"Artist Talk"
In 2023 as a part of my MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, I was asked if I would like to give an artist talk. Instead I gave a talk on artist talks. This is what I presented.
I need to confess to you all that I will not be giving an artist talk, I thought that would be boring and unenlightening for both you the audience, and myself as a filmmaker. I prefer to talk about my work privately where my development is mediated by both my inner life and those I have close relationships with.
Rather than giving an artist talk, I’ll be giving a talk about artist talks. I know it’s poor practice to blow up your own sources of income, but my friends and I promised that this will be our year of burning bridges, so in the spirit of that I’ll permit myself to speak freely.
Prior to attending SAIC I was mostly unfamiliar with the art world and artist talks. I worked in film, and if I hadn’t enrolled at SAIC, I likely would have cranked out my hours to join the union racket with IATSE 476 and become proudly employed in the film industry. From where I sit today, I do not condescend to that perspective, which to me is just as respectable as anything one might find oneself doing in the art world. And as much as the progressive spirit that floats around at SAIC will allow you to nod your head at that remark, I’ll elaborate on it later and maybe upset your own dispositions to a more appropriate degree.
I struggled filling out the application to SAIC, because I had to describe in detail what I thought my own work was doing, and why I was doing it — something I really had never grappled with before. I reached out to many who knew my work to ask them what they thought it was doing, though they mostly gave me fragmented observations. I credited my inability to deal with my own work from my own inexperience as an artist, and assumed that this ability would develop over time.
As you can see as I sit here before you today, I was accepted. Quickly upon enrolling, I began working as a videographer for the Gene Siskel Film Center, filming artist talks for the event series Conversations at the Edge, which describes itself as “a dynamic weekly series of screenings, performances, and talks by groundbreaking media artists.”
Very soon on beginning this job I realized something. Watching these talks, I found that artists — professional, well-acclaimed artists — had nothing to say. If anything, I left these talks less enlightened about art than I had felt going into them. And this was often accompanied by work that I didn’t even consider bad (though much of it was).
I began to ask myself: why did artists seem to continually fail to talk about their own work? I began to notice it with everyone I spoke to. Though it was continually demanded of them by the school; grant, fellowship and residency applications; and common conversation — no one seemed very proficient in understanding their own work.
Yet everywhere, people were giving artist talks and people were going to them. And I would eavesdrop on conversations after recording artist talks to hear what people had to say — “wow, that was great!” And I would think, “what are you talking about?” Perhaps this will provoke accusations of me being a crank or a snob or simply stupid, but I couldn’t help but notice a particular through-line in all the artist talks I saw: they seemed to never talk about the work itself.
The question would always fall on their inspirations, intentions, “political” positions they were taking — but the question of the aesthetic experience of the work itself was never touched. What happens at the level of the viewing, the sympathetic relation between the viewer/listener and the art. This is precisely what was not talked about.
Perhaps you will say that this is not the artist’s job. Yet I couldn’t help but notice that this job seemed to be thrusted upon them, because no one was taking it up, not even the interviewer in these artist talks, whose task one would assume would be to talk about the work itself. Instead, they too seemed to touch upon everything besides the work.
The best experiences I had were between Anocha Suwichakornpong’s talk and Tsai Ming-liang’s talk; the former because she concerned herself with giving technical advice for shooting a feature, something of immediate practical use for myself; the latter because he spent his time telling non-sequitur stories and flexing how much money he made, much to the poorly-hidden chagrin of the moderator and art-savvy audience members — “well that was something,” I heard from some people behind me. It was all much to my personal delight however, because I love his movies, I love flexing and I love stacking paper.
In 1996 — Adorno scholar of the Anglosphere, Susan Buck-Morss, wrote in October Magazine that [artists’] “work is to sustain the critical moment of aesthetic experience. Our work as critics is to recognize it.”
Much has been lamented in the 21st century about the death of the critic. But here I’d specifically like to talk about the artist talk as a phenomenon of this death. I’ll go out and say, that the artist talk has been the direct result of the liquidation of the task of critique, outsourcing the work of the critic onto the artist themselves, to most disastrous and disorienting results for both art and critique, two things which in our society — bourgeois society — need each other to survive.
The artist talk asks of the artist to understand their own work, and everyone can nod their head to this as a realistic request. “Of course an artist should have an understanding of what they’re doing.” The question however is what the content of this understanding is. Adorno claimed in, I believe, Aesthetic Theory, that in capitalism the artist should be free to make something without knowing what it is, and the flipside of this: the artist upon making something, doesn’t know if their art is doing anything at all.
This seems to directly contradict the idea underlying the artist talk, that the artist talk should demonstrate the artist’s understanding of their own work. But how do artists today understand their own work? Often by building arbitrary systems or by repurposing systems from the intellectual sphere to reinforce what they’re already doing, or worse, simply trying to translate these ideas directly into art. Perhaps this is why so much of contemporary artist talks speak only about inspiration, because much of the work is reducible to what merely inspired it, rather than there being a transcendental moment, where the art would become more than what already was.
Why do artists have to build these arbitrary systems of understanding for their own work? Systems that don’t really seem to touch upon what their work is doing at all? In Modernity, the artist is tasked not simply with deciding the content of their work, but also (and perhaps more importantly) the form. Claims some artists may make about the ancient roots of their artistic “practice,” really form yet another one of these arbitrary systems of understanding, and at their base, actually imply a choice on the part of the artist.
It’s actually with these artists with claims to antiquity, that the radical severance with the ancient world is most acute. For the art in the past that superficially does what their art does, did so not by virtue of a choice, but by fulfilling the social-religious obligations of art. Indeed, it was blasphemy to not portray particular subjects in particular ways in the art of antiquity, because art was not merely art, it was an object of a total religious cosmology that was enacted by everyone. In antiquity, form and content were prescribed.
Work today however, with a claim to a particular history, makes that claim by virtue of the judgment of a social individual. Yet, this claim is often made precisely to obscure the judgment, by acting as if they, the artist, are simply doing “what has always been done,” fulfilling the ever-same. Though this really represents a higher symptom than how this is usually expressed, Mark Rothko could be an example of this. In his own self understanding, his aesthetic experience becomes about “religious experience” in his work — but this really obscures what his paintings are, and implies a kind of heterogeneous imposition from the outside onto the work. What is remarkable about a Rothko painting, and painting in general for us, for our subjectivity, is not the discrete religious experience it might impart onto us, but its silence.
Art for us cannot simply “be what it is,” — e.g. self-apparent propaganda or religion. Actually, in bourgeois society — the universal society of labor where we value humanity as an end-in-itself, and thus art as well, as an objectification of our imagination — we expect art to be more than propaganda or entertainment. But ironically, it’s through art becoming an end-in-itself in bourgeois society that art both becomes art per se, but also loses its self-evident character. We require conceptual thinking in order to comprehend art, in a way that people in antiquity did not. But this does not merely represent a loss, although that’s how it might be registered subjectively (the Romantic turn and its return in post-modernism). For Bourgeois thinkers like Hegel and Modernists like Baudelaire, this represented a potential transformation of art, and perhaps even its realization.
Many today seem to have an understanding of art which contradicts my claims — “No,” they might claim, “art doesn’t just exist for itself, that’s Eurocentric. Art does exist to fulfill a social obligation, whether it be political, religious, social, cathartic, etc.” For a cheap example, many seemed to believe this when Trump was in office. For four years, all new art seemed to become Democrat propaganda. Even for art made prior to Trump’s election, “good” art seemed to now be colored by a kind of historical anti-Trump invariant, while “bad” art seemed to foreshadow Trump by representing accumulated historical “evil”. But if in that context, “good” art became about the expression of political “resistance,” the question is raised, why do art at all? Why not concern oneself with politics per se, rather than taking a long route to politics via art?
Why can art no longer be itself? Maybe this is because we have lost the capacity to look at art, and this paranoid kind of looking is now all we’re capable of. We can no longer see more than what’s on the canvas, or read what was never written, or hear notes that were not played. Art has become self-evident once again, but in a false way. When we look at art, we’re now just compelled to say, “sure, I guess that’s art.” The question of the viewer’s own imagination has been totally elided, art becomes about the art object, rather than what happens between the viewer and the art object — where art really occurs — the aesthetic experience. We cannot look at a piece of art sympathetically, but only with a kind of utility in mind. “This is the art our tumultuous times need now.” But this is not a problem of the last 10 years, but a problem of the disintegration of subjectivity amidst the persistence of capitalism. The foundation upon which art qua art (rather than as a function of something else) was able to come into existence — bourgeois subjectivity — has disintegrated amidst total barbarization under capitalism, what Benjamin described as “too much culture.”
Art does indeed express a need, but not the kind of need that could be legislated by a board of experts. To quote Trotsky: “art is an expression of man’s need for an harmonious and complete life, that is to say, his need for those major benefits of which a society of classes has deprived him. That is why a protest against reality, either conscious or unconscious, active or passive, optimistic or pessimistic, always forms part of a really creative piece of work.”
Why do people go to artist talks? To be enlightened about what art is, and to educate themselves on how to make art. But this used to be accomplished by the experience of the work of art itself — the desire to go to an artist talk today is an expression of our inability to deal with the work of art and to make art. “Perhaps hearing an artist talk about their work will help me understand what their work even is, and how I myself may make work.”
But the sense of affirmation people often express after seeing an artist talk is mere intoxication in the delusion that we can still make and receive art. This is often explained by the claim that one feels a sense of community amidst other artists in events like artist talks. At SAIC there is much talk from the administration about the school’s “vibrant community.” But of course, never is there a greater sign of a lack of community than when everyone must insist and insist and insist on the strength of said community.
This same kind of sense can be expressed when upon showing work, someone might approach an artist and say, “I think it’s so great you’re doing this,” rather than saying anything about the work itself. If it’s not just out of nicety in the face of work they actually despised, this expresses an inability to deal with the work at all, and the feeling that it's impressive that anyone manages to do anything. “It's so great you're doing this,” contains the secret intuition that it's impossible to make art anymore, but everywhere people are searching to be proven wrong. Perhaps however we really cannot, but the artist talk is an expression of art’s necessity which goes unanswered for today: that we still try to enlighten ourselves about how to make and receive art, even if we seem to be blocked in doing so.
Artistic “community” and more importantly, artistic “practice” is more often than not a shield for work which fails to even be bad. My friends and I affectionately describe work like this as, “nothing.” Really it would be more interesting to hear about an artist’s “theory” rather than their “practice” — instead however, our solicitations to hear this theory meet their arbitrary systems, totally unconnected from the work itself. And it’s not as though artists do not have a theory of what they’re doing — they just either cannot or will not express it, either because they lack the faculty to do so, or because thought taboos within art and society itself have blocked them. But an individual artist’s theory would prove useful to our purposes, because it would tell us about what the artist viewed as immanently necessary to fulfill within their own work.
Looping back to my previous comment about the film industry — that I do not condescend to my prior desire to join the grip and electric union. This was not founded upon some condescending “solidarity” with unions, which is very in vogue right now amidst a real political downturn and the total liquidation of the political potential shown by the Millennials in the 2000s and 2010s. Rather, it’s because there’s a way in which those working grunt positions in mass culture express an art-mindedness as conscious producers of kitsch, that self-avowed artists have actually lost contact with. Indeed, much art today fails to even be kitsch.
I have friends who work in film between LA and New York, many of whom do not in any way consider themselves artists, they think of themselves as something more akin to technicians. Yet, when you speak to them about their work, you find that they are more willing to think about the particular aesthetic effect it might have on the viewer, and what the work is actually doing at all, than the majority of self-avowed artists. Obviously this must be read symptomatically as well, as individuals working on a film are stripped of much of the agency of artists in other fields, so they often overcompensate by diving into the limited freedom they’re allotted. But it’s interesting nonetheless to see that in self-avowed artists, this kind of thought often just doesn’t happen — and it’s not due to more concern shown to their art’s immanent necessity rather than with the “effect” upon the viewer — it actually more acutely expresses indifference to their own material. But this isn’t necessarily their fault.
The artist, in attempting to speak about their art from the “outside” — via an artist talk for example — actually creates a barrier for themselves to successfully carry out their own work, because in effect it prevents them from thinking about their own work immanently, following its own logic from within. And since artists everywhere must justify their work as if from the outside, such as with grant applications, they are prevented from actually developing a real understanding of what they think they’re doing, an understanding that could only be expressed by the term “carrying their works' conclusions to the end.” The question of the artist’s understanding of their own work is not simply, “why did I do this?” but “what was the work asking of me?”
Perhaps an artist talk could be enlightening if this kind of understanding would be allowed to shine forth. Perhaps a model of this would not be an artist being interviewed or speaking alone, but a kind of public dialogue between an artist and a critic with a real understanding of their work. Often of course this is how artist talks are portrayed, but rarely how they actually unfold in practice. The “critic” usually just becomes the bearer of their own academic prejudices which ultimately serve to affirm whatever it comes into contact with.
But the critic here would be tasked not with positively affirming the artist’s “practice,” but to clarify what the work itself is doing, to better allow the artist’s work to develop in the future by allowing them to better understand what it is their work “wants.” The artist would be tasked with revealing the immanent logic of their own work — again, “what did the work seem to ask of me in order for it to be realized?”
The audience through this process would be able to see a discrepancy between what the artist thought they were doing, and what the art in fact actually does. It is not through the artist’s own inclinations and inspirations that the audience would have an educative experience, but through their experience of the art itself. The discrepancy between their experience of the work and the artist's conception of what they're doing, objectified as a dialogue between artist and critic, would allow the viewer to recognize their own aesthetic experience, their own subjectivity, in however limited a form we might still be capable of experiencing the aesthetic as such. For this reason, art needs to be taken up on its own terms — artists themselves cannot. What both would be expressions of however, are symptoms of the present, of a moment in capitalism.
What the work “wants,” what it’s asking of the artist. In filmmaking and art generally (but filmmaking especially due to film's nakedly constructed character) one often hears the recommendation in editing to stop trying to make the film do something it doesn't want to do. But how could a film want to do something? This seems to be a violation of the filmmaker's freedom. But this would be a misapprehension. For the freedom of the filmmaker lies in the ability to endow their own work with freedom. The freedom of art. It is not a misapprehension when people detect that a filmmaker is trying to violate their work's own freedom — or said colloquially, to not carry their own conclusions to the end. The filmmaker who does this is like the politically immature prince, who with utility in mind, permits his subjects a taste of freedom, only to attempt to revoke it when he disapproves of the ends this freedom is used for. Inevitably, this ends in rebellion.
The freedom of the artist is to realize the necessity inherent in their own work. Yet, this is a necessity they lay down at the beginning. Distaste at this necessity is ultimately fear of one's own freedom, a freedom they objectified in the object of their art, but can no longer recognize as their own.