The Whitney Biennial, and the Unbearable Denseness of Artist Statements
Why sometimes, it's better to let art speak for itself.
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In the first critique class at my MFA program in photography, my fellow student hung up a print of a chair taken in their dorm room. The chair had an Ikea-like flair of the ordinary. The photo was blurry, underexposed and slightly underwhelming. Then, the student read their artist statement in which they deconstructed and reinterpreted social anxiety through the domestic space and everyday objects, touching on their hard time in the city, insomnia, and all kinds of intimate struggles. As I watched the chair acquire magical qualities through this emotional catharsis, I became confused and intimidated. Did the relationship between the words and the photo not add up — or was it me who was missing something?
That feeling of confusion never left. Most artist statements tagged to the walls of the Whitney Biennial or art galleries more generally create a small rupture in my brain, struggling to understand 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 still 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 – and duality is key here – space and non-space, the conscious and subconscious, hyper-reality and non-reality, object and non-object. There is almost always some kind of void, tension, 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 walked through this year's Whitney Biennial, I discovered another interesting effect of IAE. The biggest NYC art bonanza boasts the most multicultural and diverse group of artists to date, yet the artist statements are 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 and belonging within the insular art world.
The current Biennial touches on an array of undeniably salient topics —racism, discrimination, alienation, marginalization, police brutality, gender roles, and death — as enumerated in the artist statements. For many, I found a disconnect between what I read and what I saw. For several, the dialogue between the written intent and the object itself felt lost in translation. The effect that had on me was slightly bullying. It's hard to admit not appreciating art dealing with such vital themes. It's even harder to critique it. Meandering through the fun exhibition space — everything thrown together on two floors, giving it a feel of a playa at Burning Man rather than the usual gallery format — I kept telling myself, "Keep calm, look engaged, and carry on."
The truth is, I am a sucker for a good artist statement. At its best, it reveals underlying intentions that are palpable but not overtly stated in the work itself. Instead of being intimidated, I am included. There is a thrill in discovering an alternate dimension of meaning that seduces me into a deeper understanding; the liberating "Aha!" moment which is one of my main pleasure in art. That tiny epiphany gives an illusion of being led in on a secret and makes me feel like the artist's accomplice. That, in itself, is inspiring.
I want to return to the Whitney Biennial, this time exploring the installations on my own terms — artist statements be damned. I will be either engaged with the work in front of me, or I won't be. That may very well be a philistine’s way of experiencing art. But I suspect it will also be more visceral and empathetic. For those installations that flood me with emotion, I may sneak a peek at the wall plaque once again. To riff off a famous Mark Twain quote: "Never let an artist statement get in the way of good art."
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And I thought it was only me who could not decipher Art Speak.