In response to my post on 19 July Roxana asked why I chose ‘to write the explanatory text so objectively/scholarly’. First to the prosaic reasons: Writing for an exhibition catalogue was quite a challenge, but apart from the briefest mentions in reviews I have not had my work written about professionally and so had to write the text myself. I sure wanted it to be able to stand up with the other texts in the catalogue. But there’s more.
I find the change of position – from maker to viewer (to reviewer?) - stimulating. These positions are contrary and complementary and intertwined and here tied up in a kind of close-knitted/knotted bundle. Writing is a looking back, an assessment usually months after the work was completed, when some degree of distance from the impetus for the work and its production has been gained. It’s a fresh look, a changed look, and newly penetrating - I’ve often discovered elements that I hadn’t noticed while I was working on the individual pieces. Hopefully it’s also a more critical one (within reason, it’s still all about me me me).
Writing is as important to me as my visual art, and I enjoy trying it out in different ways. It is interesting to attempt to look at one’s work from inside and outside. Writing can be a different way in, at its sharpest it pierces open membranes which coat troubling facets like scar tissue. Something happens that wouldn’t otherwise - on the one hand it is a distancing process and one of translation maybe, but in a strange way it also allows me to crawl deep into the work, to inhabit it anew.
It was important to me to produce a text that wasn’t (too) personal. There is a danger of being pinned down on the personal / emotional / feminine and thus narrowly judged and somewhat dismissed. When you get personal or biographical, people often take the easy road and read the work just through what they think they know, looking for links to me, to my life, to being ill. That’s just too simple/simplifying. Explorations of difference and otherness have featured in my (practical and theoretical) work since art-college. The kind of critical thinking learned there is one of the most cherished elements of my education. So in the setting of a professional exhibition with a professional catalogue I wanted a professional text, even if I wrote it myself. Seeing it in print now I can only hope I’ve pulled it off. (Check out Roxana's blog The floating bridge of dreams - it is quite wonderful.)
4 comments:
now I understand. I want to thank you for this answer, and especially for writing this: "Writing can be a different way in, at its sharpest it pierces open membranes which coat troubling facets like scar tissue. Something happens that wouldn’t otherwise - on the one hand it is a distancing process and one of translation maybe, but in a strange way it also allows me to crawl deep into the work, to inhabit it anew." It touches me immensly. and now I have to think about my inability to follow you here. I couldn't talk about my pictures the way you did about your work. the main reason, but not the only one, is that they allow me to inhabit the silence, to go beyond the categories of the mind (I don't want to use big words, but this is simply the truth).
but of course I am not a 'true' artist. and thinking about it, I realize how impossible (and certainly funny) it would be for me to try to write 'scholarly' about my job-related work (being what the germans call a 'literaturwissenschaftler' :-). it would be like writing a review for a book that I have published. hmm. why does this sound so ridiculous - or at least like a weird critical experiment - but it makes perfect sense in the artist's case? :-) I have to think about it.
and I also want to thank you for recommending my blog, I am truly honoured.
Hey Roxana, In bed last night I realised that in my answer to you I’d written about two things, got them a bit muddled up, really. Instead of focussing on why I wrote the catalogue-text like I did I got side-tracked by my passion for writing and that passion manifested itself right there and then. Nothing works better for me than writing when I try to approach a subject that I feel kind of wordless about - it feels as if my brain/heart/underbelly fuse momentarily when I get it right. They do too when I make art, but in an entirely different way. Actually I have to think about that a bit more, although I do feel it’s true. It’s all about peeling away layers, both art and writing, isn’t it, until you get to a whirling nucleus which still whizzes away every time you grope for it. And just as well.
In difference to yours my art is not about silence, to the contrary, it is maybe about giving/finding voice where there was (oppressed) silence, so I do hope it ‘speaks’ too.
I don’t really want to have to write ‘scholarly’ about my work. Want more freedom for my writing, but am also quite scared by it. At the moment the blank page terrorizes me, need to find a way to make a (new) start.
And don’t call yourself ‘not a ‘real’ artist’. I’ve only had a short glimpse of your blog but what I’ve seen is art for me. Hope to visit again soon, when I get over this grey fatigue.
I think, that language is your extra way of sensing yourself. Listen to your own words, "on the one hand it is a distancing process and one of translation maybe, but in a strange way it also allows me to crawl deep into the work, to inhabit it anew." I think you give birth to art, and then you crawl back into the womb of that situation and speak to the blood birth brine of its givings, and speak your own life anew. This is a tremendous response; maybe when you are not "scholarly" you are allowing more brilliance to brighten your voice and maybe, maybe you still don't trust its own song. : )
What a wonderful writer you are, marjojo.
Post a Comment