The Artist Statement -- First draft, critique invited You can't spend much time in the artworld without encountering the ubiquitous artist's statement. This is the official artist explanation of intention and theory. It is the public announcement of each artist's secret code that makes his or her art meaningful and relevant. No artist can do without it for without it there is no new art. The artist's statement implies that the viewer needs to be told how to examine and experience art to avoid misinterpreting it or worse, failing to recognize its importance. This is the thesis of Tom Wolfe's pithy The Painted Word, first published in (1975). He was exposing the influence of critics whose theorizing was being illustrated by eager-to-please artists. It was a masterpiece of middle-brow irony because it reversed the basic premise of art history. For ages it was the artist who created something new, undefined, un-theorized, subjective, and unexplained and it was the critic who made sense of it and sometimes discovered it (as with "primitive" or "indigenous" art).
Now, more than three decades later, Wolf's book has become decidedly un-ironic. While he was aiming at critics who had usurped the artist's role as the creators it is now the artists who usurp the critics by becoming their own theorists, interpreters, and explainers of what they do. Instead of artists illustrating what leading critics preached, artists now illustrate their own theories. They are critics first and artists second. Whatever comes first -- theory -- is the art; what comes second -- illustrating theory -- is not art. Thus the only way to be an artist today is to first of all be a critic and the theorist of one's art. Simply being a maker or creator of artworks as a subjective expression, from "internal necessity" (Kandinsky), is to not be an artist at all. Every young artist in art school quickly learns that becoming an artist is a not so much a matter of gaining studio skills but in learning how to present oneself as an artist, i.e., to be the critic and theorist of the idea that underlies whatever one does or makes as illustrations of that idea. This is the main reason why studio skills are being more and more devalued -- it's called deskilling -- in art schools. Going to art school today does not lead to the production of the "masterpiece" or demonstration of professional skills but to fashioning of the artist's statement, the critical and philosophical declaration -- the art -- that is confirmed by whatever exemplifies it. No one would say that before artists became verbalizing critics and theorists they had no ideas or intentions to guide their artmaking. What was different in the past, however, was the ambiguity and generalized nature of expressed aims. Often, they were poetic, grandiose, subjective and romantic; rarely explicit and declarative in objective terms. Artists knew they had artistic intentions for their work but they could never say, precisely, what they were and why. Or they made them up after the fact, which is fine with me. They made artworks and didn't really know why or if what they did was art except by a sense of inner satisfaction, a recognition of some congealed abundance of Proustian-like metaphor, memory, and feeling. In the past artists seemed to know about the Intentional Fallacy long before Beardsley and Wimsatt explained it. They knew intentions were probably necessary to even begin to make an artwork but they also knew that they were insufficient as proofs of art. They knew that no work of art can be made by prescription. This is no longer the case. Nowadays art is made by prescription and the prescription is the artist's statement. Just as the modern world has evolved into a world where all knowledge is specialized and subdivided and where people are valued according to their specializations, so too are artists now specialized, no longer by skill-sets, such as painter, sculptor and the like but by their artistic intentions as prescribed by their artist statements. In this they follow the mandate of specializations to a very refined degree, not unlike the medical profession where physicians limit themselves to particular anatomic and biologic areas of expertise in order to be best prepared to cure relevant injuries and disease. So too are they like the pharmaceutical scientists who invent new pills to remedy an ever-expanding lexicon of ills or maybe worse, provide for better, more precisely defined, mental health (which presumes broader and broader conditions of mental illness). I think artists know that something is wrong with the purpose of the artist statement even as they know it is crucial for their careers. The evidence for this is the almost universal hedging one notices in them. In writing them artists always avoid being clearly in one zone of activity or another. Unlike the doctor who specializes strictly in, say, afflictions of the hand but not the feet, the artist will usually want to be positioned among ''blurred boundaries'' between, say, abstraction and figuration; unlike the pharmaceutical industry which promotes one pill for neck aches and another for headaches, the artist claims that his or her intentions, theory, what have you, cures at least two or three common art illnesses, while sharply avoiding the vague claims of artistic panacea of earlier artist's sayings, such as Cezanne's, "I want to make of Impressionism something solid and enduring like the art of the museums". No hip young artist of today would begin an artist statement with a sentence like that. Whatever the claims, purposes or values of the artist statement, I am against them as proclamations, prescriptions, promises of intent, theory, exclusionary criticism, or as anything other than awkward to elegant ruminations of interests and desires. It's a simple recognition of real-world fact that no-one knows what makes a work of art -- no definition suffices -- and no artist can presume that anything he or she does is or is not a work of art. There are too many different and changing conditions, not excluding randomness, that ultimately enable some things to be art, maybe for a while, and others to be forever propositional. As scholar ThierrydeDuve has written, "The jury is still always out" (Kant after Duchamp, 1998). Furthermore, since meaning is created -- maybe mostly -- by the audience as well as the artist, what interpretative value does an author's statement of intention have? Despite my objection to artist's statements as if they were proofs of credentials, I am obviously in favor of artists writing or speaking about their interests and how their own art may exemplify one tradition or another or refuse them altogether. Since artists frequently know a lot about art theory and art history, often more than their audiences do, it's reasonable for them to do a little educating in a statement that may help others recognize the complexity of issues -- aesthetic, social, political, and that deconstructed tsunami of post-modernism --any serious artist must confront. But while the complexity of the artist's 'subject' may be daunting to all, it is not, in my view, useful to follow the mandate of our age of specialization, fully suitable to the worlds of science, academic research, industry and commerce, but deadly to the purpose of art to investigate or lay bare the fullest dimensions of human experience in the way it happens, all at once, always in flux, and through neural pathways that lead consciousness hither and yon into every corner of our minds, where all our accumulated frights and pleasures are freshly exposed to our imagining wonder. Art clarifies nothing. It explains nothing. It teaches nothing. Somehow -- again, nobody knows how -- it returns to consciousness the truly awesome and bewildering complexity of our experience. It stimulates us to re-imagine our own narratives, to re-identify ourselves. In doing that we are blended with all others and with history. If forced to write it, my artist statement would say, "I blur everything to accommodate art". William Conger
