Toward a History (and Future) of the Artist Statement

Jennifer Liese
From Paper Monument Number Four

Screen grab from the authors iteration of Nick Fortunatos Artist Statement Generator 2000
Google artist statement, and you will find a good dozen instructional websites enjoining artists to
follow these easy steps to produce this essential bit of art-career ephemera. Most begin with a
reassuring acknowledgment of artists presumed anxiety about putting visual expression into
words, then launch into an encouraging pitch for the twofold fulfillment that awaits the obliging
statement writer: not only will you be able to communicate clearly and effectively in the native
language of the curators, critics, and collectors on whom your future depends, you will also
discoversomewhere in the fresh transcription of your workaspects of your creative essence
that you never even knew existed. One Master Certified Coach provides the following
appetizing advice: Think of your artists statement as a nourishing stew. The rich flavors and
inviting aroma will feed your spirit and summon wonderful people to your table.[1]
The authors of Art/Work: Everything You Need to Know (and Do) As You Pursue Your Art
Career devote an entire section to the task. In one page max (on brevity all the experts agree),
you just want to describe, as simply as possible, what it is that you hope to do, or show, or say,
with your art, and what it is that makes you interested in doing, showing, or saying that. If only
it were that simple, for along with the dos comes a series of foreboding donts. Dont posit a
comprehensive theory of your place in art history; dont psychoanalyz[e] your motivation;
dont use jargon; and above all, dont fall prey to any among a list of phrases that plague artist
statements with insincerity or obviousness, among them: I pour my soul into each piece and
My work is about my experiences.[2]

The artist Nick Fortunato has capitalized on the prevalence of such dubious guides and clichs
with his Artist Statement Generator 2000, an online project launched in 2010 that asks the
visitor to Fill in the blanks and press the button for the last Artist Statement youll ever need.[3]
Participants respond to prompts like cartoon character, famous artist verb ending in ing,
plural food, and favorite museum. A click on create statement produces a five-paragraph,
Mad Libsstyle gag in which the chosen words complete the template, yielding such absurd
constructions as Through my work I attempt to examine the phenomenon of Bugs Bunny as a
metaphorical interpretation of both Leonardo da Vinci and sunbathing. The final line hits its
target of art-world affectation dead on. With all words preset other than the user-chosen place in
your home, mine read: I spend my time between my kitchen and Berlin.
Of course, artists words have long been met with skepticism, not least by artists themselves.
Matisse, despite his own eloquence, famously declared that a painter ought to have his tongue
cut out.[4] Pollock played dumb. Warhol mastered obfuscation. We know all of that. But artists
writings are also much anthologized and well lovedfor both their historical and literary value.
(Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists Writings and MIT
Presss Writing Art series are two standouts among many excellent collections.[5]) Following a
relative dearth of published artist writings in the object-centered 80s and 90s, the past decade or
so has seen a wave of them still too new to be anthologizedthe distribution theories of Seth
Price, the fictional narrative as impetus for art of Mai-Thu Perret, and the semiart historical
situating of Josiah McElheny, to name a few. Such diversely inclined artist-writers are keeping
the form very much alive.
Still, theres no denying the sorry state of the statement, and we all know it. The ubiquitous
request Please include an artist statement inspires cringes and groans among artists. An artist
friend of mine called artist statements the dentistry of the art world, and Fortunato is not alone
in making art that mocks the form; one of several statement satires on YouTube features a pair of
animated pig-artists translating pretentious claims of artist statements into the banal truth.
Likewise, art professionals are tired of reading these often hyperbolic, embarrassing, or at best
monotonous texts. Artist Nina Katchadourian, former curator of the Drawing Centers Viewing
Program, once told me that of the hundreds of artist statements she had read that year, only one
really stood out.[6] A gallery owner interviewed in Art/Work emphatically states that he never
reads artist statements.[7] What could be more deflating? You slave all week over your
nourishing stew and no one even bothers to taste it.

But who or what, we might ask, is to blame for this compositional rut? And once weve parsed
causes, might we find some way to effect change, to liberate the artist statement for the good of
us all? Taking history as a guide, maybe we could first learn a thing or two from the artist
statements past. Where did this ever-present, compulsory overture come from anyway?
Strangely, given its proliferation, the actual history of the genre remains a mystery. No one seems
to have written a book on the subject, or even a dissertation.[8] Any practical and theoretical
discussions of artist statements that do exist leave their history untold, perhaps because the forms
exact criteria remain undefined.
Anthologies of artist writingswhich include letters, manifestos, journals, criticism, and
interviews along with statementsare organized by chronology, theme, or country, rather than
type. The editors introductory essays make surprisingly few distinctions among various forms of
artists writings. Further complicating the matter is the fact that the term statement is so readily

generic. Sometimes it is applied to writings that were originally presented as lectures or pieced
together from interviews. Picassos Statements, for example, were in several instances
constructed from conversations with trusted confidants.[9] By contrast, Claes Oldenburgs
celebrated I Am for an Art (I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does
something other than sit on its ass in a museum. ), printed first in 1961 and reprinted many
times thereafter, is usually referred to as an essay or a manifesto, though it is titled statement on
an early typed manuscript.[10]
Robert Goldwater, co-editor of the 1945 anthology Artists on Art: From the XIV to the XX
Century, provides in his introduction a handy and ultimately telling century-by-century
characterization of broad trends among artists writings. The 14th and 15th centuries, he notes,
were dominated by handbooks on technique such as Cennino Cenninis Il libro dellArte, which
advises artists on painterly matters ranging from how to depict drapery in fresco to preserving a
steady hand by drinking only thin wines. Artists in the 16th and 17th centuries tended toward the
theoretical, as in Michelangelos rigorous efforts to rank the arts hierarchically, a popular
undertaking at the time. The 18th century brought both an uptick in academic discourse and a
surge in journals such as Delacroixs. The 19th century was characterized by private letters such
as van Goghs and the early 20th century by the public manifesto. Regarding the mid-20th
century, on the cusp of which this anthology was published, Goldwater issues the following
prediction: If introspection is losing ground, the public statement appears to be gaining.[11]
While this mention doesnt locate a birth of the artist statement, it does allude to its breakthrough
moment.
In Network: The Art World Described as a SystemLawrence Alloways still-potent 1972
critique of an art regime that produces not art but rather the distribution of art, both literally
and in mediated form as text and reproductionthe critic notes that the artist statement was the
typical verbal form of the Abstract Expressionist generation. Indeed, there were many outlets
for the statement at mid-century: art magazines such as As Is, The Tigers Eye, and Possibilities
printed them verbatim. Alloway describes the artist statement as essentially a first-person
expression putting succinctly fundamental ideas about art.[12] That much is a start in defining
terms. But wouldnt many other forms of artists writings meet the same criteria? The interview,
for example, is rendered in first-person and might well include fundamental ideas about art. But
of course the interview generally originates with the spoken rather than written word and involves
an influential interlocutor.[13] Artists journals and letters both fit Alloways description, but they
initially have only an audience of oneself or one other in mind. The manifesto might be written by
a single artist, but, as Mary Ann Caws points out in her Introduction to Manifesto: A Century of
Isms, this archetypal form uses we-speak as a persuasive tactic in converting others to a
collective causeWe intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness,
begins Marinettis Futurist Manifestowhile the artist statement serves primarily to elucidate the
artists own work.[14]
How then might we refine Alloways definition? A proposal: The artist statement is a firstperson [written] expression [intended for readership,] putting succinctly fundamental ideas about
[ones own] art? I would propose adding still another, more contemporary criterion to this stab at
typology: the artist statement, as we know it today, is produced to meet an explicitly professional
occasional need, such as accompanying the artists work in a magazine, exhibition catalogue,
grant application, or on the artists website. Looking back at some of the most exceptional artist
statements of the 20th century, we find many that hew perfectly to this definition, and even shade
into blatant self-promotion, withoutit should be notedsounding like an artists
statement.[15]

In 1908, for example, Matisse wrote what art historian Jack Flam calls one of the most important
and influential artists statements of the century. Notes of a Painter, the artists first published
text, was solicited for the French literary journal La Grande Revue. Clocking in at some 3,000
words, it addresses color, composition, painting from nature versus painting from imagination,
and fellow artists, and it includes one of those art advisers verboten comprehensive theories
on artists inability to escape their moment in history: All artists bear the imprint of their time,
Matisse writes, however insistently we call ourselves exiles from it. Far-reaching and
provocative, the statement is nonetheless transparently careerist. As Flam points out, one of
Matisses intentions was to clear himself of some of the criticism leveled against him in both
reactionary and avant-garde circles, and indeed the painter calls out his critics by name. Another
intriguing bit of self-promotiondirect marketing you might call itis hidden just beneath the
surface, right there in the statements best-known line: What I dream of is an art of balance, of
purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter, an art that could be for
the businessman as well as the man of letters, for example, a soothing, calming influence on the
mind, something like a good armchair that provides relaxation from fatigue. This line, which
would long after reinforce critiques of Matisses work as merely decorative, was, Flam argues,
directed to one particular businessmanSergei Shchukin, a Russian collector and Matisses
new patron, who had told Matisse that his paintings offered him consolation amid personal
tragedy.[16] Hence Matisses shameless plug for the armchair effect, right in the middle of one of
the most important artist statements of all time.
American art magazines werent far behind the French in publishing artist statements. Marsden
Hartleys, for example, Artand the Personal Life, appeared in Creative Art in 1928. A
paradoxically passionate defense of the artist as a thinking rather than wholly feeling being, the
text begins: I have joined, once and for all, the ranks of the intellectual experimentalists.
Personal art is for me a matter of spiritual indelicacy. What takes the place of expressionism
and emotionalism in Hartleys construct? I am interested in the problem of painting, of how to
make a better painting according to certain laws. It is better to have two colors in right relation
to each other than to have a vast confusion of emotional exuberance in the guise of ecstatic
fullness or poetical revelation.[17] Hartleys steadfast rationality is radical, defying what Brian
Wallis would one day call one of the most enduring and telling fantasies of modernist culture
that the artist is a feeling, inarticulate genius.[18] Marcel Duchamp recognized this mythand its
consequenceswhen, in a 1957 lecture, he described the pigeonholing of the artist as a
mediumistic being who is denied the state of consciousness on the esthetic plane about what
he is doing or why he is doing it.[19] In other words, Hartleys statement is an object lesson in
refusing to play the sensitive mute.
In 1954 Louise Bourgeois wrote a statement, published in Design quarterly, that is otherwise a
straightforward description of her work, but which begins with a caveat worth quoting at length
for its insight into the essential challenges of writing about ones own art:
An artists 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. At
best the artist does what he can rather than what he wants to do. After the battle is over and the
damage faced up to, the result may be surprisingly dullbut sometimes it is surprisingly
interesting. The mountain brought forth a mouse, but the bee will create a miracle of beauty and
order. Asked to enlighten us on their creative process, both would be embarrassed, and probably
uninterested. The artist who discusses the so-called meaning of his work is usually describing a
literary side-issue. The core of his original impulse is to be found, if at all, in the work itself.[20]

Surveying artist statements from throughout the 20th century, its remarkable to see how many
begin similarlydisavowing the task at hand before undertaking it, as if to offer some protection
or cathartic release. Matisses Notes of a Painter makes the same point in a sentence: I am
fully aware that a painters best spokesman is his work.[21] Alexander Calder writes, Theories
may be all very well for the artist himself, but they shouldnt be broadcast to other people.[22]
Robert Rauschenberg takes a subversive route, injecting bits of nonsense into his Note on
Painting: I find it nearly impossible free ice to write about Jeepaxle my work. The concept I
planetarium struggle to deal with ketchup is opposed to the logical community life tab inherent in
language horses and communication. It is extremely important that art be unjustifiable.[23]

Spread from Daniel Frasnay, The Artists World (1969); Louise Nevelson statement and portrait
In the 1960s, in response to increasing popular interest in art, there appeared several photographic
portrait books that sought to reveal truths about artists works and personae through views into
their studios. Alexander Libermans The Artist in His Studio (1960) is perhaps best known among
them, but The Artists World, published in 1969, with photographic collages by Daniel Frasnay
portraying some fifty artists, offers another layer of insight through its accompanying statements.
Wildly divergent, most appear to have been written for the occasion, and many appear in the
artists own script. Some are technical. Sonia Delaunay, for example, offers the following
equation of her color theory:

Others are playful. Here is Calders treatment of color:

White and Black are
the strong colors
Red is not far behind,
but off at an angle
Next come Blue, Yellow
and Orange, rather pasty
Green should be like
a billiard table
and Purple as in the
Spanish Loyalist Flag.
Some are romantic: Shadow and I have a long long love affair, writes Louise Nevelson. Others
evanescent: I grope in space for the vibrating invisible white thread of the magical that lets fall
facts and fancies like the music of a stream singing its way through pebbles, quick and precious,
effuses Giacometti. Some are self-doubting, like Adolph Gottliebs: Surrounded by my
materials, canvas, paints, oils, brushes, etc. I feel like a relic of the past because paintings are still
among the few things made by hand. Others process-oriented, as with Karel Appel: I make
myself free, I stand aside, I squeeze myself dry. Then I am ready to begin painting. Some are
droll: Rembrandt is beautiful, but sad. Boucher is gay but bad. Great Painting has never made
anyone laugh, observes Jean Dubuffet. And at least one, Roberto Mattas, is exhilaratingly
exhortatory: You have to stir up that subversive imagination that shatters the accepted formulas
and ideas were imbued with and unleashes the poetic states. That exists in all of us and propels
us toward the unforeseeable. YOUVE JUST GOT TO GET TO THAT INNERMOST
CORE![24]

By the 1970s and 80s, the primary site of published artist statements seems to be the exhibition
catalogue. Lawrence Weiners famous Untitled Statement, the one that goes:

Page from Information (1970); Lawrence Weiner statement

1. The artist may construct the piece

2. The piece may be fabricated
3. The piece need not be built
appeared in the catalogue for the influential 1970 MoMA show Information.[25] Eva Hesse, a
year before she died, wrote a catalogue statement of loose, deeply intimate notations that move
back and forth with painful ease between art and illness. It begins:
Hanging.
Rubberized, loose, open cloth.
Fiberglassreinforced plastic.
Began somewhere in NovemberDecember, 1968.
Worked.
Collapsed April 6, 1969. I have been very ill.
Statement.
And after a half-dozen more such stark counterpoints, it ends:
I have learned anything is possible. I know that.[26]
Ed Ruscha, in a statement for 50 West Coast Artists (1977), covers concrete topics from his
biography (born in Omaha) to his influences (The painting of a target by Jasper Johns was an
atomic bomb in my training), yet also includes a resolute claim for ambiguity: I am committed
to collecting thoughts and potential issues. The result can be vague if it wants to be. Its not
important. The important thing is to create a sort of itch-in-the-scalp.[27] Magdalena
Abakanowicz, in a statement published in an exhibition catalogue around the same time, is
contrastingly razor-sharp: I wanted to tell you that art is the most harmless activity of mankind.
But I suddenly recalled that art was often used for propaganda purposes by totalitarian systems. I
wanted to tell you also about the extraordinary sensitivity of an artist, but I recalled that Hitler
was a painter and Stalin used to write sonnets.[28] Gilbert & George, whose self-published
booklets of the early 70sA Guide to Singing Sculpture; A Day in the Life of George & Gilbert
the Sculptors; The Pencil on Paper Descriptive Works of Gilbert & George the Sculptors (a
single, three-page-long sentence)were essential early iterations of their work. They state the
case for unconventional artist statements straightaway in their 1978 statement:
We believe in the Art, the Beauty and the
Life of the Artist who is an eccentric person
with something to say for Himself.29
In 1989, Mike Kelley wrote Statement for Prospect 89 for a catalogue for the German
exhibition of the same name. Here is a bit of its climactic, and now haunting, prose: Wallflowers
those shy ones! Oh! Cling! Cling thee to the furthermost bordersthe hinterlands. Sublimate,
oh, sublimate thy libidinal impulses into decorative organic motifs ornamental hair growths,
aesthetically placed tattoos. Beauty-mark thyself! Oh! Oh! Oh![30] In the preface to his
collected functional writings, Kelley surmises that he has earned his right to this sort of utter
absurdity: I suppose that I have been in the art world long enough to feel some sense of security
that an adopted crackpot voice will not necessarily be confused with my own; or I just dont
care anymore if it is.[31]


Of course its artists less established than Kelley who are more likely to be asked for an artist
statement at all, and they probably do care very much if someone thinks they are a crackpot.
Nowadays, the statement isnt typically meant for publication in an avant-garde magazine or a
career-defining catalogue. The occasions are more frequent and mundane: professors require
them as supplements to critiques; grant-givers, residency programs, and grad schools request
them as support material; galleries solicit them as fodder for press releases; or you just need
something for a website.[32] An artist statement is supposed to fulfill overlapping and shifting
professional requirements, while at the same time managing to sound like an un-coerced
statement of principles. The regularity and inherent conflict in these requests is confusing, and the
combination of strict guidelines and obscure goals is the real-life artist statement generator that
produces so much turgid and overreaching prose.
I am the director of the Writing Center at Rhode Island School of Design, where a group of peer
tutors and I work with student writers on all kinds of writing, including our share of tortured artist
statements. In the process, I think were starting to learn something about how to help young
artists write effectively about their work. A couple of years ago, Arianne Gelardin, a RISD
graduate student and Writing Center tutor, set up a workshop designed to help students prepare
their artist statements for the RISD Grad Book 2011. For this catalog, which she edited, Gelardin
explicitly offered all statement writers the agency of choicea chance to experiment, to
diverge.

Page from RISD Grad Book 2011; Jo-Fan Chang statement

Some really took her lead. Heres Lisa Jo-Fan Chang, layering concrete poetry onto the fan-like
form of her furniture design:
Fold.
Folding.
Folded.
Fold the unfold.
Fold and unfold. Fold/unfold.
Unfold and fold.
Unfold the fold.
Unfold.
Unfolding.
Unfolded.
Heres Mimi Cabell, a photographer, performance artist, and writer, standing her ground: I do
not apologize and I am not sympathetic. I do not hear grays in peoples voices, only the blacks
and the whites. I hear yes and no, here and there, on and off. Not maybe, or somewhere, or
running at half speed. And finally, heres Byeongwon Ha, a new media artist, with a piercing
reminiscence of life before such media:
I used to live along a river that was intertwined with a longer river that led into a huge sea. I
enjoyed catching crabs with my friends and I remember the moisture and the coldness of sand,
the hardness and the sharpness of a crab, the smell and taste of salt, and the sunset that said,
Come back home. Im not sure why I stopped catching crabs, whether the crabs themselves
disappeared or if Legos and video games immersed me. However, crab-catching remains the only
authentic piece of interactive nostalgia left in my life.[33]
Coaxing such apt, confident, and memorable writing out of artists, who arent all artist-writers
after all, isnt always so straightforward. The various parties that assign and request artist
statements dont always offer the same freedom that Arianne did. Explicitly or implicitly, they
endorse the conventional wisdom, the codified model for fill-in-the-blank, forced prose meant to
serve as the ultimate linguistic record of an artists work. Its worth noting that according to many
scholars in writing pedagogy these factorschecklist writing prompts, prescribed outcomes,
external rather than internal motivation, and one-shot attemptsprohibit expressive and effective
writing. Writing is better practiced as an ongoing process in which a series of self-discoveries
unfold in organically organized form.[34]
But whats the alternative to our formulaic norm? Far from uncovering some definitive urstatement, the selective history of artist statements offered here shows them to be as varied and
complex as the conditions that brought them forth. Comprehensibility, tastefulness, and brevity
were clearly not always the goals. These statements, rather, are generous, adventurous, defensive,
incisive, vindictive, eccentric, experimental, bombastic, sly, sad, funny, personal, political, and
poetic. Its hard to tell when they even began. Indeed, the difficulty of locating a precise birth of
the artist statement is both explanatory and potentially liberating, since many of the genres most
depressing examples seem to be written as if the writer is tryingand failingto emulate some
kind of correct model, one which he or she has never actually set eyes on. Artists have become
convinced theyre supposed to say my work explores the notion of self-reflexivity rather than I
paint about paintings, but they arent sure why. Its like sitting down to write a poem and
throwing in a bunch of thees and thous because thats how poetry is supposed to sound. The
results are obviously less than artful.

A couple of years ago I met the reliably contrarian critic Dave Hickey, who, on hearing that I
work with art students on their writing, immediately announced: The artist statement should be
abolished! It was a tempting solution, I must admit, but I wasnt going to leave it there. Why is
that? I asked. Because artists dont know what theyre doing, he said. I almost took the bait,
but thought twice and knewI think anywayjust what he meant: if they know exactly what
theyre doing, its not art. Precisely. But rather than abolish artist statements, why not adjust the
current rules of the game? An artist statement can be an authentic, generative complement to the
work, as I witnessed recently when Brigid Rau, a RISD senior who photographs images projected
onto textilesinextricable layers referencing our screen-based visual landscapewrote an artist
statement that layered multiple narratives on multiple screens, then captured it as a screen grab of
her monitor. The one-size-fits-all explanatory imperative might seem like an efficient way to get
artists to speak a language that everyone elsecurators, collectors, professors, criticscan
understand, but the overall result, lets admit it, is usually a really horrible Esperanto. For
everyones sakeartists and the people and institutions working to support themit would be
better to welcome sense and nonsense, coherence and paradox, philosophy, poetry, and maybe
even a little more than a page, all of which might truly represent, rather than reduce, artists and
their art.

[1] Molly Gordon, How to Write and Use an Artists Statement,

www.mollygordon.com/resources/marketingresources/artstatemt/.
[2] Heather Darcy Bhandari and Jonathan Melber, Art/Work: Everything You Need to Know (and Do) As You
Pursue Your Art Career, Free Press, 2009, pp. 6870.
[3] http://10gallon.com/statement2000.
[4] Jack Flam, ed., Matisse on Art, University of California Press, 1995, p. 2.
[5] See Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz, Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists
Writings, University of California Press, 1996. MITs Writing Art series includes collections of writings by
more than twenty artists, among them Carl Andre, Dan Graham, Yvonne Rainer, Mike Kelley, and Andrea
Fraser. Other anthologies of artist writings that informed this article include: Herschel B. Chipp,Theories of
Modern Art; Robert Herbert, Modern Artists on Art: Ten Unabridged Essays; Ellen Johnson, American Artists on
Art from 1940 to 1980; Dore Ashton, Twentieth Century Artists on Art; Katharine Kuh, The Artists Voice: Talks
with Seventeen Artists; Eric Protter, Painters on Painting; Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves, eds., Artists on
Art from the XIV to the XX Century; Brian Wallis, ed., Blasted Allegories; Mary Ann Caws, Manifesto: A
Century of Isms; and Jack Robertson, Twentieth Century Artists on Art: An Index to Artists Writings, Statements,
and Interviews.
[6] In the exemplary statement, artist Kathleen Henderson juxtaposes a fantastical childhood memory with a
traumatic news report she read many years later. Katchadourian noted, The statement helped me clue in to the
violence and rawness in her drawings, which are a very important part of them, and she did this in a much more
interesting way than that tired formula of the artist statement that begins I am interested in E-mail to the
author, November 7, 2012.
[7] Bhandari and Melber, p. 68.
[8] The only significant scholarly take on the artist statement I came across is an issue of the Canadian journal
Open Letter (Fall 2007) devoted to Artists Statements and the Nature of Artistic Inquiry. Contributors
consider the form from a variety of perspectivesin relation to rhetoric, poets statements, and musical
influence, for example. But only one seeks to situate the statement historically: Open Letter editor Frank Davey
provides a valuable analysis of the reception history of the artist statement in relation to Wimsatt and Beardsleys
The Intentionality Fallacy (1946); Roland Barthess The Death of the Author (1967); and Pierre Bourdieus
The Rules of Art (1996).
[9] For example, the first-person running narrative published as Picasso Speaks in The Arts (May 1923) began
as an interview with Marius de Zayas. Chipp, p. 263.
[10] Published first in the exhibition catalogue Environments, Situations, Spaces, Martha Jackson Gallery, 1961,
a rough typed version of I Am for an Art headed statement is among the Ellen Hulda Johnson papers,

Archives of American Art. Accessed online at

www.aaa.si.edu/collections/searchimages/images/image_7971_20905.htm. [11] Goldwater and Treves, pp. 22,
23, 17.
[12] Lawrence Alloway, Network: The Art World Described as a System, Artforum, September 1972, pp. 29,
30.
[13] The Fall 2005 issue of Art Journal features a series of excellent articles on the artist interview.
[14] Caws, pp. xx, 187.
[15] Given limitations of space and time, the examples that follow hereorganized chronologically to suggest a
rough sketch of the venues in which statements have appeared over timeare limited to published artist
statements. One can imagine the thousands of statements that never made their way out of artists gallery files.
Future research on the artist statement would include visits to the archives of American Art or the Museum of
Modern Arts artists files. My thanks to MoMA archivist Jenni Tobias for a promising initial conversation about
what one might find there.
[16] Flam, pp. 30, 43, 30, 42, 35.
[17] Reprinted in Chipp, pp. 5269.
[18] Wallis, p. x. Frank Davey traces the dismissal of artists intellects back to Plato, who wrote of the poets in
his Apology of Socrates that no wisdom enabled them to compose as they did, but natural genius and
inspiration; like the diviners and those who chant oracles, who say many fine things but do not understand
anything of what they say. Artists Statements and the Rules of Art, Open Letter, Fall 2007, p. 35.
[19] Marcel Duchamp, The Creative Act, in The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, Michel Sanouillet and Elmer
Peterson, eds., Da Capo Press, 1973, p. 139.
[20] Originally published in Design Quarterly, no. 30 (1954), p. 18. Reprinted in Bourgeois, Destruction of the
Father, Reconstruction of the Father: Writings and Interviews 19231997, MIT Press, 2008, p. 66.
[21] Flam, p. 37.
[22] In Joann Prosyniuk, ed. Modern Arts Criticism: A Biographical and Critical Guide to Painters, Sculptors,
Photographers, and Architects from the Beginning of the Modern Era to the Present, vol. 2, Gale Research Inc.,
1991, p. 57.
[23] Stiles and Selz, pp. 3212. Sculptor david Smith would have appreciated Rauschenbergs sentiment. He
once proposed: I think we artists all understand English grammar, but we have our own language, and the very
misuse of dictionary forms puts our meaning closer in context. I think were closer to Joyce, Genet and Beckett
than to Webster. Kuh, The Artists Voice, p. 8.
[24] Daniel Frasnay, The Artists World, JM Dent & Sons Limited, 1969, pp. 34, 158, 270, 204, 236, 288, 300,
260.
[25] Stiles and Selz, p. 839.
[26] Ibid., p. 595.
[27] Ed Ruscha, Leave Any Information at the Signal, MIT Press, 2004, pp. 911. Swedish artist Jan
Svenungsson, in his vital essay
The Writing Artist, argues convincingly, and quite in line with Ruscha, that ambiguity is crucial to good
artists writing. See www.artandresearch.org.uk/v2n2/svenungsson.html.
[28] Stiles and Selz, p. 260.
[29] Robert Violette and Hans-Ulrich Obrist, eds., The Words of Gilbert & George with Portraits of the Artists
from 1968 to 1997, Violette Editions, 1997, p. 96. The editors note that this statement was written for use in
exhibition catalogues.
[30] Mike Kelley, Minor Histories: Statements, Conversations, Proposals, ed. John C. Welchman, MIT press,
2004, p. v.
[31] Ibid., pp. xiixiii.
[32] Strange that the DIY opportunity of artists own websites does not seem to have yielded much
experimentation with the artist statement. Likewise, video artist statements, which are cropping up on YouTube,
typically just show artists reading aloud from still-dull statements while standing in
front of their work. Artist blogs, on the other handephemeral, visualmay illuminate some possibilities for
artist statements.
[33] Ariane Gelardin, ed., RISD Grad Book 2011, Rhode Island School of Design, 2011, pp. 19, 73, 69, 108.
[34] See freewriting pioneer Peter Elbows Writing Without Teachers and Everyone Can Write (both Oxford
University Press, 1973; 2000); and artist Lynda Barrys What It Is, Drawn & Quarterly, 2011.