23/03: artspeak:

a sound installation based on semi literate utterances by contemporary art curators.

When I was fifteen years old I was sent to a fabulous art school on London, England called Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts, or Camberwell, crafty school, as the bus conductor indicating my bus stop, called it.

It was at the height of a period when drawing was taught as an absolute, as a method of training, not only the hand to be skillful and the eye to observe, but the brain to assimilate, organize and recreate our observations filtered through our own histories, experiences and contexts.

I loved art and artists of all kinds, not just painters but musicians and writers and filmmakers and sculptors, later performance art, video and computer based art, sound installations, you name it, I was interested.

Then something peculiar began to happen, at first it was almost imperceptible and it seemed to coincide with the movement away from an apprenticeship based learning forum (working artists), to a university based forum (talking artists).
Instead of serious aesthetic discussion, we began to be subjected to gushes about technique and intentions, academia had co-opted the artists brief attempts to control their own creative future.

Curators began to curate the work of other curators, producing exhibits based on museum collections. Novels became “literary” they read as though the author was trying to win a prize, poets began writing for other poets, form over concept. Worse, the use of linguistically inept phraseology and invented terminology designed it seems, to confuse and obfuscate, became the basis for “critical analysis” A constant reference to other peoples opinions (usually dead French philosophers) and a total avoidance of a personally experienced awareness, was now the norm. This approach flies in the face of two things my father taught me:

“ A persons intelligence is measured by how many people they can enlighten, not by how many they can confuse”

“Writing and talking about something that you have not personally experienced, is lying and is of no value to you or your audience”

ArtSpeak takes favourite phrases that have been published in catalogues or art magazines as part of “critical essays” and/or articles for or against the work of a particular artist or group of artists, or in support of, or to rail against a particular theory or idea. The text is both spoken and written onto two blackboards wired with contact and vibration mics. This information is fed into a simple mixer and with a minimum of interference via filters and effects, played out to the listener as an informational loop. As more phrases are written on to the boards the loop grows and changes producing an endless and constantly evolving work.

Here are ten phrases that I have found in contemporary curatorial writings, please add your favourites and build the project.

1.unproblematized historical trajectories.
2.conflating unrecuperated literary analogies.
3.our artistic ‘upbringing’ gives us an insiders sense of content/form camouflage strategies.
4.existential relief in obsession.
5.through problematizing the authority of historical narratives,
a multiplicity of histories and conclusions emerge.
6.occluding the performative absence.
7.subjectivising the topology of place-ness
9.unstable narrative sites.
10.a futurist sound cloaked in the irony of retroactivity.


ArtSpeak: installation view

email for information:lance olsen

lance  installations