Artspeak’s dodgy reputation isn’t new, as shown by BANK’s PRESS RELEASE project, now on show at Tate Britain (and at www.john-russell.org). In a process which now seems touchingly archaic, the collective (running 1991-2003, and featuring John Russell, Simon Bedwell and Milly Thompson at the time) gave marks out of ten and made unsolicited critical annotations on the type-written hand-outs from 1998-99. They faxed them to the galleries by way of free consultancy on how to tidy up their self-presentation and avoid ‘the new bureaucratic meta-language’ of ‘meaningless mannerisms’ and ‘badly thought out (non) theory and jargon’. The rebukes are fun, but did their efforts have any effect? Stephen Friedman scored 1/10: criticisms included a habit of dealing in opposites such as ‘both serious and frivolous’, a technique which ‘means you have nothing to say about the work’. Maureen Paley (1.5/10) was traduced for using the hesitant term ‘can appear’ and for how ‘extremely bad use of punctuation and grammar’ marred a press release ‘refreshingly devoid of any ideas’. The approach garnered a comparatively dizzying 2.25/10, despite some empty terms of praise: viz ‘you keep telling us things are important – I’m becoming suspicious’ and ‘what does ‘beautiful’ mean? This is a press release, not a script for The Antiques Roadshow.’ Perhaps it’s the impact of word processing, but this year’s output from the three galleries looks far more professional and avoids those sins. The writing is also reasonably clear, excepting The approach’s text on Alice Channer, in which ‘instead of volume, the tensile subject aspires to a back-end viral aesthetic’ and ‘the dialectic between concept and matter collapses’.
Most days art Critic Paul Carey-Kent spends hours on the train, traveling between his home in Southampton and his day job in Surrey. Could he, we asked, jot down whatever came into his head?
