Dear Plaster: Nobody understands my exhibition text!
4 min read
The best advice is harsh but true and is born of experience and bitter pain, and there’s plenty of that in Plaster’s agony aunt column. This week, Georgia O’Grief helps an artist lost in translation
Dear Georgia…
I am part of a collective of screen-based practitioners at the interface of technologies and ecologies of care: our practices embrace the intricacies and dualities of emotional mediated experience(s) while dismantling structures of self-surveillance. Recently, several new bodies of works of ours were activated, however it has been indicated to us that our embrace of horizontal, non-hierarchical and elliptical logics in the assemblage of textual material counterintuitively instantiates a limit horizon on the dissemination of our knowledges. Our practices are predicated on resisting the compression, simplification and reduction of textual output, as occurs under late capitalism, so how can we effectively embrace the complex free-play of texts while ensuring our oeuvre contributes to discourse?
Yours,
Lost in translation
Georgia says…
Stop, honey, please, I have a headache. What little I gather from your almost unreadable email is that you’re struggling with communication. Ok, first, I want you to take a breath – nice and deep – and read out loud what you just wrote… Are you gasping for air? Did you even finish the first sentence? What’s with all the four-syllable words? What’s with the plurals? Why are you so evasive? Why are you repeating yourself over and over again? You think you’re being precise, you sound like a nervous wreck. Now, go take a walk. Touch grass.
I’ll cut you some slack: even good artists are not good writers. And you’re far from the only bad writer out there. Too many times, I’ve wasted a perfectly good Thursday night dragging myself to the wrong side of the city to be met with an A4 printout that reads worse than second hand toilet paper. Texts full of half-remembered philosophy shot through with shit: run-on sentences, ugly participle phrases, incomplete comparisons and redundant adjectives. Who’s to blame? The artists? Their tutors? French philosophers? Their publishers and translators? I don’t think this question matters as much as the question of how to stop it.
Artists are incestuous. They spread bad writing habits like they spread chlamydia. Nobody taught them how to write, they learnt it from the first text they came across, probably written by an artist, who learnt from another artist, who learnt from another artist… you see where this is going. They don’t question the unusual phrasing or uncomfortable rashes and simply pass it on. They never thought to check whether their writing was normal because, “it’s always been like that, I promise.”
You want advice? Take a break from exhibition texts: don’t read them, and certainly don’t write them. Think of it as a detox. After a month or so, get back into it, but play safe. Only read the classified ads, throw away the thesaurus. Remember, it’s not about the size, it’s about how you use it. If an exhibition text does a good job, it makes you feel closer to the work. It’s a hand on your arm, a shared cigarette under an umbrella. A good text doesn’t play games; it doesn’t act dumb but doesn’t act hard to get. It’s not about the text, it’s about you. Be active, be direct, write what you want, don’t hold back. And for god’s sake, when you send me a thank you email, don’t give me another headache.
