Back in the day, before I had so clearly been identified as an art writer, I would ever so often be asked to make art. After viewing one of the few installations I created, a local curator of some repute had this response: "Too much to read." In retrospect, I should have taken the hint. And in a sense I did, leaving the visuals to the artists and taking up my pen/keyboard to concentrate on words. There are some artists, however, who think the word is free game. Some incorporate it into their paintings (Ed Ruscha), some author their own narratives for video or audio pieces (Janet Cardiff), and others draw on texts to supplement their installations (Thomas Hirschhorn). And then there are those who make writing their art. Lawrence Weiner might be the first to spring to mind, but there is a whole slew of them on view right now at The Power Plant, each in their own way making an argument against the criticism that reading and looking are mutually exclusive.
Christian Bök, Protein 13, 2012, plastic components
In addition to that curator's retort from so many years ago, the other thing that kept echoing through my head as I made my way through Postscript: Writing After Conceptual Art was the voice of every gallery patron who ever complained about having to read about the art to understand it (and I worked for over half a decade on the front lines of this exact publically funded art gallery, so I heard it a lot). The strange thing was, it was me doing the complaining this time. My problem was no so much with the words as the concepts. This isn't just an exhibition of artists using words; it is a collection of artists responding to a previous tradition of artists who used words to explore a range of philosophical ideas concerning meaning and representation as they relate to what we call art as it relates to how we engage with the world as beings who value something we call art. The work was often its own explanatory text in Conceptual Art, or it was at least directly engaged with eliciting that explanation. Post or Neo or whatever Conceptualists often append themselves to an earlier work, claiming to extend it or make it newly relevant through recontextualization or repetition. In far too many cases, this does little to add anything to the original gesture or its new context.
Andy Warhol's routine refrain, "So what?" has long been a torment and a challenge for me to justify the art and writing I claim have value. I ask it of the work I see every week in the galleries and can usually come up with some convincing answers. Unfortunately, this week I'm coming up blank.
The Power Plant: http://www.thepowerplant.org/
Postscript: Writing After Conceptual Art continues until September 2.
Terence Dick is a freelance writer living in Toronto. His art criticism has appeared in Canadian Art, BorderCrossings, Prefix Photo, Camera Austria, Fuse, Mix, C Magazine, Azure, and The Globe and Mail. He is the editor of Akimblog. You can follow his quickie reviews and art news announcements on Twitter @TerenceDick.
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Postscript: Writing After Conceptual Art at The Power Plant
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