I just came back from the Kochi art biennale in India.
Galleries, old warehouses, stores had all turned into places to exhibit art from around the world.
We were surrounded by the sights and sound of art
KOCHI SOUND1
Films, paintings that spanned walls, structures that looked termite mounds sprang up inside warehouses baking in the hot sun
KOCHI SOUND
While artists explained their work to onlookers
RATNA
And i suddenly remembered a funny reel I had seen featuring Dan Rosen host of Middlebrow, a self-declared “pseudo-intellectual podcast” about a man following him around the museum for 20 minutes. He confronts him
ROSEN1: Hey hey why are you following me? Its creeping me out.
The man replies:
ARTIST1: “I saw you looking at my painting. You spent six seconds on it. I spent two years on it.”
When Rosen expresses amazement that the artist is just hanging around waiting to see how people are looking at his painting, the artist protests
ARTIST2; “Yes, I have to make sure that people are actually consuming it, digesting it in the proper way and you’re not.”
Art appreciation is an art in itself. There are courses and seminars and I often wish that my STEM education had made more room for the humanities so I understood a little more about art movements and schools of literature. But now you can google everything says a fellow STEM friend reassuringly. But I don’t even know what I don’t know I reply despairingly. So I am usually grateful when art comes with an artist’s statement. It is like a map to some hidden treasure.
But increasingly the artist’s statement can overshadow the art. Crafting one is not a skill that comes naturally to all artists. In a 1936 lecture called “What are Master-Pieces, and Why Are There So Few of Them?” Gertrude Stein said “Nothing could bother me more than the way a thing goes dead once it has been said.” But we live amidst a pandemic of saying where art cannot rest in peace, let alone speak for itself. We must explain it and have it explained so that we know we are, as the Middlebrow reel quipped, “digesting it in a proper way.”
Years ago an artist friend would complain about having to explain his work in interviews. “I just make things because I think they are pretty,” he would say. “But that isn’t good enough. There has to be a deeper meaning.” As someone who worked with words, it became my job to craft his artist statements. “Make me sound smart,” he would say. The ideas were his. The artistry was his. But I would need to come up with pithy statements about it, finding layers of hidden meaning and contemporary cultural relevance so that it “sounded” smart.
Now I am not needed. We have ChatGPT.
Durga Puja in Kolkata is often hailed as the city’s premier public art festival. I have grown up seeing both artistry and gimmickry in the Puja installations. Sometimes it was goddess made out of bottle caps. Sometimes it was Hogwarts or Titanic as themes. It could be cheesy but it was fun and never needed an artist’s statement.
But now that Durga Puja has received the imprimatur of intangible cultural heritage from UNESCO it is becoming increasingly more self-conscious about its status as art aka the artist statements are getting more incomprehensible. I remember walking into one Durga Puja and being gobsmacked by the word salad in the artist’s statement which talked about lingering over colonial edges and navigating spaces to “difference.” I thought the Durga image was striking but the artist’s statement made my head spin. And every year since it’s been getting progressively more dizzying.
The real problem isn’t the word salad. That would be easy to ignore. It is that art at its best should resonate differently in each viewer’s mind. It thrives in the grey spaces of nuance, in the things left unsaid. The statements at their best can give us a glimpse into where the artist is coming from. But they can also eliminate the fluidity of the experience by telling us exactly what to think.
Words can be boxes too and in their own way they can cage art.
Has it come time to set art free? Even at the risk of being misunderstood.
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata