contemporary monkey

The art industry is impressive in its extraordinary ability to write mystifying missives without saying much at all (if you can make it that far without asking for a four-ounce shot of Tobasco).  Here are some favourites:

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“Creating a vision of a generic, idealised utopia, non-specific in location but familiar nonetheless from travel guides and National Geographic imagery, we’re reflecting on notions of escapism, tourist-as-voyeur and the politics of tourism.”
-artist Edwin Pennicott, from Creative Review, June 2010, on waterfall scenery painted on a hoarding above a London pub, clearly having a laugh as if “tourism-as-voyeur” and “the politics of tourism” are subjects in need of a good discussion. Good one Pennicott, you nearly got us.

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“It [Italy] had followed an analogous trajectory in terms of artistic development, however its cultivation of a unique concept of a kind of ‘discontinuous’ modernity was characterized by a greater awareness of the specificity of the individual and the broad spectrum of differences it represented than that found, for instance, in the puritanical Minimalism of the American avant-garde.”   – Luca Cerizza, in Frieze Magazine, March 2010, attempting to make a comparison by making it impossible for the reader to remember just what the hell he was talking about in the first place.

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She [Tomma Abts] has cracked a nut that artists have been working on for eons - how to paint the inchoate. Her paintings have this ‘thing’, this feeling, this notion of the vastness of the universe and the internal…soul” – Laura Hoptman, New Museum, New York from “Seven Days in the Art World” making a hazy attempt to define Tomma Abts as Super Artist Who Can Do It All, and Probably Not A Mimic Of Piet Mondrian, or Op Artists of the 1960s, or Those Danish Neo-Concrete Artists Of The 1940’s.  Strictly Original, Tomma.

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“Similarly, although these paintings are hugely seductive in their explosive exuberance, their sensual intensity is really just a sign of our total inability to function.”   – The Contemporary Art Book (Bonham-Carter, Hodge) describing our total inability to function while looking at one of Franz Ackermann’s works, but really describing the author’s total inability to function and hoping we feel the same way.

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“I work on projects involving research and creation centered on the construction of ‘museumness’ and archival production, with a further focus on themes of a theoretical, philosophical and sociological order: a range of strategies that deal with the mechanisms and periodicities manifested by contemporary art, always from a critical and reflexive viewpoint in relation to institutional practices.”   – taken from art.es, issue number 32

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“Through the use of cheap materials and a rudimentary approach to display, Reid works against formality and the ideologies suggested by images of wealth and beauty dispersed within the work. Utilising a de-skilled aesthetic and emphasizing the act of composition rather than the final product, the artist reveals and dismantles these ideals as well as her own response.”  – Description for a work by Clunie Reid, winner of the John Jones Art on Paper Award 2008, and shown at Zoo Art Festival, London, 2009.

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“Regarded as a microcosm or theatre of the world, and a memory theatre, these collections conveyed symbolically the patron’s control of the world through its indoor, microscopic reproduction.”  – November 2009 email promotion for Exquisite Trove at The New Art Gallery Walsall.

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