The Staged Business of Artists in Public Practice: Writing for/about Art

Introduction: The Artist’s Statement on His Behalf

Standing before the class, I begin to read aloud an artist statement written by a young, gay, immigrant Latino artist who is one of the class’s students. The document describes his [“my”] family’s immigration and its influence on his work in video, painting, and performance. It tells of his recent breakup with his first and only lover, its debilitating effect on his spirit, and its influence on the violent representations and the use of metallic materials in his recent work. The statement also recounts his family’s long journey into the United States from Mexico, his even longer journey to citizenship, and how he always addresses themes of belonging to family, community, and nation in his work. When I pause from speaking, the artist whose writing I have read sits silently, and his classmates promptly begin to discuss the statement in detail, assessing its clarity, its use of narrative, its efficacy in evoking his installation work and filmmaking, and the statement’s likely influence on a grant panel or curator. Later, the student will tell me that the experience was raw for him, and that he had been concerned about whether he had gotten too personal in his statement. He will say that the feedback helped him understand not only what he left out, but what he was still committed to saying. From the outset, we hold to a tacit understanding that with respect to art-making and artist representation, the personal is not only political, it is elemental.

This essay describes a pedagogy that productively uses representational writing common to artist grants, new work development, and even ongoing promotions as the substance of critically engaged and engaging performance. In “Artists in Public Practice: Writing for/about Art,” an undergraduate, upper-division topics course I developed at the University of Texas in 2010, students performed one another’s project descriptions, budgets and budget narratives, and artist biographies, to name a few examples. By “performed,” I mean that for a portion of each week, student facilitators read aloud one another’s writings and then engaged the class in discussions about whether the words and documents adequately evoked and advocated for the artist’s project, process, and/or body of work. To illustrate the course’s proposals, I situate its practices against performance theories exploring the tension between writing and embodiment, including Diana Taylor’s archive and repertoire and Della Pollock’s performative writing. To demonstrate the course’s relevance at this moment and a predominance of writing-as-representation in artistic practice, I frame the course within current movements in cultural policy and fine arts higher education.

The value of Artists in Public Practice is that the course cultivated among the emerging artists enrolled practice-based skills and knowledge. Many students celebrated particular accomplishments during the class: one student designed and later opened a video production cooperative, which supplements his earnings from working in a visual arts gallery; another led the discussion about letters of agreement at the same time that she was writing her own for a series of CD covers for which she received a commission; two other visual artists used the opportunity to rebrand themselves as educators and used the documents to secure teaching jobs shortly thereafter. Even now, three years later, I hear back from the students as they embark on new projects. The scenic designer recently tagged me on Facebook to let me know how she had used her course-based skills to land her dream job. The artist whose statement I read aloud used his materials to apply for and obtain a fellowship to study in Guatemala, his first trip across a US border since childhood. On the day before I finished this essay, a student who identified as a sound designer asked me to meet him for coffee and look over the one sheet and proposed website for a collaborative production company he has recently created with a filmmaker/videographer, a web designer, and a writer who has been organizing philanthropy projects since childhood. While...