Statements of the obvious?
I am the best artist. Wooster Street. New York City. 1988. Photo by Victor Macarol
During the course of your studies you have to write about your work. Early on that’s relatively simple as the course document is full of ‘check and log’ prompts. A good deal of what you’re expected to write are fairly immediate responses to exercises.
As you progress, technical issues recede and your concern is likely to be with making something that affects an audience and writing an accompaniment to that can become harder. That audience might initially be your tutor, but it’s worth thinking about the kind of language you want to use because, if you’re lucky, you’ll be asked to write an artist’s statement at some point. It might be to accompany a group exhibition, for a catalogue, or maybe you’re building a website. If you’re applying for funding, or a residency, or responding to an open call you’ll almost certainly have to do it.
Rather than give you a template (oh, if only it were that simple), I’ll list some things you shouldn’t do, along with possible antidotes. This advice is for the ‘straight’ artist’s statement. I’ve seen people use lists and poetry effectively, but that needn’t detain us here.
- The golden rule: don’t dress up the text in poetic language. Write it like you’d tell someone, face to face. In fact, imagining if someone came up to you and asked about your picture helps a lot. How might you answer their questions? Write that down. If, when you read it back, it sounds pretentious or, worse, new-agey, then do it again.
- Write less than you think, not more. If there’s a word limit on application forms, don’t assume that you have to fill it. Get someone you trust to help edit it, too. It goes without saying–but I’ll say it anyway–that it should be grammatically correct and everything spelled right. You might not get a chance to correct it before it’s used.
- Never tell your audience how to look at your work. I once sat on a selection panel for an arts festival and several applications had opening sentences like ‘my work makes people feel free’ (or thoughtful, unsettled, and so on). This, in effect, disallows an audience any room to engage with the work and comes across as arrogant. Instead, think about where the work came from and be specific. If it’s a memory, then say so. If it was because you noticed how light fell across a field when you were taking the bins out one evening, then say that. Don’t dress it up, though.
- Don’t mention that your work is a ‘creative response’ to anything. It’s art, and that ought to be a given. Avoid anything that reads like a definition of art. Artists are keen to tell people what their work is ‘about’. This is trickier as it’s a bit like telling an audience how to look at the work. In a short statement it’s hard to get across what might be complex ideas, so leave it. However, pithy sentences like ‘Exploring the relationship between shape and colour in landscape is at the heart of what I do’, or ‘I’ve always considered making sculpture as an elaborate form of play’, can work. They say something, but not too much.
- Quoting another artist can be effective point of reference as it will be assumed you like the artist, which implicitly contextualizes your work. But, but don’t use quotes to demonstrate how well read you are, and keep it down to one. Make sure it’s (a) correct and (b) relevant. If in doubt, leave it out.
- Don’t start every sentence with ‘I’ or ‘My’ as it will make you sound self-centred. (You can avoid this by using the third person, but that can sound pompous too, especially in a group show where everyone else’s statements are chatty). Find ways of structuring the sentences dynamically. Starting with a verb helps. For example, instead of writing ‘I was always interested in Matisse’s use of pattern’, can be re-arranged to read ‘Matisse’s use of pattern has always interested me’.
- Never–and I can’t put this too strongly–refer to ‘my art’. It’s your work. It’s fine to refer to paintings, pictures, sculptures etc..
- Avoid writing a description of the work. There’s not much point in telling the audience that they’re looking at ‘large metal structures’, ‘square pictures’, or ‘self-portraits’ if that’s what they can already see. They can probably work that out. Writing about scale, squareness or self-portraiture is okay, though. It’ll place you in some sort of art historical context, too.
The final thing to say is that you should never assume that anyone ever reads an artist’s statement, because they’re usually rubbish.
15 thoughts on “Statements of the obvious?”
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Useful practical advice…thanks for that. Have you seen this site…it is an artist statement generator:
http://www.artybollocks.com/#abg_full
“My work explores the relationship between Pre-raphaelite tenets and UFO sightings…”
Excellent site Keith!
Thanks Bryan for the advice, really interesting and useful post.
It’s a wonderful thing, that site. Of course, we’ve all fallen into the trap.
Very useful- thanks Bryan. Can you give us a couple of example of artists statements that you think are just right?
I’ll have a think, but it’s really hard. I tend to take not much notice of them (as implied by the last line of the piece. It’s also a question of horses for courses. That is, if you’re in a group show you’d submit something slightly that would be different from something for a solo show.
Rummaging around in my own archive I found the following statement I wrote to accompany a John Moores Painting prize submission. The painting was shortlisted, but not selected. I promise you that I’ve not changed a thing:
In Maryport, Cumbria, there is a public toilet that was once painted turquoise.
ADT fitted one of their distinctive hexagonal alarms to it.
The toilets were subsequently painted, without removing the alarm, a pale yellow.
The toilets were closed up and the alarm was removed, revealing a turquoise hexagon.
On November 6th, 2005 I photographed this.
In 2011, I used Photoshop to turn the picture black and white.
I printed out the picture, gridded it up and painted the image in oils.
Thank you! Thank you!
This is such a timely post, I wouldn’t even raise an eyebrow if I find out my tutor is behind this topic getting raised… 🙂
Go on, I dare you to post something you’ve written…
Give it a go. Very boring compared to yours. This is for a group exhibition coming up in July. Welcome feedback.
Keith Greenough is a British photographer based in South East England and has a particular interest in portraiture. His work investigates the strategies for ‘disarming the pose’ of his portrait subjects.
Keith is also a triathlete and competes in daylong ‘Ironman’ races. The photographs on show at this exhibition take ‘Ironman’ and its impact on his life as their subject.
‘Ironman Family’ is a series of portraits of friends who are fellow competitors. The work seeks to confound the vernacular idea of portraiture and invites speculation about the general nature of people who take part in endurance sports and why they challenge themselves to the extreme.
‘I am an Ironman’ tries to convey what the grinding routine of the physical training for the races feels like. The work comprises of 30 self-portraits. Each was made immediately after a training workout with Keith still dressed in his training kit. The idea was to capture himself at moments when he was too tired and distracted to pose.
Keith is in the final stages of completing a degree in photography at the Open College of the Arts. Photographers Rineke Dijkstra and Bettina Von Zwehl have been as key influences on his work. I am an Ironman was recently shown at the Photofusion Salon13 in London.
I think its fine, but I’d tighten it up a bit.
If you’ll indulge my inner-copyeditor…
From:
Keith Greenough is a photographer and triathlete based in South East England with a particular interest in portraiture. His work investigates the strategies for ‘disarming the pose’ of his portrait subjects.
‘Ironman Family’ seeks to confound the vernacular idea of portraiture, inviting speculation about the general nature of people who take part in endurance sports and why they challenge themselves to the extreme.
‘I am an Ironman’ tries to convey what the grinding routine of the physical training for the races feels like. Each of the self-portraits were made immediately after a training workout, capturing the moments when Keith was too tired and distracted to pose.
Keith is in the final stages of completing a degree in photography at the Open College of the Arts. Photographers Rineke Dijkstra and Bettina Von Zwehl have been as key influences on his work. I am an Ironman was recently shown at the Photofusion Salon13 in London.
Thanks for that Bryan….does sound slicker!!
You’re welcome Keith. Conflating similar claims is a useful starting point. You’re a photographer and a triathlete. Putting them in the same place (which is what the work does) reduces a potential hierarchy, I think.
This is what I wrote about my photo of a stain on a lamp post
territoire
This piece interrogates the extraordinary immediacy and transformative process of mark making. Subverting the boundary between the zeitgeist of our times (banality and decay) and that of neo modernism. It should not be interpreted as a picture of dog wee, but a reaction against dog wee. The dog wee is of course a metaphor for territorial individuality, but also opens a space in which to explore other metaphors of state change (liquid to solid), viewpoint and sensuality (visual versus olfactory). Taking the piece altogether it extracts meaning through the interface of contemporary photographic practice and drawing (mark making) to invite us to raise our eyes from the ground and look to the skies.
This reminds me of the catalogue commentary on a painting in the Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin ‘Black Relief Over Yellow and Orange’ by Ellsworh Kelly, ‘the fruit of observations of nature…a joyful, crystal clear celebration of objects and place. Secular, free from quasi-religious justification for ecstasy or revelation, the paintings bear witness to a conscious specific experience that has no meaning outside its visual, haptic quidity.’ Three rectangles in yellow, black and orange. Maybe a great painting but the words do it a disservice.
Although that’s definitely over-written (in my opinion) it does say something interesting. It disallows a non-secular reading and encourages a focus on the physicality of the painting-as-object. The title does that, too, and I suspect that’s a much better statement than the one that’s appended to the work. However, we probably can’t rule out the possibility that the artist (or whoever wrote that) is having a bit of fun at our expense, while being honest.
as always Bryan, you have provided some really useful info for students (and others!)