Recently, Alyson B. Stanfield of Art Biz Coach shared on Facebook a snippet of a gallery’s promotional email she received that was full of artspeak, that curious language in which artist statements are written that has more in common with theoretical physics than regular English. It’s also known as International Art English, or IAE.
So I went looking for the latest artist statement generator, and found 500 Letters.
There have been artspeak generators over the years, but this one is actually rather convincing. I plugged in some basic information — my name, the year I was born, where I work now, and so forth. Then I chose my primary and secondary media (painting and drawing), and selected three themes: urbanity, landscape, and utopia, which actually are the themes my work centers around.
You can see it is almost convincing, even though the tone is all wrong compared to my actual artist statement. Some parts are a bit of a stretch, but not too far off-base:
Brad Blackman (°1978, Bowling Green, KY, United States) makes paintings and drawings. By merging several seemingly incompatible worlds into a new universe, Blackman focuses on the idea of ‘public space’ and more specifically on spaces where anyone can do anything at any given moment: the non-private space, the non-privately owned space, space that is economically uninteresting.His paintings are often about contact with architecture and basic living elements. Energy (heat, light, water), space and landscape are examined in less obvious ways and sometimes developed in absurd ways. In a search for new methods to ‘read the city’, he uses a visual vocabulary that addresses many different social and political issues. The work incorporates time as well as space — a fictional and experiential universe that only emerges bit by bit.His works bear strong political references. The possibility or the dream of the annulment of a (historically or socially) fixed identity is a constant focal point. By exploring the concept of landscape in a nostalgic way, he investigates the dynamics of landscape, including the manipulation of its effects and the limits of spectacle based on our assumptions of what landscape means to us. Rather than presenting a factual reality, an illusion is fabricated to conjure the realms of our imagination.
His works establish a link between the landscape’s reality and that imagined by its conceiver. These works focus on concrete questions that determine our existence. Brad Blackman currently lives and works in Nashville, TN. In all seriousness, one could actually use something like this as a jumping-off point for your own artist’s statement, and then adapt it into your own language and tone. Or it could inspire you to make something new. Reading this, I start imagining how to make fictional cities fueled by my love of mystery and science fiction.
For further reading, check out A user’s guide to artspeak from The Guardian.
