How To Talk About Your Work

I attended a lecture/Q+A session this morning with curator/critic Barbara O'Brien, former editor of ArtNewEngland this morning. It was the third talk I've attended of hers (once when she introduced her exhibit Standing On One Foot at Gordon College, and another time with the art critic Donald Kuspit as Simmons College, where she now teaches). I'm been impressed each time by her sensitivity; usually I think of The Art World as a very scary and brittle political space with a clandestine sense of manners; a single wrong move can you booted or blacklisted. Barbara O'B., though, always communicates a sense of humanity and reverence, if you will, for the artist as person, and their work as an essential aspect of that. I like that.

Her talk today was on presenting your work to curators and galleries; the public, business side of being an artist. She said, interestingly, that in an artist's statement she doesn't necessary want to find out about the conceptual or emotional trappings of a work; she wants first to connect to the work on a physical level, on the level of materials and practice - and then discover its meaning later for herself. I love that; as for me the original meaning of the artwork is not something that the audience necessarily needs to know to appreciate it. I don't want my art to speak for itself necessarily (of course we could spend a long time unpacking exactly what that means), but rather to present a unified sybolic matrix that the viewer can extrapolate from. My repetition of rabbits, birds, metal leaf placement, etc. is meant to evoke a series of connections that will give viewers spaces to build their own narrative connections on. Time and time again the things that people tell me they see or 'understand' from looking at the paintings are widely divergent from my own initial understanding of the work, and while showing the work in progress, my continued work on a piece has often been influenced by what viewers have said. So in that sense, I would say that the work is collaborative.

Umm...trying to reunite this thought-train...in the end I got to talk to Ms. O'Brien for about thirty seconds. I've introduced myself every time I've met her, but of course she doesn't remember me :). She asked me about my work and I found myself telling her about my senior thesis work from two years ago, which is still important to me but not really the most logical thing to be telling a curator about, esp. since it's scattered and sold now. Immediately after she wished me the best of luck and walked away, I realized that I should have said something like, "I work on a small-to-medium scale with acrylic and precious metals, using a decorative, Southeast Asian aesthetic and animal imagery to intimately communicate a sense of simultaneous power, threat and vulnerability." Oh well...next time. We are only succinct in our own heads I guess.

P.S. After my Barbara blunder, another artist I know invited me to submit to an invitation-only juried exhibit, which I'm really excited about! The deadline's coming up though (they always are) so i'll need to get cracking to have my piece in.