I want to talk about gallery press releases, and I want to do it without screaming, which is going to be difficult because I have been standing in front of gallery walls for seven years now reading these things and I have reached the end of my patience in a serious way.
Last Tuesday I walked into a gallery on West 24th Street — good gallery, I like this gallery, I have stood in front of paintings there and felt things I can't fully articulate, which is the whole point — and I picked up the press release for the current show and read the following sentence: "The works in this exhibition occupy a liminal space between the personal and the political, interrogating the boundaries of representation while simultaneously destabilizing the normative frameworks through which the body is traditionally understood."
I read it twice. I am a reasonably intelligent person. I have read a lot of books. I grew up in South Brooklyn where we did not have a lot of patience for people who used five words when one would do, and I have carried that instinct with me into the art world like a hunting knife. And I am telling you: I do not know what that sentence means. Not because I'm not smart enough. Because it doesn't mean anything. It is a sentence whose function is not to communicate but to signal — to tell you that the people who wrote it have been to graduate school and would like you to know that, and to make you feel, if you haven't, that maybe this place isn't quite for you.
"The paintings on the wall are extraordinary. The sentence about them is a wall built to keep you away from the paintings."
Here is what I know about that show, from actually looking at the work for forty-five minutes: a woman painted her own body, repeatedly, across twenty years, in colors that shifted from almost flesh-tone in the early work to something furious and electric in the recent stuff, and if you stand in front of the biggest painting in the back room, the one with the red, you will feel something shift in your chest and you will not be able to explain it later. That is the show. That is what I wanted the press release to tell me.
I know why it doesn't. I know the language evolved inside institutions that valued this kind of signaling, and I know there are people who read those sentences and feel included rather than excluded, and I know that dismantling academic language is not as simple as just deciding to write more clearly. I know all of that. I've been around long enough to understand the ecosystem.
But I also know this: every person who picks up that press release, reads that sentence, and puts it back down and decides this gallery is not for them — that is a person who didn't get to stand in front of that painting. And that painting is too good for that to keep happening.
Write it like you're telling a friend. Write it like the work is worth understanding. Write it like you believe that understanding is possible for people who haven't read Foucault. Because the paintings — the actual paintings, the things people made with their hands and their eyes and their whole selves — those are almost always worth it. It is only the language around them that keeps failing.
Fix the language. The rest will follow.
