BlackLab: Adventures in Still Pictures

Artspeak #01

Writing about fine art is an art in itself. Too often though, writers get away with murder by hiding behind art’s amorphous, subjective and intangible qualities to justify vague, contradictory and nonsensical writing.

Call us old-fashioned but we believe writing should be legible and clear with a point. Following in the footsteps of whattheheckisart and artbaloney, we pick out criminally poor and vague art writing and apply it to other artworks, transmogrifying hackneyed and pedantic rhetoric into cockamamie heteronyms. Aren’t we the clever ones …

This week, extracts from Donna Moylan’s Landscape with Meaning press release are applied to the Hungate Outdoor Community Arts Show in York.

“Imagined, invented, and inspired, sometimes populated and sometimes desolately devoid of human life, this outdoor exhibition hovers in the uncanny domain between the remembered and the repressed. The range in scale, from an almost medieval miniature to a near baroque grandeur, formally transmits the artists’ dual concerns with microcosmic and macrocosmic alternate worlds. The tightly focused group of paintings and works on paper included in the Hungate Outdoor Community Arts Show allow a profound understanding and recognition of the painterly skills at the artists’ disposition.

Writing about an earlier show Barry Schwabsky commented; “Delicate and blunt, intricate and slapdash, serene and lurid commingle; painstaking ornamental elaboration turns into the impatient, sweeping gesture that would wipe the slate clean; abstract forms and spontaneous effects bump up against precisely rendered images, not without surprise but certainly without antagonism.”