The Artist’s Underword

This post is written in response to a request made by Sanjida (read her post here)…thanks Sanjida, was searching for a stimuli which could steer me away from my usual tales of woes. You provided it to me, I am steering a-w-a-y!!!

About artists and art-statements…about artists, academic researches/resources and life…

I attempted to be a Marxist once; I still am in my ideological orientations, if not in practice and life-style…therefore I think artworks should have a statement. But qualifying: artists convey things more clearly during a moment of social crisis. Now you would say isn’t every moment of history a moment of social crisis, when the powerful is making it hard for the powerless? Yes, it is. But artists go for clear-cut statements only during those moments of crises when the people are in need of and are capable of understanding statements, they don’t always remain in that receptive state always. Except during the moments of impending revolutions people hardly need artists (except those fleeting moments of being entertained). So that’s the thing: the public don’t need artists, so artists don’t need making statements…artists better be left alone with their curiously pointless chores they are involved in, only artists know that time is running away fast and they have things to do! Worse, they sometimes don’t clearly know what they want to do! It’s not like goal-oriented corporate projects you see…and more confusing it becomes, more exciting and fruitful the experience turns out to be!

Artworks have statements, but in these times of callousness and ignorance to artistic reception, artists should hide their statements but still hit it where it should hit, reading/viewing/hearing our works people should feel a kind of punch but they should not have an idea from where the punch came from. They must work it out! We artists toil, we slog…things can’t be so easily consumed and commented upon, and artists should not provide footnotes or manuals to their works.

But you know Sanjida the cultural industry, within the vortex of which we would be sucked in, would ask precisely what your ‘statements’ are. You know why? In his ‘What is an Author?’ Michel Foucault hinted that during the wee hours of modernity it was the scientists – not artists – who were required to ‘sign’ their ‘works’; because a Galileo or a Copernicus was going against the church and the idea that the king were divine descendants empowered to rule; so they ought to be marked so that they can be penalised. In our era, via technocentrism and applied science, the powerful have appropriated science, but artworks are still not entirely gobbled up, so they need statements…

Are they paranoid of sedition? Is your work seditious? Might not be, they are just setting a norm, ‘cause being a sensible and sensitive being you might turn out to be angry and impatient someday, you might scream through your works. Broadly, it is a way of killing artworks and the process of creation, this demand of being lucid and precise and immediately comprehensible, in other words, instantly consummable (and forgettable). Should we forget that only those artworks linger which has an irritating air of incomprehensibility around it coupled with an allure? Art needs to be seductive and enigmatic in these moments of finance capitalism.

Because right you are: they want you to write yourself in all lucidity and precision when they ask you to write about your art. An artist, who is a complex being, who is always in flux, always growing and mutating, receiving stimuli from the world and reacting subliminally…how can she be summed up within word-limits? Why should she be? Because she is dangerous.

But what can you do then? Well, I have my ways. Artists can be blunt, should be misleading, dishonest, capricious, not in his works, but in his statements. Ask Quentin Tarantino, someone who vows not be serious, if his Kill Bill vol II is a feminist statement or not, ask him if he has subverted a very masculinistic genre/medium of superheroes and action cinema or not, not only making it entirely woman-centric but also rendering it feminine (i.e. not about doped-up, muscled-up masculinised women, the difference between Uma Thurman and Pamela Anderson; but about women who cry and kill because they are wounded mothers, its about motherhood and sisterhood in a boy’s genre)…Q will just laugh it away! Artists are clever people, armed with cunning, they know how to survive, they know how to dupe and bribe the powerful, because they know that only they are capable of making hidden statements which will be understood/deciphered in posteriority. And artists should never, ever elucidate themselves, because a reader/viewer must work out the meaning investing at least a few fraction of cerebral labour that the artist spends; as specialised readers, we artists know that the pleasure of experiencing an artwork lies exactly in the pursuit of this elusive structures of design and meaning…

Time for an example. The history of cinema features a couple of great artists who were co-patriots, contemporaries and great visionaries of the medium. I am talking of Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov of the Soviet cinema in the 1920s. Now, while Eisenstein’s films were overtly political, Vertov’s were not apparently so. A man much ahead of times, Dziga Vertov almost predicted what the visual medium might be 80 years after he was working in his couple of feature-length films and numerous short ones, but he was apparently more of an aesthete to maverick Eisenstein’s loud-pamphleteer. Lenin’s was the period of avant-garde’s paradise in the USSR; Stalin arrives, and one of the first thing to be curbed was avant-gardism of any sorts, branded as anti-people because of its difficulty and ‘elite’ outlandishness. The aesthete received the earliest blow, Vertov submitted numerous scripts to be rejected until his patience waned and he simply faded out. Eisenstein, after suffering similar tribulations, decided to make few films which shunned contemporaneity and therefore controversy and was based on medieval Russian heroes; only the posterity knows that his Alexanders Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible are nothing but veiled criticisms of an autocratic monarch. He had the last laugh. Vertov was an honest good-hearted man, Eisenstein had the cunning.

I don’t know Sanjida if I have engaged properly with the questions which you put forward, but I felt engaged. Thanks mademoiselle! I haven’t discussed another part of your question. My next post here will try to respond to that and I will also provide a link to another sort of reply in the other blog of mine.

Related post: Writing me in, writing me out