TLDNU*

(*Too long, did not understand.)

Either I just succumbed to some kind of reading disorder, or the reliably daft e-artnow list has delivered another payload of grade-A twaddle. I’ll make some allowances for Bildfrost (“Frozenness”) being an exhibition at a German gallery, but on the other hand although I’m pretty confident that I speak German I’d still want to run my German press release past somebody who was a native speaker to make sure I wasn’t making ein Arsch of myself.

I’ll just pull out the silliest phrases and paragraphs at random from what is quite a lengthy screed, but trust me: it all makes about as much sense out of context as it does in context, i.e. virtually none. There’s also a lot of telling us what we’d be able to see with our eyes if we could see the art, which is redundant, patronising and controlling if we intend to see the art and usually baffling if we can’t see the art and probably never will.

BILDFROST (“Frozenness”)

“Initially, the picture seals itself off from the interpretation of any impression. An oscillating flurry emits from the center that steers the anticipation of a disappearing space into darkness. At the same time, it becomes clear that the fabric of colors is the result of picturesque grid structures. Has large pixilated photography been translated into painting or is the painting imitating a print? The understanding of the romantic image remains a wanting. The work resists any outsider’s demand to understand and requires an active positioning of the viewer. A motive between figurative speech and reflections on media.”

THE PARTS THAT READERS TEND TO SKIP

“I’m sure many readers already have in mind certain art texts that may be made up of technically correct English words and sentences, but ultimately can’t be processed by the reader into anything resembling a rational argument. You may immediately recall particular writers about art who seem to be going for the high score in a game of Scrabble instead of communicating ideas.”

I wrote this for Interpretation Matters, my colleague Dany Louise’s new research and learning project on the good, the bad and the ugly of writing about art. Regular readers of this blog will already know it’s a subject close to my black heart.

http://interpretationmatters.com/?page_id=14

Read some examples of the bad and the ugly here on this blog, under headings like

http://careersuicideblog.wordpress.com/tag/english-lesson/

http://careersuicideblog.wordpress.com/tag/artist-statements/

http://careersuicideblog.wordpress.com/tag/art-speak-2/

ART F-ALL

“Hierarchies of participation are being reconfigured and traditional authorial claims are under stress, new articulations of spectator/performer reciprocity can no longer be disregarded.”

The venerable ART-ALL academic mailing list is nowadays mostly a silent void. And Darkness and Decay and fifty thousand pointless conference papers about art hold illimitable dominion over all. Very rarely a small, absurd item still scuttles across ART-ALL’s dead face, like this recent call for participation associated with the University of Glasgow and The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, specifically two entities that in all seriousness call themselves respectively the “Performance and the Body Working Group” and the “Performance and New Technologies Working Group”. “Working groups”, as if they’re engaged in vital research or something, as if the fate of the world hangs upon their deliberations.

Behold the sheer bollocks that these people write:

Title: Embodied Engagement: Participatory And Immersive Performance
The Performance and the Body and Performance and New Technologies Working Groups are joining forces this year to explore different bodily, aesthetic, political, ethical and economical aspects of participation in the current performance milieu. In a performance context where hierarchies of participation are being reconfigured and traditional authorial claims are under stress, new articulations of spectator/performer reciprocity can no longer be disregarded. Focusing on audience experience, we intend to examine possibilities of participant (spectators and performers) agency and empowerment within different modes of performance transaction.

HEY, STOP DISREGARDING THE NEW ARTICULATIONS OF SPECTATOR/PERFORMER RECIPROCITY, OK? Does this Scrabble board of a paragraph really mean to suggest that it’s in any way a new thing for live art and performances to involve or incorporate the audience as something other than passive spectators? If so, they’re talking absolute crap. And if they don’t mean to suggest this, then I’m still pretty sure they’re talking absolute crap. If you’re focusing on audience experience, don’t you think you should be able to express yourself to that audience in plain English?

According to Adrian Heathfield, contemporary performance has shifted aesthetically from ‘the optic to the haptic, from the distant to the immersive, from the static relation to the interactive’. The dialogue between the two Working Groups aims to explore the productive tensions between bodies and technologies in the development of this shift. The contested term ‘immersive’ is a rich, under-theorized concept which pulls in and works across distinct constituencies of performance. It calls upon diverse technologies to create its performance environments and promote active bodily engagement. Immersion both as an artistic intention and a perceived process is identified with concepts of viscerality, authenticity and immediacy. Yet the question remains as to how effective immersion can be in engaging audiences mentally, emotionally and corporeally.

You know Adrian Heathfield. Of course you do. He’s, er… the man who said contemporary performance has shifted from the optic to the haptic. Which is a shame, really, because I’d much rather see a performance than have to wait in a long queue to feel the performer. I’d like somebody to explain to me how one engages an audience corporeally; does this just mean grabbing or groping them? Having a fight with them? Because I’m also available to perform in shows like this.

What utter balls.

Anyway, let’s wish both of these working groups the best of luck in their research. Millions of lives depend upon it.

“WE CALL IT VOIGT-KAMPFF FOR SHORT…”

OR: THE TURING TEST FOR ARTISTS

The pioneering cyberneticist Alan Turing proposed a test for machine intelligence: if a person can’t tell the difference between the text output from a machine (or its software) and a real human, then arguably that machine could at the very least be considered a fair simulation of intelligence even if not intelligent as such. This concept may also be familiar in the form of the famous scenes of the (fictional) Voigt-Kampff test that’s administered to distinguish humans from replicants in Blade Runner.

We may be close to the Voigt-Kampff threshold for artist statements, which are notoriously full of shit. Jasper Rigoles has programmed a fairly convincing generator that takes input from a form and outputs an artist statement in international artbollocks English. About the only things missing are a few key, trite  bullshit phrases that are almost always in bad artist statements, e.g. “… works between [major art hub] and [major art hub]“.

ONE DIMENSIONAL

From Berlin gallery Fruehsorge (who came to my attention thanks to complaints from other arts professionals about their, shall we say, relaxed attitude towards financial relations with artists* see footnote) comes this splendid slab of bullshit about their current exhibition of drawings by Matthias Beckmann. This is a verbatim cut and paste from the English version of their site, but I speak German as well so I can assure you this is a fair translation of a German write up that is also brimful of crap.

“Matthias Beckmann is a draftsman. He meets his counterpart as a discreet dialog partner who then turns into a silent observer in front of the motif. Beckmann looks for places and finds pictures right there. “The draftsman Beckmann, who finds what he wants to see in everything, has an anarchic wit that flashes up time and again …” There is never only one picture, there are always mostly larger series, so that his drawings expand and condense to a larger visual narrative. Thus a fundamental characteristic already of the individual sheet augments itself, for Beckmann’s drawings give the impression that for the draftsman “at least on paper … no thing as such is significant. It is only the attention it gets that lifts it out of the arbitrariness of “all sorts of things”.” Exactly this is one of the crucial preconditions for relativizing the documentary gestus of these drawings. Beckmann’s pencil lines are contours, lines which directly refer to an extra-pictorial object. Nevertheless he succeeds in liberating the drawing from a one-dimensional object reference and transforming what is seen into a solely pictorial reality. That is why one should never reduce his drawings to their mere depictive function, even though Matthias Beckmann certainly, and not least, is a drawing documentarist. But the big achievement of his drawings is an intensified sensitization of seeing. The viewer has to renew the way he sees the drawn objects and their spatial contexts, has to readjust his view of the world.”

NOTES:

“He meets his counterpart as a discreet partner…” It’s rare for an art text to accurately convey how blithely sordid, mercenary and pervy many artists are about exploiting other people to make their work, but this is a pretty good distillation of it. It almost sounds like a paraphrase from a disturbing Craigslist personal ad.