The Readers’ Underwords

To continue with my response to Sanjida’s post, where responses are trickling in…with Sulz, Biyang Hansen, a ‘photowriter’ whom I had the pleasure to discover, and CJWriter, a very like-minded ‘mind-kin’, being eloquent enough. Picking up strands of their thoughts, which issued from Sanjida’s unease with ‘artist statements’, an idea against which I reacted strongly in my last post:

Biyang: Actually, I think the best way to make an “artist statement” is to get somebody else to do it. Seriously.
Having somebody else to describe you and your art does not put any bounds on your options to express yourself. It is merely their opinion and will count as such however close it may be to your own opinions.

Sulz: biyang offered a good perspective, even though i feel to an extent only the artist can truly understand his art and therefore would be the best person to explain it. i don’t how inspiration works with artists, but as a writer (of some sort) i’m inspired by thoughts and issues that mean something to me, and that is my reason for what i produce. i cannot write something out of the blue and not know why i wrote it; it would have no meaning to me.

CJWriter: I don’t really go for a statement as such, but I do think it’s important you have something to define what your work (or art) is about. People can speculate but you’re really the only one who knows exactly what inspired you, what you mean your work to represent. It’s great having somebody review your work and say what they got from it, but sometimes the differences can define you in the eyes of other people (their words make up someone else’s mind about you, if that makes sense). That’s something I’m uncomfortable with. But I can see why people would like to let their work stand by itself as well, so I guess it’s really up to the individual artist.

I was thinking how artists/writers can illuminate their own works, providing a meta of sorts. I am also keeping in mind some of Sanjida’s initial thoughts, which no one is still touching as such:

Coming back to serious research….what are the worthy resources? Of course there are the obvious must-read books. But I am beginning to question the empiricist way of learning things. Most often, I wouldn’t know how to relate stuff I know through books to my regular everyday life. If everything in the universe is interconnected, there must be a way to relate everything to every other thing by comparing theories of multiple disciplines. I am yet to figure out a personal learning process that will enable me to do that. And unless I am thus ENabled, I won’t feel EMpowered enough to write an artist statement.

Should someone write about his own work? If one does, does it render the ‘original’ artwork redundant, ‘cause its lacking something? Or should they be considered as rejoinders/afterthoughts/footnotes to the ‘original’ and be considered as a continuation? In my previous post I talked about certain artists’ mischievousness. I still stand by it. Eccentric, you might label me…but I think that artists toil and slog, and they slog hard; they cannot make their works easily consumable (unless they are really paid a helluva lot of dough!). I am not being an old-fashioned modernist, I am accusing the common receivers’ habit of shorter attention span, instant gratification and shallow comprehensibility that the culture industry coupled with consumerism brews. And which medium can be more exemplary of that than the one I am currently dabbling in and you are engaging with than blogging?

Depends. If you consider blogging as artistic expression. I do. But that’s beyond the point.

But blogging is liberatory, in more than one way. I am arriving at my point. I think Biyang is missing Sanjida’s point because if ‘somebody else’ provides a statement about an artist and her works(s) then it ceases to be a ‘artist statement’, it mutates to a commentary/criticism. I think then the discussion ensuing is a comparison between an ‘artist statement’ and a ‘commentary’ on it. There had been ‘artist statements’…and my experience of teaching/studying concludes that such statements might be outright unreliable (a Picasso, a Bunuel or a Jean-luc Godard), too dense and personal which might alienate the appreciator, too reluctant and incomprehensive and sometimes outright wrong! Yes, take it from me, I won’t cite examples, artists might be blind to the ramifications of their own works too (okay, read about John Ford’s statements about his own works). And commentaries/criticisms…well, artists’ impatience about such things are well known…though they never deny the importance of such things and often they are eager about them once they publish/exhibit their works. Its almost like the artworks’ second lives beyond the artists’ durations of creation.

But critics/commentators always had been like priests, the interlocutor between the mute God/artist and the curious devotee/spectator/believer who apparently is either ignorant of God’s language or is a bit illiterate. The high-handedness of the critic begins here when he claims to know a specialised language, pedagogically reads between the lines in order to explain the artwork or teach the viewer. Therefore, the entire locution depends solely on the critics’ personal tastes. In Film Theory, the structuralists became very impatient of such subjective critical evaluations when they started practising an analysis which ceases to be either evaluative or prescriptive. But okay, being an academician I know that since we film-theorists have stopped talking in the language which cuts across; we write in a language which one must learn… The academician might be more humble than the critic. He seldom dictates and guides choices of the readers/viewers, but his is a closed-door exercise.

I think I have touched upon Sanjida’s point in the last blockquote.

Now. Since I am reaching the 1000th word of this post I must come to the point. I am thinking about the medium of communication which the critic or the academic resorts to. It had been print, recently it had been the websites. But what we significantly lacked for about one-and-a-half centuries or more is the non-professionals’ experiences of an artwork…and I think blogging provides such a medium. Since theoretically anyone can blog (aha! a net-literate only…me and Sanjida habitat poorer countries), it becomes a medium more democratic even than a website (not the wikis of course) and if one comes across such expressions one knows what we had been missing for decades or more. Print could never be so democratic. Blogging hardly requires any money!

When a blogger writes for a considerable about a book she has read, a movie he recalls or have seen few hours back or a painting which she might hyperlink too she should be someone who is intensely engaging with a artwork. Writing for a considerable length presupposes certain intellectual acumen and certain knowledge of the art-medium. Moreover, whenever I come across a post about a book a blogger is either reading or have just completed, I enjoy a strong streak of immediacy and contingecy of views in such a post. Artists always enjoyed such immediacies when they talk with one of their readers/viewers; but I have also witnessed the sheer presence of the artist often inhibiting or distorting the others’ spontaneity. Blogging frees the commoner of such aberrations.

The experience of the artwork by someone else. I think that is what the artist is always eager to share, rather than expressing his intentions or hearing specialists’ commentaries.

Sanjida, I haven’t exactly dealt with your concern of how the artist can relate to multi-disciplinary theories; but doesn’t it provide me ample food for the next post?

A Post peculiarly related: Still Writing me In