Sandip Roy: When the artist’s statement overshadows the art

At a literary festival, it’s natural to talk about reviews. Recently at the Kolkata Literary Meet, Pulitzer winner Jhumpa Lahiri and Booker winner Kiran Desai were sharing the stage for the first time. The moderator, Anindita Ghose, brought up the touchy subject of bad reviews. Lahiri confessed that an early bad review caused her to break down in tears on the couch in her husband’s office. Desai said because she lived and worked alone, she had no one to turn to after a stinker of a review. “I would just be by myself, dealing with it,” she said. The consensus seemed to be to avoid reading reviews in general for one’s peace of mind.

But sometimes a persistent reviewer really wants you to know what they thought of your book, good, bad or ugly, said Ghose. What if they tag you on the reviews, she asked.

“What’s a tag?” asked the famously social-media averse Lahiri causing the audience to erupt in laughter.

It is a privilege to be able to survive in the world of arts and culture these days with that level of seclusion from social media. For most art practitioners that’s no longer an option. It’s not just about reviewers. Authors are rumoured to get book deals based on their social media following. Artists must contextualise, explain and defend their creations.

Literature festivals, art expos and biennales are wonderful opportunities to meet the artists. One can take selfies and get autographs but also hear them speak about what they do and why they do it. Artists who mostly lead the existence of unsocial hermits suddenly have to sit on stage and talk about their craft like a coffee nerd explaining the finer nuances of their morning brew. Paradoxically, this can also take some magic out of the art.

More than one friend has told me they religiously avoid attending sessions featuring authors they love, fearing they will end up liking them a little less after seeing them in real life. And every work they read or artwork they look at henceforth will be tainted by that encounter. One will suddenly start to read pomposity between the lines and see insecurity in the brushstrokes. The author, in all his pettiness, will loom uncomfortably large behind the prettiness of the prose.

Dan Rosen, host of Middlebrow, a self-declared “pseudo-intellectual podcast” has a funny reel about a man following him around the museum for 20 minutes. When he confronts him, the man says indignantly, “I saw you looking at my painting. You spent six seconds on it. I spent two years on it.” When Rosen expresses amazement that the artist is just hanging around waiting to see how people are looking at his painting, the artist protests, “Yes, I have to make sure that people are actually consuming it, digesting it in the proper way and you’re not.”

Art appreciation is an art in itself. There are courses and seminars, and I often wish that my STEM education had made more room for the humanities so I understood a little more about art movements and schools of literature. But now you can Google everything, says a fellow STEM friend reassuringly. But I don’t even know what I don’t know, I reply despairingly. So I am usually grateful when art comes with an artist’s statement. It is like a map to some hidden treasure.

But increasingly the artist’s statement can overshadow the art. Crafting one is not a skill that comes naturally to all artists. In a 1936 lecture called What are Master-Pieces, and Why Are There So Few of Them?, Gertrude Stein said, “Nothing could bother me more than the way a thing goes dead once it has been said.” But we live in an age where we must explain art and have it explained so that we know we are, as the Middlebrow reel quipped, “digesting it in a proper way.”

Years ago an artist friend would complain about having to explain his work in interviews. “I just make things because I think they are pretty,” he would say. “But that isn’t good enough. There has to be a deeper meaning.” As someone who worked with words, it became my job to craft his artist statements. “Make me sound smart,” he would say. The ideas were his. The artistry was his. But I would need to come up with pithy statements about it, finding layers of hidden meaning and contemporary cultural relevance so that it “sounded” smart.

Now I am not needed. We have ChatGPT.

Durga Puja in Kolkata is often hailed as the city’s premier public art festival. I have grown up seeing both artistry and gimmickry in the Puja installations. Sometimes it was a goddess made out of bottle caps. Sometimes it was Hogwarts or Titanic as a theme. The queue would snake around the block as people flocked to see their hometown gods transplanted to the Potterverse. It could be cheesy but it was fun and never needed an artist’s statement.

But now that Durga Puja has received the imprimatur of intangible cultural heritage from Unesco, it is becoming increasingly self-conscious about its status as art, and the artist statements are getting more incomprehensible.

I remember walking into one Durga Puja and being gobsmacked by the word salad in the artist’s statement, which talked about lingering over colonial edges and navigating spaces to “difference”. I thought the Durga image was striking but the artist’s statement made my head spin. Every year since it’s been getting more dizzying.

Puja theme designer Anirban Pandalwala had a huge success a few years ago when he turned an entire street into a set that had stepped out of the pages of the beloved nonsense rhymes of Sukumar Ray. All the houses on the lane were painted white with black line drawings like the pictures in Ray’s book of poems Abol Tabol.

Fantastical creatures from those poems were recreated, entwined around lamp posts, popping up from behind windows or wandering around the streets. There was no deeper meaning. It was nostalgia at its happiest and people thronged to it and marvelled at the magical transformation of a neighbourhood, which became a portal into their childhood. At that time Anirban, who usually designs half-a-dozen Durga Pujas, said for him both Sukumar Ray and Durga Puja were mass art. People of all ages, of all kinds of educational background could enjoy both. He told me that when it came to Durga Puja, as an artist he had to keep in mind he was making art for the masses. For him the mass was as important as the art.

The real problem isn’t the word salad. That would be easy to ignore. It is that art at its best should resonate differently in each viewer’s mind. It thrives in the grey spaces of nuance, in the things left unsaid. The statements at their best can give us a glimpse into where the artist is coming from. But they can also eliminate the fluidity of the experience by telling us exactly what to think. As I gear up to go to the Kochi Biennale for the first time, I feel both excited and a little nervous, worried that I will get lost in the words that might surround the art.

Words can be boxes too and in their own way they can cage art. Has it come time to set art free? Even at the risk of being misunderstood.

Cult Friction is a fortnightly column on issues we keep rubbing up against.

Sandip Roy (@sandipr) is a writer, journalist and radio host.