Making a statement about art
BY ESTHER ERLICH. I am a visual artist. My work is mostly figurative and includes portraiture and sculpture. I can spend hours on end mixing paint, creating pictures and images and transposing what is in my head to a canvas.
I love what I do and can’t imagine a world in which I wasn’t able to spend my days covered in paint.
When I’m not producing art, I often drag friends and family along to visit galleries with me. I feel a great sense of awe and pleasure if I come to be standing in front of a beautiful work.
Experiences of art – both making and observing it – are sensory. And yet, these days I can rarely exhibit my work without being asked to write an artist’s statement.
As a visual artist my thoughts have already been explained in the best way I know how – in my artwork.
A singer or musician isn’t asked to explain their work via a picture, a dancer or actor isn’t asked for a written statement and an author isn’t asked to sculpt the meaning of their book, so what is it about the humble artist that makes our work so hard to enjoy without a written explanation?
If I had a specific point to make, I imagine there would be a more direct, efficient way to do that, like to go out and protest (or write a letter to The Australian Jewish News about it!)
Yet curators still want an artist’s statement. Thankfully, in this internet age, there is a saviour online at www.artybollocks.com. This website instantly generates a sage description of any work of art with a simple click.
For example: “My work explores the relationship between the universality of myth and romance tourism.” Click. “Ever since I was a child I have been fascinated by the endless oscillation of the human condition.” Click.
Art is so much more than just conveying a particular, defined message. I love visual art for its ambiguity. I love that people see different things in it at different times.
I’ve often gone along to major exhibitions and wondered what the artist would think about all this dialogue put to their art by the curators.
I notice how members of the public spend a lot of time reading the statements beside the works rather than looking at the art and feeling for themselves what the artist is saying.
In my opinion art should be accepted for what it is, and if it does not send a message then no amount of comment will make the art better.
I don’t want to tell people who are looking at my art what I think they should see. So I implore you to leave logic at the door when you go to look at art. Enjoy it for what it is, a visual treat (or torment …). It either moves you or it doesn’t. You either love it or you don’t. You think it’s a work of genius or something a kindergarten kid could do.
It’s up to you to decide, not for the artist to tell you. And because there is no “wrong” in art, forming your own opinion about a piece of art is a totally legitimate thing to do.
And if a statement is absolutely essential, I think personally I’d rather dance one!
Esther Erlich is a Melbourne-based artist who has been exhibiting since 1983. She won the prestigious Doug Moran National Portrait Prize in 1998 and the Archibald People’s Choice Award in 2000. Her paintings and drawings feature in prominent public and private collections throughout Australia and overseas, including collections of the National Portrait Gallery, National Library (both in Canberra) and the Performing Arts Museum in Melbourne.
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