Art Write Barbarous; a challenge to art educators.

In the past couple of weeks more people will have seen more contemporary art than at any other time of the year. It’s final degree show time for art colleges up and down the country, and mums and dads, brothers and sisters, girlfriends and boyfriends, and even that strange bloke down the street that everyone calls “uncle”, dutifully respond to the invitation to appreciate the aesthetic output of their favourite little creative. I wonder what they all make of it, really. Especially the mums and dads.

I imagine there’s a lot of nodding of heads and stroking of chins. Along with some non-committal gushing – “that’s lovely,” yes, very deep,” “I don’t get it, but I’m sure it’s terrific!” – as they gaze at a video installation that reminds them of the time their old black and white TV blew its tube; a sculpture consisting of an easy chair, a set of false teeth and a harpoon; and a painting that looks like the aftermath of a forklift debacle in the Dulux aisle at Homebase. But, they’ll be thinking, this is modern art; it’s sort of what we expected. It’s meant to be a bit incomprehensible.

Then they’ll take a sly shufty at the accompanying exhibition notes for some further enlightenment, and will be confronted with a paragraph not dissimilar to the following:

My practice is located in a situation rooted in the play of signification, a point the significance of which is precisely indeterminate. Between the push of space that enfolds an envelopment and time, that pulls a fast one; writing. Not necessarily in conventional, prescribed, orthodoxy: letters, words, sentences, punctuations adding up, accumulating, accruing, but don’t amount to one single meaning. Investigation, exploring and interrogations are means to reveal and unravel our human conditioning that has been with us as man on this opacity we call the planet almost forever until, now that we are living in circumstances of post-temporal duration. When, as the philosopher Jacques Rancierre has written, language has lost its legitimacy as legislator of the communicable and the image has instantiated the absentiation of actuality. I am interested in parsing the transgressive hybridity of unnarrativisable representative reading and texts that are not answerable to recognisable logophalloheterocentric literalisms but proliferate with unspeakable palimsestuous profligacy.

Now, is it likely on reading this passage that your average parent will think; my my, hasn’t our Cassandra come on leaps and bounds! At home she’s never off Facebook, we’d never suspect her capable of such intellectual fireworks from what we’ve seen there. Or; crikey, that Nathaniel has hidden depths! We’ve never had any conversation from him in three years except “dunno,” “whatever,” and “dad, can you lend me twenty quid!” But look, he’s become a veritable prodigy of philosophical acumen. Marvellous.

Or is it more likely they will respond with embarrassed incomprehension? Maybe even simmering anger if the parent concerned has any feel for the English language.

It’s not fair to blame the students for this state of affairs. They are obviously mimicking the prevailing style of art writing, which they see modelled by their lecturers and the whole art establishment. I’ve read a lot of material from academic art departments recently and can confidently assert that art teachers write even worse than their counterparts in English Studies, and that’s saying something. They write worse than philosophers. They even write as abominably as sociologists! And that’s the most offensive insult that I can think of, as I’ve never yet encountered a sociologist who could manage a decent declarative sentence, who wasn’t a corrupter, molester, and vile abuser of the English tongue.

Consider the above passage again. The first thing that assaults you is its sheer ugliness. How, you may wonder, could anyone who has spent three years thinking about aesthetics and making art, serve up such a dogs dinner of a paragraph? Why is this atrocity acceptable, and normal even?

And why not even the vaguest grasp of basic rules of punctuation, grammar, syntax and word meaning? I’m all for breaking the rules, experimenting, playing daring games with language – but you have to know the rules first, otherwise you end up looking like an arsehole. I’ve met circus horses who could hoof commas more accurately than demonstrated here, and a couple of chimps on a word processor would exhibit a better grasp of sentence structure.

Why in so much of this twaddle the repeated rhetorical gesture about the multiplicity, instability, and variability of meaning? Being able to locate a single, solitary, consistent thought in any of this morass of meaning-depleted dross would be a bonus.

And since when did artists start describing what they do as a “practice”, and when did the verb “practice” entirely flip its connotation? I’m sure I remember a time when practice was something you did without thinking about it too much, then theory came along some time after to explain, illuminate, and reveal what it was you were really doing. These days it seems that “practice” is a derivative of theory, simply there to illustrate a position, embody a point, flesh out an ideology that exists independently and prior to the artistic product. This may be progress, I don’t know. But it would be good if the exposition of the idea was intelligible.

I’ve just spent a couple of hours with my niece, a talented artist who is applying for university next year. She was howling with laughter when I read her some of the stuff I’ve collected from final degree shows, and thankfully she hasn’t been got at yet by the art establishment. She still thinks and talks and writes like a normal, intelligent, well informed human being who loves art . . . but for how long? Once she goes to uni she’ll be subject to massive peer pressure to behave as if art talk is acceptable. So, here’s my question to peddlers of art wank in institutions of higher education; if she gets a place in your department, how will you make sure you don’t teach her to mimic the art idiocy as practised by most of you?

If you indoctrinate her into that shit I will find out where you live!