For some artists I guess the phenomenon of the "artist statement" is a somewhat regrettable one. A lot of artist statements I have read have the scent of coercion about them as if they would rather do anything than talk about their work.
All too often I find that reading what an artist says their work is meant to achieve does the perception of their actual work no end of harm.
I have been told several times not to say anything about my work: the clear assumption being that a work is meant to "speak for itself".
But as we all approach any work of art, even our own, with various frames of reference already in place, the work never ever actually speaks for itself anyway: I have been called a minimalist so many times that it's clear to me that instead of engaging with artworks on their own terms so many of us instead cloak our perception with categories like "isms" to the extent that what is not at all "minimalist" about my work gets overlooked.
For me the writing of texts, about my own or other artist's works, is a way of making space for the works to present themselves: one of my favourite philosophical slogans is the phenomenological principle "to the things themselves".
What Husserl meant in saying this was that the goal of philosophy was not the production of ideas, concepts or interpretations but the renewal of perception, believing that experience is all there is, that what is is what is or has been given to us here, where we are already.
Philosophy in the phenomenological tradition is not about what is beyond the world, but is a way of engaging thoughtfully with the world where we are: the goal of philosophical analysis is not to tell us where we are or should be going but instead where we are already, it does not take us someplace else but rather returns us to where we already are.
I enjoy the process of writing, even when I write about other artists I admire (Rothko, Klein, Marden, Pollock, Judd, Holbein, Vermeer, various 17th century Dutch still-life painters, Innes, Roeth, Martin or Flavin) I am writing about my own work and the directions I want to take.
For me the "artist statement" is literally part of the work, the work would not be what it was without what is for me a necessary detour through writing.
For me writing has the same processes and formal necessities as painting and similar decisions are always at play: my love of the colon, the parenthesis, the fragmentary statement, the allusive, my love of what I would like to call a layered, ambivalent and tentative form of writing, which reproduces as clearly as possible the way thoughts form, which avoids making declarations as much as possible, all this has clear parallels to the directions my visual work has taken.
My writing frames and informs the processes of painting.I often take notes whilst waiting for a surface to settle, dry or set.
Writing is a way of experimenting with a work.
Most artists who write about their work would not admit, as I am about to, that I write as a way of inaugurating, on my terms as it were, initially at least, the terms of a dialogue with the viewer. Every viewer will automatically come to the work with some sort of framework of perception in place. Writing is a way of intervening in an existing framework of interpretation to provide an alternative way of approaching the work.
Writing can be a way of entering into a conversation with a work in its long and often meandering coming-to-be (or, more accurately, its taking place) as if it were not mine, as if I were simply the observer of this event.
This blog is a way of publishing those observations. In some ways they add up to an extensive "artist statement".
No scent of coercion here.
