International Art English
WHY IS IT SO DIFFICULT to find plain English in the art world?
For many of us, reading a wall text, press release or exhibition catalogue is often an incredibly frustrating experience. Instead of finding answers and making sense of the work, your efforts are rewarded with a slippery chaos of descriptors and embellishment.
You might understand every word independently, and yet they are connected in such a way that entire paragraphs seem to skirt meaning altogether. Wading through the onslaught of words, making sense of it seems so near and yet so far.
In 2012, artist David Levine and sociologist Alix Rule conducted a study on this form of 'Artspeak', using press releases from the Internet mailing list e-flux, which circulates roughly three announcements a day about exhibitions from all over the world. Taking the previous thirteen years of mail-outs as their sample, they conducted lexical, grammatical and stylistic analysis to identify patterns of linguistic usage in a unique language they named 'International Art English' (IAE).
So what are its defining features? IAE loves to invent nouns: 'potential' becomes 'potentiality', 'experience' becomes
'experiencability. In IAE, the longer the word, the better: why should artists 'use' something when they can 'utilize' it? Then there is a compulsion towards hyperbole: an artist's work is never simply thought-provoking but, as one recent press release put it, 'dissolves our perceptions of the real and the virtual, place and time and the nature of memory and its loss'. Oh, that's another thing, a tendency to list opposites - the work at once 'exposes and obfuscates", it 'blurs the boundaries' between 'internal psychology and external reality'.
No one in the art world can claim immunity. At some point, all of us have been guilty of speaking in what sounds like inexpertly translated French', as Levine and Rule put it. But it would be too hasty to dismiss all Artspeak as gobbledygook. There is a lot of good writing out there and sometimes a long word is used because a long word is required. Really good writing can be as enlightening as it is challenging. And that's a lovely IAE pairing, if ever there was one.
For many of us, reading a wall text, press release or exhibition catalogue is often an incredibly frustrating experience. Instead of finding answers and making sense of the work, your efforts are rewarded with a slippery chaos of descriptors and embellishment.
You might understand every word independently, and yet they are connected in such a way that entire paragraphs seem to skirt meaning altogether. Wading through the onslaught of words, making sense of it seems so near and yet so far.
In 2012, artist David Levine and sociologist Alix Rule conducted a study on this form of 'Artspeak', using press releases from the Internet mailing list e-flux, which circulates roughly three announcements a day about exhibitions from all over the world. Taking the previous thirteen years of mail-outs as their sample, they conducted lexical, grammatical and stylistic analysis to identify patterns of linguistic usage in a unique language they named 'International Art English' (IAE).
So what are its defining features? IAE loves to invent nouns: 'potential' becomes 'potentiality', 'experience' becomes
'experiencability. In IAE, the longer the word, the better: why should artists 'use' something when they can 'utilize' it? Then there is a compulsion towards hyperbole: an artist's work is never simply thought-provoking but, as one recent press release put it, 'dissolves our perceptions of the real and the virtual, place and time and the nature of memory and its loss'. Oh, that's another thing, a tendency to list opposites - the work at once 'exposes and obfuscates", it 'blurs the boundaries' between 'internal psychology and external reality'.
No one in the art world can claim immunity. At some point, all of us have been guilty of speaking in what sounds like inexpertly translated French', as Levine and Rule put it. But it would be too hasty to dismiss all Artspeak as gobbledygook. There is a lot of good writing out there and sometimes a long word is used because a long word is required. Really good writing can be as enlightening as it is challenging. And that's a lovely IAE pairing, if ever there was one.
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