grabs my attention. I read it and re-read it maybe five or six times. It seems absolutely fascinating and, if I could understand it, it might be completely worthy of funding. The problem is, it is written in ‘artspeak’ – a language I have not yet mastered.

The following is not a funding request, but an example from a recent exhibition ‘Meaningless is More’ by local artist Christopher LG Hill:

‘Signs and signifiers, words and objects litter the edges of the floor. We want to make sense of a chaotic world. But the poetics of being don’t settle, an anarchic flame burns. Making sense of our self as individual, simplifying existence is tricky, there are spills, overlaps. As there are with the objects, images, rhythm and words in this exhibition. Defining and qualifying give us anchors for being, but they change, as does property and desire. Multiple voices, collective, splintered, layered. Lock boxes with keys to airbnbs, champagne, corked, trapped in bondage, glasses frame vistas, antique plastic bags, phones kissing, yakult bottles and designer cable ties… These are loaded with meaning, but together it falls apart. Which is great, nothing matters, new ways for being, loving, laughing, living, seeing, are possible every second. Meaning accumulates, morphs, but is never ending. A golden periphery to the rotten core’.

Christopher is a well-regarded, thoughtful, personable and erudite practitioner. He participated in ‘Melbourne Now’ at the NGV in 2014 with a similarly obscure project titled ‘free temporal groupings’. This was described as an ‘aesthetically lo-fi installation [which] embraces anarchist ideas to find new ways to examine the relationships between freedom, people and objects’. The last time I saw him was some months ago when he was conducting a weekend art class at the NGV. 

The blurb for his recent exhibition above, describes Christopher as: ‘an artist, poet, anarchist, as well as others, untitled, etc, collaborator, facilitator, tutor, curator, lover, friend, publisher of Endless Lonely Planet, noise wall proprietor, gardener, co label boss; Bunyip trax, traveller, homebody, dancer, considerate participator, dishwasher, graffiti bencher, fine food eater, exhibitor … tweeter, twitcher, sleeper, Biennale director… DJ, retired gallerist Y3K, conversationalist who represents them self and others, born Melbourne 1980c.e, lives World’.

Both his exhibition descriptions and his comprehensive description of himself are quite poetic – perhaps they are THE ARTWORKS – I often wish I could be as creatively articulate. Maybe there is a clue to meaning in the exhibition title ‘Meaningless is More’. Is Christopher being ironic’, or is he making a sad reflection on life in the 21^st century?  I doubt I will work it out. But both ‘texts’ exemplify how ‘artspeak’ has become the language of much of the contemporary art world for the past four decades.

Where does ‘artspeak’ come from and how has this happened?

‘Artspeak’ is the pejorative term for what is better named ‘International Art English’.  In 2010 David Levine (an American artist based in New York and Berlin) and Alix Rule (a sociology student at Columbia University in New York) decided to examine the phenomenon of the linguistic verbosity found primarily in gallery press releases, articles in critical art journals, and increasingly in museum didactics. They collated thousands of exhibition announcements and used language-analysing software (Sketch Engine) to discover the forms and structure of this unique ‘language’. The findings were published as an essay in the American art journal ‘Triple Canopy’ and it has become one of the most widely circulated pieces of online cultural criticism.

International Art English (IAE) has a number of recurring features. These include: more rather than fewer words, ordinary words taking on non-specific ‘alien’ meanings and functions, the deployment of words with a faddish precision, the use of abstract and philosophical terms, and unusual juxtapositions and syntax. The language was described as sounding like ‘inexpertly translated French’.

The link with French is not surprising and even understandable. The origins of IAE can be traced back to the post-modernist thinking and prose style that came out of France in the early 1980s and which was heavily featured in the influential critical journal ‘October’. The main protagonists of post-structuralism, post-modernism and deconstruction were part of the intellectual and philosophical milieu of France and included: Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Julia Kristeva amongst many others. Extremely difficult to define concisely, ‘Post-Modernism’ is a mode of discourse that rejects the possibility of reliable knowledge, denies the existence of a universal stable reality, and frames aesthetics and beauty as arbitrary and subjective. It is characterised by an attitude of scepticism, irony and the rejection of the grand narratives and ideologies of modernism.

In attempting to describe the uncertainties, contradictions, paradoxes and ‘slippages’ that occur in all forms of communication, it is not surprising that the written language of IAE has had to grapple with contradictions, ambiguities, circumlocution, and unstable and multiple meanings. A new ‘art vocabulary’ has emerged and words like: radical, interrogates, subverts, void, tension, intersectional, gendered, critique, rupture, transversal, ‘the real’, ‘field of action’, negation, dialectic, etc are now commonplace. However, by trying to be too precise, discursive, inclusive and thoughtful, the meaning that is sought often gets lost as too many lexical cooks spoil the illustrative broth.

Apart from the desire to create a language to describe art, IAE has other functions. Its role is partly about power, as the language is very much an ‘insider language’ which confers a strong signal of belonging to an inner art sanctum. IAE has also been taken up by academic institutions and the commercial art world to confer status, muddy the waters around the meaning of a work, and thus keep the value of artworks high. In this way it functions like the ‘Emperor’s new clothes’.

Not surprisingly the opacity and hermetic nature of ‘artspeak’ has resulted in it becoming an object of mockery and derision.  There are a number of websites that will generate ‘artspeak’ on demand. One of the most popular is ‘Artybollocks’. Artybollocks has ‘artist statement’ and ‘short artist statement’ generators. Examples of  ‘short artist statements’ are: ‘What starts out as vision soon becomes debased into a tragedy of greed, leaving only a sense of unreality and the possibility of a regeneration’ or ‘With influences as diverse as Roland Barthes and Miles Davis, new variations are crafted from both orderly and random dialogues’. These types of pithy statements are perfect as tweets. The site will even provide a certificate of ‘Artistic Practice Licensing Authority’ (reminding me of the diploma given to the scarecrow by the Wizard of OZ). If interested, ideas for coming up with your own artist statement can be found at: https://www.artybollocks.com/generator.html#navigation

Alternatively, if you are feeling speechless or just inarticulate in front of a work of art, the site for you is ‘The Instant Art Critique Phrase Generator’. All that is required is to type any five-digit number into the webpage and voilá! an instant perceptive quote appears. For example, guiding in the Antiquities section of the NGV could result in: ‘I find this work menacing because of the way the subaqueous qualities of the Egyptian motifs make resonant the inherent overspecificity’ or, ‘Eidos’ by Barbara Hepworth is a candidate for: ‘I’m troubled by how the disjunctive perturbation of the biomorphic form contextualizes the accessibility of the work’.  This invaluable tool for guiding can be found at: http://www.pixmaven.com/phrase_generator.html

However, International Art English does serve a real and important function in reminding us of the difficulties in describing the thoughts and feelings generated by artworks. So, sometimes it’s necessary to stop laughing about ‘artspeak’ and look at how art can be written about in a way that is both meaningful and accessible. If this is of interest, I suggest looking at ‘Artists Write to Work’ by Kate Kramer.  Kramer is a lecturer in critical writing at the University of Pennsylvania and experienced in professional and business development for artists. This is a practical workbook rather than an academic tome and includes worksheets that will point you in the right direction.

In the meantime, I will continue to work on my art writing for this blog. So, look forward to further exegeses which will seek to explore the relationship between linguistic choreography and the object as apprehended. Reflecting on the ideas of Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud and Christopher LG Hill, new tensions will be distilled from both constructed and discovered meanings.  Ever since I became a docent, I have been fascinated by the ephemeral nature of the moment. What starts out as vision soon becomes finessed into a manifesto of distress, leaving only a sense of what could have been and the dawn of a new beginning.  As subtle phenomena become distorted through frantic and diverse musings, I know I will continue to leave you with both an optimistic montage of ‘the possible’ and a pessimistic epitaph for the inaccuracies of our future.

Whew, I think I nailed it!