I wrote an article years ago about artist’s lingo ( click here ) and in sleuthing for backup of that point I surfed the internet and artist websites and their “artist statements” in particular, to see if I could decipher and cull the lingo and vernacular of artists and start to understand it. I found a shocking array of unreadable paragraphs that sounded complicated yet sort of meaningful but actually left me cold and empty with regards to meaning and substance. I must freely admit that I am an artist and am also an art teacher for about 20 and 15 years respectively. I could look in my own closet for linguistic skeletons passed out like too much Halloween candy not respecting the auditory cavities I might leave behind. I catch myself sometimes using not necessarily big words, of which I have limited recall, but longer than necessary or repetitive and sometimes confusing statements, not intentionally uttered, but offered almost as a byproduct of trying to explain the peculiarities of artmaking, of which there are many. So, why the heck would I say the same thing three times differently when one short burst would suffice?
Call it insecurity or something like that. We all have insecurity and the artist’s insecurities are no different than “normal” ones except that the process of making art opens little, or even big windows onto that secret place of uncertainty we hide away from many but our most trusted confidants. Making art can be a humbling, vulnerable occupation more of the time than not. Creation comes partly from peering down that deep well of uncertainty and seeing what might be reflected back or what may even lie hidden below the surface. Faith is a powerful tool in our artistic toolbox and faith that we won’t fall into the well even as we stretch to peer deeper and teeter on the edge of whatever precipice we’ve created always underpins the process. When that faith exhausts out of the room like so much oxygen leaving our ego gasping for breath, vulnerable, insecure, it’s going to seek something to sustain it.
Enter the big words.
I’ll diverge here and offer a snippet of a scene. For the setting, imagine a college campus and you are the intrepid art student doing your best to fit into a world in which everyone is doing their best not to fit in…
You feel vulnerable and crappy because your art is coming out crappy (we could write a whole different article on the relative health of feeling so intrinsically good or bad if your art is good or bad.) You are 20 years old and you need to take your art piece to class in all its crappiness and to do your best not to feel punched in the gut when your crappy feelings are hurt by your paunchy, bearded, white, male art teacher. A funny thing happen as you sit and listen to the discussion about your crappy art – it’s described as “working on a tactile level, which creates a visceral reaction that is palpable in a really fundamental way.” You like how that sounds! Another comment is that “the distribution of kinetic marks activates the surface in a way that is emotive.” Boy, this feels good! A last utterance describes “a tension between the nuance of compression and decompression in the artist’s touch.” Ok, that last didn’t make much sense but it sure felt great! Somewhere in between these statements was a comment about using different color and perhaps spending more time on the work… Reasonable… but those other comments where so much more mysterious and they sounded so full of meaning! Great!
What we have just witnessed is a not uncommon exchange in art school, elaborated a bit for effect but not necessarily uncommon.
At its core, art making leaves us vulnerable and we often feel crappy and uncertain of our actual versus desired results. The art we make is also communicating with a language (the language of paint in my case) that is potentially imprecise for what we want to say (all language is somewhat imprecise but some more so than others) We then want to best say something we strongly believe in and with strong belief comes a greater desire for things to work effectively. The result of all these variables compounding is a sense of unease and uncertainty that is often overpowering. It takes guts to admit your uncertainty and instead what often fills the void are those statements and words we have heard, read or even uttered that describe art with large words that sound, on the surface, unquestionably meaningful (see above example) even if we aren’t quite sure what they mean. I think they really often hold their meaning in their ability to confuse and create vulnerability in the listener because the listener doesn’t dare admit they don’t understand what they just heard! We do need to communicate and we need to express complicated things with confidence but we so often overcompensate with words that cover our uncertainty with their own supposed “big” meaning we end up not really communicating at all.
I recently heard a radio show where the host was talking with a Yale professor on a particular subject in the professor’s specialty. Almost every statement offered by this Yale professor was prefaced by “I taught this in my class…” or “in my class, we talked about…” Every time I heard this preface it was as if this professor needed just a little extra meaning offered by her association with Yale University and her class. It was as if the information offered wasn’t quite meaningful enough but with an association with her class it became just meaningful enough. I’ll admit to doing much the same in my own teaching as I’ll relate a certain point to a mentor of mine even though the point has intrinsically become my own. If my mentor (who I respect deeply) said it then of course the point has just a little bit more meaning and power than if just little old me said it. I don’t advocate against this kind of association if reasonably employed but there is an obscuring of the meaning if we as the audience start to hear the uncertainty that is masked behind whatever device is employed. I stopped hearing what this Yale professor said because I could only hear “in my class…” and I doubted what came next. We artists do much the same in describing our work with those big words and statements.
In the end, artist will use big words. We will hide behind them and also use them with a true understanding of their meaning. Better? Worse? Most important is that we communicate because, at the real end of the day, that is our job.
