Worth a thousand words?
When does language hinder communication? Whenever it is used to describe art, or so it would seem. Andy Beckett deciphers the impenetrable waffle favoured by galleries the world over to see what, if anything, it all means
Gallery Exit in Tin Wan, Aberdeen is now showing "In the Offing", the first solo exhibition by Lewis Lau Yin-to. Ten oil paintings of various sizes and with a photographic feel to them hang from the walls of the gallery. The scenes are of the everyday, you may conclude, on a stroll around the hushed room. But then you read the exhibition notes.
"'In the Offing' refers to the area where the sea touches the sky, the fine line where movement becomes stillness," we are told. "While using the photographic image as a point of departure, the featured works move away from their time bounded dimension and explore the possibility of portraying a timeless exposure of memory - the point where Sight and its objective dimension meets Absence and the imaginative power it brings. All the unnecessary signs, unseemly for the remembrance of an event, are in the works deleted from the original image and rendered into new and every time richer manifestations. Seemingly staged in every detail, the works in fact explore memory by means of brushstrokes. A gesture unrestrained from any mental or physical boundary, it enables the artist's interventions to explore fortuitous and unforeseen trajectories."
If you've been to see contemporary art in the past three decades, you will probably be familiar with the feelings of bafflement, exhaustion or irritation that such gallery prose provokes. You may well have got used to ignoring it. As Polly Staple, art writer and director of the Chisenhale Gallery in London, puts it: "There are so many people who come to our shows who don't even look at the programme sheet. They don't want to look at any writing about art."
With its pompous paradoxes and plagues of adverbs, endless sentences and strained rebellious poses, much of this promotional writing serves mainly, it seems, as ammunition for those who still insist contemporary art is a fraud. Surely no one sensible takes this jargon seriously?
David Levine and Alix Rule do. "Art English is something that everyone in the art world bitches about all the time," says Levine, a 42-year-old American artist based in New York and Berlin, Germany. "But we all use it."
Three years ago, Levine and Rule, a 29-year-old critic and sociology PhD student at Columbia University in New York, decided to try to anatomise it. "We wanted to map it out," says Levine, "to describe its contours, rather than just complain about it."
They christened it International Art English, or IAE, and concluded that its purest form was the gallery press release, which - in today's increasingly globalised, internet-widened art world - has a greater audience than ever.