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Toward a History (and Future) of the Artist Statement

 Jennifer Liese 

From Paper Monument Number Four 

Screen grab from the author’s iteration of Nick Fortunato’s “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

discover—somewhere in the fresh transcription of your work—aspects of your creative essence

that you never even knew existed. One “Master Certified Coach” provides the following

appetizing advice: “Think of your artist’s 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 don’ts. Don’t posit “a

comprehensive theory of your place in art history”; don’t “psychoanalyz[e] your motivation”;

don’t use jargon; and above all, don’t 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]

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The artist Nick Fortunato has capitalized on the prevalence of such dubious guides and clichés

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 you’ll 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 Libs –style 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 ametaphorical 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 loved—for both their historical and literary value.

(Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings and MIT

Press’s “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 anthologized—the distribution theories of SethPrice, the fictional narrative as impetus for art of Mai-Thu Perret, and the semi–art historical

situating of Josiah McElheny, to name a few. Such diversely inclined artist-writers are keeping

the form very much alive.

Still, there’s 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 Center’s 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 we’ve 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

statement’s 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 form’s

exact criteria remain undefined.

Anthologies of artist writings—which include letters, manifestos, journals, criticism, and

interviews along with statements—are 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