Project 2: Artist Platforms, Promotion and Documentation

Research Task: Artist Writing as a Practice

Read the interview Writing as a Visible Practice: An Interview with Maria Fusco, by Chris Sharratt for Art & Education publishing platform, November 2018.

I have read the interview with great interest. I share Maria Fusco’s perspectve on the “art writing” term as she puts it: ” Phrases are very useful for building a constituency of people who are interested in challenging the practice, but now I think that “interdisciplinary writing” is a clearer, more nuanced phrase; “art writing” now has a smack of antiquity about it.” (https://www.e-flux.com/education/features/229480/writing-as-a-visible-practice-an-interview-with-maria-fusco).

I resonate with this opinion because every time I used to write about art since Level 2, I always ended up thinking about philosophical, cultural, theological, psychological and aesthetic concepts which are separate, vast and solid disciplines. Thus, I can say the author’s point is absolutely valid. Art is a complex intellectual activity because it is inherently interdisciplinary in its core nature, so writing about it from different, single views or an ambiguous platform would be a shallow approach.

I expected the journalist to ask more questions about how to improve the writing, but he was more focused on Maria Fusco’s teaching practices. He asked one question: “CS: What do you ultimately hope an artist, a writer, will gain from learning interdisciplinary writing?”, Maria Fusco’s answer was general, although relevant, but I would dig deeper into that. I wish the quality of questions would be better; my “appetite” to learn about Artist writing was not satisfied at all. If I were able to interview Maria Fusco, I would ask the following questions:

-What artist’s writing do you find as a must-read for every Fine Art student? Whose artistic writing do you find to be of a top standard so far?

-What are the characteristics of high-quality and poor art writing?

-Is there any historical/cultural art writing tradition in the world which has been around for many years, students might look at and research?

– How vital are philosophy, history, sociology, cultural studies and psychology for ancient and modern art writing? Can you provide an example of good art writing that is done on an interdisciplinary platform?

Tim Etchells (1962-)

Tim Etchells (2018) in Susie Pentelow, Swimming Against the Tide: An interview with Tim Etchells, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead VITRINE [online].

Tim Etchells’ interview was another great and engaging read for me. He explores the relationship between the artwork and the viewer, the emerging dynamic, and the development of the context as soon as the viewer interacts with the artwork. His personal artistic inspiration centres on the text, the phrase that is the main subject of his work, and the semantics of that phrase. His short but capacious phrases, which he installs in neon at carefully curated locations, remind me of the traditional Japanese haiku literary approach. His interview was interesting for me because I also share an interest in well-crafted texts and great literature. I don’t exclude this creative area for my future projects, and I resonate with his point of view that texts have a certain special power over us. The text, the phrase, is a self-sufficient and unique phenomenon that has tremendous power over human consciousness. I checked his neon light and other installations, and I understood that he prefers to focus viewers’ attention on the semantics of the phrase, without any distraction from other visual elements, which are minimal. Essentially, for him, it is all about the text and location, which create unity, thereby speaking to the viewer. I resonate with his artistic style and genre.

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View this 11 minute video conversation between Ingrid Pollard and Lubaina Himid produced by Baltic gallery.

“Ingrid Pollard (born 1953, Guyana) uses photographs, prints, moving image and audio to uncover the layered histories of representation. Melding together ephemera with iconic images; the English with the African, it makes visible the invisible, to reveal in her words ‘what we always knew was there’. While investigating race, ethnicity and public spaces she has developed work juxtaposing landscape and portraiture which provide a context for issues of migration, family and home.”

I watched the interview and cannot say that it had any significant impact on me. There are many reasons for that. One reason is that the interviewer didn’t do a great job; she was focused on the artist’s feelings and approach to creative practice, although asking very conventional questions. The artist was giving conventional answers — that didn’t help either. I know it sounds very critical, but after reading Van Gogh’s letters to his brother Theo, which are heavily loaded with profound thinking and insights into his creative practice, I established a standard for this kind of artist talk. Van Gogh was powerful in writing and articulating his thoughts, which he did in a refined and poetic way. I had to look on the internet to understand the context of the artist’s “Black Boy” photography, texts, and pub signs showcase. Ingrid Pollard’s work is certainly notable, as she is a Turner Prize Finalist. However, even though I fully acknowledge the creativity of the multidisciplinary approach, when considering the show’s impact on the viewer, which the artist aimed to achieve — exploring racism in modern times — it is somewhat weak. It is weak not because it is poorly done, nor because people are not interested in the topic, or the theme of the exhibition is not relevant and should not be investigated, but instead because the creative exploration of the historical theme of racism and black slavery has already produced an enormously talented and high-quality standard artworks. I am speaking about such movies as “Amistad”(1997), “Django Unchained” (2012), “Harriet” (2019) and many more. The movie is a much more profound and powerful interdisciplinary genre, so the scale and the magnitude of its impact ( the alignment of literature base/story and screenplay, actors’ energy, music and sound, strong visual dynamic) strongly outweighs the silence of the white gallery space, filled with some photographs, pub signs and edited texts. This drastic contrast between the power of genres working on the same theme led me to the realisation that the artists must be aware of this dynamic and consider how to present their project, which can differ in approach but not be weak, especially if the artist is working with a historical context and narrative. The artist explains that she didn’t arrange the objects (the elements of her showcase) in a particular order, leaving viewers plenty of space for their own thoughts to freely navigate the space between them. That was her curating strategy. I find it kind of contradictory to her initial impulse to make people think about how insulting it is for black people still to see this kind of pub sign in modern Britain. It means that the artist has a definite opinion about the situation, which led her to decide to draw attention to it socially. In my opinion, historical context highlights the need for more definitive curation, which can amplify its impact.