The Unbearable Denseness of Artist Statements

The tyranny of artspeak, and why it's often better to let the work speak for itself.

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In the first critique class at my MFA program in photography, a student hung up a print of a chair taken in their dorm room. The chair had an Ikea-like flair of the ordinary, and the photo itself was underexposed and underwhelming. Then came the artist statement, an earnest account of social anxiety refracted through domestic objects, with nods to insomnia and urban alienation. As I watched the chair acquire magical qualities of the student’s emotional catharsis, I grew confused and intimidated. Did the relationship between the words and the photo not add up, or was it me who was missing something? Either way, I didn’t say anything. No one wants to sound like the dumbest person in art class.

That feeling of confusion never left. Most artist statements tagged to the walls of Chelsea art galleries create a small rupture in my brain as I struggle to understand the performative fluency of what, at first glance, reads as English. Though I recognize individual words, the overall meaning is — much like the infamous escargot scene in Pretty Woman — a slippery little sucker.

Looking around at other people reading the same plaques with serene focus instead of panicked bewilderment signals to me that I should keep such thoughts a secret, lest I expose myself as an art philistine. Which in my case would be doubly embarrassing, since I have an MFA in photography and a background in art history. I have consumed an entire curriculum of visual theory from Sontag to Walter Benjamin to Baudrillard. Yet, when I try to make sense of any number of gallery press releases, I feel like an imposter.

There is a uniquely generic way in which the art world speaks. Someone is always interrogating, exploring, exposing, inverting, subverting, reflecting, or reimagining elements of — duality is key here — space and non-space, the conscious and subconscious, hyper-reality and non-reality, and object and non-object. There is always some kind of void, liminality, psyche, abstraction, deconstruction, intersection, fragility, paradox, and juxtaposition. None of these are particularly obscure concepts, but when strung together and peppered with an obscene number of adverbs and adjectives, their meaning dissolves into a puzzling illusion where the more I read, the less I seem to understand.

Doing some research into the origins of modern artist statements, I found out to my delight that in 2013, a cheeky essay by Alix Rule and David Levine labeled this format as International Art English. They traced its origin to popular translations of French post-structuralist philosophers, which became a model for American critical art writing back in the 1970s. The art world adopted both the deliberate vagueness of the ideas and, rather ironically, the accidental vagueness of the translations. And voila! The newly minted artspeak became a reservoir of pompous declarations, endless sentences, and ambiguous meanings.

When I read a statement telling me that the artist "is using found landscapes to radically subvert the accepted paradigms of the everyday while reflecting the subconscious liminal space between order and disorder,” I am cowered into submission by the virtuosity of the prose and the denseness of the ideas. Which seems to be intentional. International Art English (IAE) coerces the reader into giving artwork significance that may not otherwise be visible, or even there at all.

As I wandered through a gallery tour last week, I discovered another interesting effect of IAE. The biggest NYC art stretch boasts an enviably multicultural and diverse group of artists, yet the artist statements read remarkably homogenous, producing an effect of everyone graduating from the same virtual MFA class. IAE is a fully functional, global language, coddling individual viewpoints from all parts of the world in the same, instantly recognizable fluff. The artists themselves don't seem to have much of a choice in the matter. The format is a codified path to acceptance within the insular art world. You don’t get a foot in the art world by writing clearly. You get it for sounding like you already belong.

Meandering from gallery to gallery, I encountered the fashionable roster of relevant topics, from identity to marginalization to gender roles. While the themes felt urgent, the delivery was numbing. Everything was wrapped in the same soft, abstract language that obscured the link between what I was reading and what I was looking at. The effect that had on me was slightly bullying. To not be moved by the work felt like a kind of personal failing. To criticize it, even worse. The difference between ideological tone-deafness and aesthetic dissonance can be too delicate for comfort.

The truth is, I am a sucker for a good artist statement. The kind that clarifies and lets the viewer in on a secret, rather than pontificates. At its best, it can create a feeling of recognition, a low-key epiphany that turns the viewer from an outsider to a collaborator. An effective artist statement doesn’t try to elevate the art so much as sync with it. And, if it respects your time, your brain, and your bullshit threshold, it might even be a pleasure to read.

By 24th street, I stopped looking at wall plagues altogether. That may have been an uncultured way of experiencing art, but it was spectacularly more enjoyable. When something moved me, I snuck a peek at the statement to see if I was far off from the artist’s intent. Most of the time, I was. But it didn’t matter. To riff off a famous Mark Twain quote,

"Never let an artist statement get in the way of good art."

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