Whenever I see project statements from visual artists, I see one look at ‘my work is impressionistic…’ and toss it aside.
Curators I’m sure do it as well. If not, they really should.
I tell all my visual arts students, when you write, toss away those ‘isms’. Toss away those academic terminologies. Write simply. Please do not use five syllable words and run on sentences.
Louis Bourgois said: An artist's words are always to be taken cautiously. The finished work is often a stranger to, and sometimes very much at odds with what the artist felt, or wished to express when he began.
An artists’ statement should add to, not summarize, their work. It is like stepping out of your little world and inviting others in.
Here are some sentences I’ve come across that makes me want to fling the paper across the room. Or, these days, shut down the laptop, a thing I rarely do.
In my art, I try to capture the beauty in the mundane.
Or another one I found on Art Narc: Be that in the battles of the self or the overwhelming and confusing chaos that is our modern times, I seek to find the essence of what it means to be human today; be that the fragility or the resilience of the human animal in the face of endless and impossible questions of life itself.
Trouble is, to write simply, is the hardest thing of all which is why writing is often filled with banalities and cliches. To write simply, means to truly understand what you are trying to say. If you really know what you’re talking about, the language will naturally follow.
Here’s what I tell my students. And in fact, also to seasoned journalists like my father, who knows more than anyone about religion and Bengal politics but while writing his own memoirs, had me turned off by the second page:
Write as though you’re explaining a concept to a five year old child. Assume that your audience knows nothing but do not over explain either— which is often a pitfall. Do not write an academic paper. Do not try to sound smart. Be simple and honest.
Once asked to write a full story in six words, legend has it that novelist Ernest Hemingway responded: "For Sale: baby shoes, never worn."
Filmmaker Satyajit Ray used the same philosophy.
I always feel that bad writing often reflects an inflated ego—or perhaps uncertainty— on one side of the spectrum and laziness on the other. If you are confident, you do not try to impress. If you take time to think before putting down a sentence, you wouldn’t use jargons as crutches.
But when it comes to formal writing, people freeze. They use five syllable words and every terminology they’ve come across in a pamphlet found in a museum: impressionism, juxtaposition, duality, expressionism, spirituality.
Please kill me as I cry.
What really does duality in life experience mean? How would you explain it to your little child, niece or nephew? You might say: well, I grew up in one country but my father and mother were from somewhere else. So I am from two places and there is two of me. A little of this place and a little of that.
Say it like that. Don’t be embarrassed to use a thesaurus. Don’t use more than one adjective in a sentence. Keep it clean and sparse, like a minimalist website without too much clutter and pop ups.
Ultimately, a foggy sentence reflects a foggy mind.
So, tell me a story, I say to them.