In 2001 I had a show of box paintings at SPIN Gallery in Toronto and I decided to include a faux artist statement. There is so much dreck that uses half-understood current jargon in artists’ statements, which explains why nobody reads them, and why it seemed like a good moment to put a private joke in a public setting. Of all my friends, family and colleagues, only one artist read it. He told me it was funny, and that made my day.
ARTIST’S STATEMENT
IN SPITE OF THE FACT THAT
THE “ARTIST’S STATEMENT AS BUSINESS LETTER”
HAS BECOME A STANDARDIZED, ALBEIT MINOR LITERARY FORM
THAT BARES LITTLE RELATION TO THE LONG TRADITION OF
“THE ARTIST MANIFESTO”
YET IT (THE “ARTIST’S STATEMENT AS BUSINESS LETTER”)
TRADES ON THE GLAMOUR OF A SUPPOSED CONNECTION
By Stephen Eric Armstrong, artist, January, 2001
Originally published in Wegway No. 7, Fall 2004.
Numerous boxes that market and protect things like pharmaceuticals, soda crackers and nails enter my home. I have been saving these boxes, carefully undoing them, and then painting them. This process:
1- Redeems (almost Biblically) commodified objects to a context of personal value by way of labourious embellishment with gesso and paint. Late Capitalism’s colonization of the individual is reversed by the exercise of taste. Artists must be earnest and diligent if they are to succeed in the great task of ideological intervention. We are not to be envied in this difficult work.
2- Plays with the fundamental notion that a painting is a flat thing that offers a virtual, or apparent, volume. The boxes were not flat when I found them, but of course, they were flat at some earlier time on a factory floor somewhere, but this is irrelevant because the point is, they were designed to be folded and glued, or possibly stapled, and not be flat, and when most of us encounter them they aren’t flat, and we don’t generally understand them as being flat, but I made them flat and then I painted them to suggest illusory volumes of celestial proportions. But, simultaneously, and contradictorily, these illusory volumes look like nothing more than paint on cardboard. These paintings demonstrate the letter of Clement Greenberg without the spirit, or the spirit without the letter, or perhaps neither, or even both. Moreover, they could equally be regarded as Minimalism deconstructed. There is a lonely grandeur in such subtleties.
3- Celebrates the ordinary, that inevitable place where we all live. The boxes document the private life of a household as it is reflected in its consumer choices. Marx said that commercial relations falsify human relations – this process needs to be turned around, and this can only be accomplished by remembering who we are – we the people, who truly own this world, a point stressed by Mayakovsky. These boxes are cargo-cult totems for personal lives lost in global commercial culture. They reclaim a folk tradition and re-integrate the individual into meaningful social constellations. (see #1)
4- Sets up a figure/ground tension on a painted surface that has no clearly discernible figure on a ground, and is, indeed, only ground and nothing else. This tension is achieved by way of the peculiar shapes of the boxes. The shapes cause our perceptual mechanisms to seize upon the entire painted surface as a figure, while the ground becomes the framing materials I suppose, or even the entire world in which the figure exists. These paintings deny the figure/ground relation, but by so doing, export that relation into the real world, becoming in the process, virtual sculpture. (see #2)
5- Etc.
SEA 2001
P.S.
I almost believe these things, it’s just that I sometimes find articulated thought to be an embarrassment. I suppose this document is in equal parts a strutting of my stuff, a parody of artists’ futile attempts to describe the essence of their art, and a confession of my grandiose motivations. But more to the point, I have a tendency to try to be smart. That tendency is found in the Modernist/Postmodernist tradition and thus partially comes from my education, but my conscience forces me to take some resposibility for being a bit of a show-off.
But there’s nothing wrong with beauty, and beauty is a kind of smart. It’s a very direct kind of smart that feels immediate and I therefore don’t understand how beauty functions. I’m unable to say anything more.
SEA 2023
This document is approved by The Institute for the Separation of Theory from Practice.
My eyes glazed over suitably as I read this piece...😉