Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Jennifer Liese
From Paper Monument Number Four
Screen grab from the authors iteration of Nick Fortunatos Artist Statement Generator 2000
Google artist statement, and you will find a good dozen instructional websites enjoining artists to
follow these easy steps to produce this essential bit of art-career ephemera. Most begin with a
reassuring acknowledgment of artists presumed anxiety about putting visual expression into
words, then launch into an encouraging pitch for the twofold fulfillment that awaits the obliging
statement writer: not only will you be able to communicate clearly and effectively in the native
language of the curators, critics, and collectors on whom your future depends, you will also
discoversomewhere in the fresh transcription of your workaspects of your creative essence
that you never even knew existed. One Master Certified Coach provides the following
appetizing advice: Think of your artists statement as a nourishing stew. The rich flavors and
inviting aroma will feed your spirit and summon wonderful people to your table.[1]
The authors of Art/Work: Everything You Need to Know (and Do) As You Pursue Your Art
Career devote an entire section to the task. In one page max (on brevity all the experts agree),
you just want to describe, as simply as possible, what it is that you hope to do, or show, or say,
with your art, and what it is that makes you interested in doing, showing, or saying that. If only
it were that simple, for along with the dos comes a series of foreboding donts. Dont posit a
comprehensive theory of your place in art history; dont psychoanalyz[e] your motivation;
dont use jargon; and above all, dont fall prey to any among a list of phrases that plague artist
statements with insincerity or obviousness, among them: I pour my soul into each piece and
My work is about my experiences.[2]
The artist Nick Fortunato has capitalized on the prevalence of such dubious guides and clichs
with his Artist Statement Generator 2000, an online project launched in 2010 that asks the
visitor to Fill in the blanks and press the button for the last Artist Statement youll ever need.[3]
Participants respond to prompts like cartoon character, famous artist verb ending in ing,
plural food, and favorite museum. A click on create statement produces a five-paragraph,
Mad Libsstyle gag in which the chosen words complete the template, yielding such absurd
constructions as Through my work I attempt to examine the phenomenon of Bugs Bunny as a
metaphorical interpretation of both Leonardo da Vinci and sunbathing. The final line hits its
target of art-world affectation dead on. With all words preset other than the user-chosen place in
your home, mine read: I spend my time between my kitchen and Berlin.
Of course, artists words have long been met with skepticism, not least by artists themselves.
Matisse, despite his own eloquence, famously declared that a painter ought to have his tongue
cut out.[4] Pollock played dumb. Warhol mastered obfuscation. We know all of that. But artists
writings are also much anthologized and well lovedfor both their historical and literary value.
(Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists Writings and MIT
Presss Writing Art series are two standouts among many excellent collections.[5]) Following a
relative dearth of published artist writings in the object-centered 80s and 90s, the past decade or
so has seen a wave of them still too new to be anthologizedthe distribution theories of Seth
Price, the fictional narrative as impetus for art of Mai-Thu Perret, and the semiart historical
situating of Josiah McElheny, to name a few. Such diversely inclined artist-writers are keeping
the form very much alive.
Still, theres no denying the sorry state of the statement, and we all know it. The ubiquitous
request Please include an artist statement inspires cringes and groans among artists. An artist
friend of mine called artist statements the dentistry of the art world, and Fortunato is not alone
in making art that mocks the form; one of several statement satires on YouTube features a pair of
animated pig-artists translating pretentious claims of artist statements into the banal truth.
Likewise, art professionals are tired of reading these often hyperbolic, embarrassing, or at best
monotonous texts. Artist Nina Katchadourian, former curator of the Drawing Centers Viewing
Program, once told me that of the hundreds of artist statements she had read that year, only one
really stood out.[6] A gallery owner interviewed in Art/Work emphatically states that he never
reads artist statements.[7] What could be more deflating? You slave all week over your
nourishing stew and no one even bothers to taste it.
But who or what, we might ask, is to blame for this compositional rut? And once weve parsed
causes, might we find some way to effect change, to liberate the artist statement for the good of
us all? Taking history as a guide, maybe we could first learn a thing or two from the artist
statements past. Where did this ever-present, compulsory overture come from anyway?
Strangely, given its proliferation, the actual history of the genre remains a mystery. No one seems
to have written a book on the subject, or even a dissertation.[8] Any practical and theoretical
discussions of artist statements that do exist leave their history untold, perhaps because the forms
exact criteria remain undefined.
Anthologies of artist writingswhich include letters, manifestos, journals, criticism, and
interviews along with statementsare organized by chronology, theme, or country, rather than
type. The editors introductory essays make surprisingly few distinctions among various forms of
artists writings. Further complicating the matter is the fact that the term statement is so readily
generic. Sometimes it is applied to writings that were originally presented as lectures or pieced
together from interviews. Picassos Statements, for example, were in several instances
constructed from conversations with trusted confidants.[9] By contrast, Claes Oldenburgs
celebrated I Am for an Art (I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does
something other than sit on its ass in a museum. ), printed first in 1961 and reprinted many
times thereafter, is usually referred to as an essay or a manifesto, though it is titled statement on
an early typed manuscript.[10]
Robert Goldwater, co-editor of the 1945 anthology Artists on Art: From the XIV to the XX
Century, provides in his introduction a handy and ultimately telling century-by-century
characterization of broad trends among artists writings. The 14th and 15th centuries, he notes,
were dominated by handbooks on technique such as Cennino Cenninis Il libro dellArte, which
advises artists on painterly matters ranging from how to depict drapery in fresco to preserving a
steady hand by drinking only thin wines. Artists in the 16th and 17th centuries tended toward the
theoretical, as in Michelangelos rigorous efforts to rank the arts hierarchically, a popular
undertaking at the time. The 18th century brought both an uptick in academic discourse and a
surge in journals such as Delacroixs. The 19th century was characterized by private letters such
as van Goghs and the early 20th century by the public manifesto. Regarding the mid-20th
century, on the cusp of which this anthology was published, Goldwater issues the following
prediction: If introspection is losing ground, the public statement appears to be gaining.[11]
While this mention doesnt locate a birth of the artist statement, it does allude to its breakthrough
moment.
In Network: The Art World Described as a SystemLawrence Alloways still-potent 1972
critique of an art regime that produces not art but rather the distribution of art, both literally
and in mediated form as text and reproductionthe critic notes that the artist statement was the
typical verbal form of the Abstract Expressionist generation. Indeed, there were many outlets
for the statement at mid-century: art magazines such as As Is, The Tigers Eye, and Possibilities
printed them verbatim. Alloway describes the artist statement as essentially a first-person
expression putting succinctly fundamental ideas about art.[12] That much is a start in defining
terms. But wouldnt many other forms of artists writings meet the same criteria? The interview,
for example, is rendered in first-person and might well include fundamental ideas about art. But
of course the interview generally originates with the spoken rather than written word and involves
an influential interlocutor.[13] Artists journals and letters both fit Alloways description, but they
initially have only an audience of oneself or one other in mind. The manifesto might be written by
a single artist, but, as Mary Ann Caws points out in her Introduction to Manifesto: A Century of
Isms, this archetypal form uses we-speak as a persuasive tactic in converting others to a
collective causeWe intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness,
begins Marinettis Futurist Manifestowhile the artist statement serves primarily to elucidate the
artists own work.[14]
How then might we refine Alloways definition? A proposal: The artist statement is a firstperson [written] expression [intended for readership,] putting succinctly fundamental ideas about
[ones own] art? I would propose adding still another, more contemporary criterion to this stab at
typology: the artist statement, as we know it today, is produced to meet an explicitly professional
occasional need, such as accompanying the artists work in a magazine, exhibition catalogue,
grant application, or on the artists website. Looking back at some of the most exceptional artist
statements of the 20th century, we find many that hew perfectly to this definition, and even shade
into blatant self-promotion, withoutit should be notedsounding like an artists
statement.[15]
In 1908, for example, Matisse wrote what art historian Jack Flam calls one of the most important
and influential artists statements of the century. Notes of a Painter, the artists first published
text, was solicited for the French literary journal La Grande Revue. Clocking in at some 3,000
words, it addresses color, composition, painting from nature versus painting from imagination,
and fellow artists, and it includes one of those art advisers verboten comprehensive theories
on artists inability to escape their moment in history: All artists bear the imprint of their time,
Matisse writes, however insistently we call ourselves exiles from it. Far-reaching and
provocative, the statement is nonetheless transparently careerist. As Flam points out, one of
Matisses intentions was to clear himself of some of the criticism leveled against him in both
reactionary and avant-garde circles, and indeed the painter calls out his critics by name. Another
intriguing bit of self-promotiondirect marketing you might call itis hidden just beneath the
surface, right there in the statements best-known line: What I dream of is an art of balance, of
purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter, an art that could be for
the businessman as well as the man of letters, for example, a soothing, calming influence on the
mind, something like a good armchair that provides relaxation from fatigue. This line, which
would long after reinforce critiques of Matisses work as merely decorative, was, Flam argues,
directed to one particular businessmanSergei Shchukin, a Russian collector and Matisses
new patron, who had told Matisse that his paintings offered him consolation amid personal
tragedy.[16] Hence Matisses shameless plug for the armchair effect, right in the middle of one of
the most important artist statements of all time.
American art magazines werent far behind the French in publishing artist statements. Marsden
Hartleys, for example, Artand the Personal Life, appeared in Creative Art in 1928. A
paradoxically passionate defense of the artist as a thinking rather than wholly feeling being, the
text begins: I have joined, once and for all, the ranks of the intellectual experimentalists.
Personal art is for me a matter of spiritual indelicacy. What takes the place of expressionism
and emotionalism in Hartleys construct? I am interested in the problem of painting, of how to
make a better painting according to certain laws. It is better to have two colors in right relation
to each other than to have a vast confusion of emotional exuberance in the guise of ecstatic
fullness or poetical revelation.[17] Hartleys steadfast rationality is radical, defying what Brian
Wallis would one day call one of the most enduring and telling fantasies of modernist culture
that the artist is a feeling, inarticulate genius.[18] Marcel Duchamp recognized this mythand its
consequenceswhen, in a 1957 lecture, he described the pigeonholing of the artist as a
mediumistic being who is denied the state of consciousness on the esthetic plane about what
he is doing or why he is doing it.[19] In other words, Hartleys statement is an object lesson in
refusing to play the sensitive mute.
In 1954 Louise Bourgeois wrote a statement, published in Design quarterly, that is otherwise a
straightforward description of her work, but which begins with a caveat worth quoting at length
for its insight into the essential challenges of writing about ones own art:
An artists words are always to be taken cautiously. The finished work is often a stranger to, and
sometimes very much at odds with what the artist felt, or wished to express when he began. At
best the artist does what he can rather than what he wants to do. After the battle is over and the
damage faced up to, the result may be surprisingly dullbut sometimes it is surprisingly
interesting. The mountain brought forth a mouse, but the bee will create a miracle of beauty and
order. Asked to enlighten us on their creative process, both would be embarrassed, and probably
uninterested. The artist who discusses the so-called meaning of his work is usually describing a
literary side-issue. The core of his original impulse is to be found, if at all, in the work itself.[20]
Surveying artist statements from throughout the 20th century, its remarkable to see how many
begin similarlydisavowing the task at hand before undertaking it, as if to offer some protection
or cathartic release. Matisses Notes of a Painter makes the same point in a sentence: I am
fully aware that a painters best spokesman is his work.[21] Alexander Calder writes, Theories
may be all very well for the artist himself, but they shouldnt be broadcast to other people.[22]
Robert Rauschenberg takes a subversive route, injecting bits of nonsense into his Note on
Painting: I find it nearly impossible free ice to write about Jeepaxle my work. The concept I
planetarium struggle to deal with ketchup is opposed to the logical community life tab inherent in
language horses and communication. It is extremely important that art be unjustifiable.[23]
Spread from Daniel Frasnay, The Artists World (1969); Louise Nevelson statement and portrait
In the 1960s, in response to increasing popular interest in art, there appeared several photographic
portrait books that sought to reveal truths about artists works and personae through views into
their studios. Alexander Libermans The Artist in His Studio (1960) is perhaps best known among
them, but The Artists World, published in 1969, with photographic collages by Daniel Frasnay
portraying some fifty artists, offers another layer of insight through its accompanying statements.
Wildly divergent, most appear to have been written for the occasion, and many appear in the
artists own script. Some are technical. Sonia Delaunay, for example, offers the following
equation of her color theory:
By the 1970s and 80s, the primary site of published artist statements seems to be the exhibition
catalogue. Lawrence Weiners famous Untitled Statement, the one that goes:
Of course its artists less established than Kelley who are more likely to be asked for an artist
statement at all, and they probably do care very much if someone thinks they are a crackpot.
Nowadays, the statement isnt typically meant for publication in an avant-garde magazine or a
career-defining catalogue. The occasions are more frequent and mundane: 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; or you just need
something for a website.[32] An artist statement is supposed to fulfill overlapping and shifting
professional requirements, while at the same time managing to sound like an un-coerced
statement of principles. The regularity and inherent conflict in these requests is confusing, and the
combination of strict guidelines and obscure goals is the real-life artist statement generator that
produces so much turgid and overreaching prose.
I am the director of the Writing Center at Rhode Island School of Design, where a group of peer
tutors and I work with student writers on all kinds of writing, including our share of tortured artist
statements. In the process, I think were starting to learn something about how to help young
artists write effectively about their work. A couple of years ago, Arianne Gelardin, a RISD
graduate student and Writing Center tutor, set up a workshop designed to help students prepare
their artist statements for the RISD Grad Book 2011. For this catalog, which she edited, Gelardin
explicitly offered all statement writers the agency of choicea chance to experiment, to
diverge.
Some really took her lead. Heres Lisa Jo-Fan Chang, layering concrete poetry onto the fan-like
form of her furniture design:
Fold.
Folding.
Folded.
Fold the unfold.
Fold and unfold. Fold/unfold.
Unfold and fold.
Unfold the fold.
Unfold.
Unfolding.
Unfolded.
Heres Mimi Cabell, a photographer, performance artist, and writer, standing her ground: I do
not apologize and I am not sympathetic. I do not hear grays in peoples voices, only the blacks
and the whites. I hear yes and no, here and there, on and off. Not maybe, or somewhere, or
running at half speed. And finally, heres Byeongwon Ha, a new media artist, with a piercing
reminiscence of life before such media:
I used to live along a river that was intertwined with a longer river that led into a huge sea. I
enjoyed catching crabs with my friends and I remember the moisture and the coldness of sand,
the hardness and the sharpness of a crab, the smell and taste of salt, and the sunset that said,
Come back home. Im not sure why I stopped catching crabs, whether the crabs themselves
disappeared or if Legos and video games immersed me. However, crab-catching remains the only
authentic piece of interactive nostalgia left in my life.[33]
Coaxing such apt, confident, and memorable writing out of artists, who arent all artist-writers
after all, isnt always so straightforward. The various parties that assign and request artist
statements dont always offer the same freedom that Arianne did. Explicitly or implicitly, they
endorse the conventional wisdom, the codified model for fill-in-the-blank, forced prose meant to
serve as the ultimate linguistic record of an artists work. Its worth noting that according to many
scholars in writing pedagogy these factorschecklist writing prompts, prescribed outcomes,
external rather than internal motivation, and one-shot attemptsprohibit expressive and effective
writing. Writing is better practiced as an ongoing process in which a series of self-discoveries
unfold in organically organized form.[34]
But whats the alternative to our formulaic norm? Far from uncovering some definitive urstatement, the selective history of artist statements offered here shows them to be as varied and
complex as the conditions that brought them forth. Comprehensibility, tastefulness, and brevity
were clearly not always the goals. These statements, rather, are generous, adventurous, defensive,
incisive, vindictive, eccentric, experimental, bombastic, sly, sad, funny, personal, political, and
poetic. Its hard to tell when they even began. Indeed, the difficulty of locating a precise birth of
the artist statement is both explanatory and potentially liberating, since many of the genres most
depressing examples seem to be written as if the writer is tryingand failingto emulate some
kind of correct model, one which he or she has never actually set eyes on. Artists have become
convinced theyre supposed to say my work explores the notion of self-reflexivity rather than I
paint about paintings, but they arent sure why. Its like sitting down to write a poem and
throwing in a bunch of thees and thous because thats how poetry is supposed to sound. The
results are obviously less than artful.
A couple of years ago I met the reliably contrarian critic Dave Hickey, who, on hearing that I
work with art students on their writing, immediately announced: The artist statement should be
abolished! It was a tempting solution, I must admit, but I wasnt going to leave it there. Why is
that? I asked. Because artists dont know what theyre doing, he said. I almost took the bait,
but thought twice and knewI think anywayjust what he meant: if they know exactly what
theyre doing, its not art. Precisely. But rather than abolish artist statements, why not adjust the
current rules of the game? An artist statement can be an authentic, generative complement to the
work, as I witnessed recently when Brigid Rau, a RISD senior who photographs images projected
onto textilesinextricable layers referencing our screen-based visual landscapewrote an artist
statement that layered multiple narratives on multiple screens, then captured it as a screen grab of
her monitor. The one-size-fits-all explanatory imperative might seem like an efficient way to get
artists to speak a language that everyone elsecurators, collectors, professors, criticscan
understand, but the overall result, lets admit it, is usually a really horrible Esperanto. For
everyones sakeartists and the people and institutions working to support themit would be
better to welcome sense and nonsense, coherence and paradox, philosophy, poetry, and maybe
even a little more than a page, all of which might truly represent, rather than reduce, artists and
their art.