Break Yourself Free from the Ossified Language of Art Speak

And after you read the main event, I invite you to watch the first episode of Sager Solutions, a NEW series of short mosaic problem solvers.

First, a photo of my phone. Notice the hand-circled spot. That is the negative space I created yesterday that will elbow out Facebook and improve my quality of life. Facebook helps sell art. And it helps book Ruins tours. But it also chips away at my soul. I have been weighing those scales for far too long.

But you are a business owner! they say. You need to have a presence on these places, just hold your breath from their noxious fumes and bear with it!

I am hearing more and more from fellow Substackian writers that the world we are building here far outshines any other social media format, to the point that deleting other apps is truly in our best interest. The discourse on Notes is uplifting, smart, and just… sparkly. If you would like to check it out, just download the Substack APP. As a subscriber to The Ruins, you will automatically get to see the fun things I post and share on there. It’s a better world. It’s like being in the early days of My Space when everything is fresh, and you are the first to hear about the cool party happening down the street.

Beware Instagram…like a bad rooster, you may be next on the chopping block.

BIG NEWS

The Ruins Movie is now STREAMING. You can watch it now. You can watch it late tonight when you can’t sleep. You can watch it however and whenever you like. Even on your phone! And please share far and wide. Little grassroots movies like these become hits through word of mouth. Your mouth!

The Ruins Movie: A short film by Robert Tinnell

Ruins movie trivia: The gorgeous piano music was composed and performed by none other than mosaic artist, Kenneth Blaine. That man has talent stacks!

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Break Free from ARTSPEAK

An artist is always charging forward. On a good day, I imagine myself in full chain mail regalia astride one of those heavy, draft horses with a big smile on my face. Or sometimes a scowl. It depends on the day. Tiptoeing one morning, bulldozing the next. But always a dynamic movement into the skirmishes outside of the establishment, the known, the way things are done. The artist’s refusal to live inside of a prescribed outline gives her extraordinary power. She can imagine things that don’t need definition. She can create things that refuse classification. The Ruins Project stands as the embodiment of the great power of the warrior artist archetype. I often refer to sections of its blank concrete walls as the wild west.

But I feel deflated when I see artists trying to define their work using someone else’s language. The pompous ARTSPEAK vocabulary that can still be spotted in the wild today, is a tragic example of the establishment controlling the imaginers. The establishment, as in, those who make the rules that an artist believes she should follow to be successful; museum directors, curators, the people who create grant applications, critics who don’t make art.  Art Speak is a brittle dialect that works hard to distance the viewer from genuine intimacy. The human experience of art should be visceral, seated in the gut. Tortured phrases, like the one below that I made up as an example, work to separate you from a direct, earthy connection to art.

Read my ARTSPEAK experiment statement…

My work, being intuitively process-based, traverses the idea of geographical placement while simultaneously communicating historical texture, the gravity of ancestry and a proletariat mentality. The materiality driven goals are transcended only by a more universal respect for language within the medium. Sometimes the narratives that I construct ask conceptual questions about the human experience of locality. Often, my work challenges preconceived understandings about marginalized groups.

Where is the humanity in that statement, I ask? I am exhausted from it. You are too, if you even got to the end.

Now, read this same statement, written to be understood…

I build art about place because my place defines who I am.  I come from a beautifully imperfect corner of the world, and it has stamped a deep, sometimes bloody mark, into my soul.  I feel pride for the people I come from; coal miners, farmers, steelworkers, people who build things.  I go out into the fields and dig up pieces of time, pieces of history that I transform into lines of mosaicked communication. Using simple tools, I cut, shape, and organize tesserae into an intuitive mosaic language. I tell stories in stone. Sometimes those stories are big and sweeping like geologic layers. Sometimes they are small and speak for forgotten people.

Same subject, different writing. Which statement will you remember?

I understand the process we must go through for show applications, grant proposals and all the things that make a working artist get stuff done.  But when do we, as the ones who do the making and the heavy lifting, grip the reins of our own destinies and turn this giant, plodding monster of word control towards a clearer destination? That destination being those powerful moments in time when a person stands in front of this thing we made and is illuminated.

That’s my goal, as the artist. To illuminate. To shine a light into the cave of shadows that Plato describes in his allegory. To pull people up into the sun. I ask myself if a statement about my art will add to the illumination? Or not.

What if you wrote about art like Anthony Bourdain talked about food?

Authentically. Honestly. And maybe, a bit shockingly.

Writing about art can be hard. Sometimes I can do it well, but often I choose to go sans statement. When I do decide to write a statement, I follow my guidelines below.

• Don’t write like a snob. This means leaving out the twenty-dollar words. Words like deconstructed, generative and materiality. I know, I used the fancy word, ossified in my title today, but I balanced it with lots of other, very simple words. Phrases like informed by are overused. Write to invite your reader in deeper. A good statement should not be a barrier that only a select few will understand.

• Know your audience. Hopefully you are writing for regular people, wanting to feel things. Picture a real person, someone who you want to reach, and write for them.

• Ask yourself if your art needs an explanation? Maybe, maybe not.

• Dig down to the kernel of truth. If you were threatened with violence and told you must choose one word to describe your piece of art, then hold that word in your mind for a bit. Confusion? Confidence? Country? Cohesion? Then build on that word. The word in my artist statement above would have been PLACE.

• Authenticity over everything. Being exactly who you are is your best communication style.

• Describe physical things. Your materials and tools. The story behind the story. A hint about the how is interesting to people. This included terms that non-art people do not understand yet. Like intuitive malmischiato.

Put on your armor, grab your sword, and break yourself free from ARTSPEAK.

The world will reward you.

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I was making a mosaic while on vacation last month. Yes, I make mosaic even while I am meant to be taking a break from making mosaic. Hunched over a bed of tiny shale slivers, my friend mentioned that the tips I was sharing with her as we worked were small but mind-altering. I decided to make it official and create a series of these small tips that are really solutions to problems. Possibly problems that you didn’t know you had. Each five-minute video will make you smarter, even if just by a few degrees.

They add up!

You can watch the other free shale course that I mention over at Mosaic Arts Online HERE. And you can get yourself some of the famous Youghiogheny Shale on my website.

I invite you to follow along for Sager Solutions next Wednesday. Each weekly video will be centered on the composition below, that I will be building as I create these little mosaic experiences for you. You get to watch it become a finished mosaic, week by week!

After this week, Sager Solutions will be reserved for my beautiful paid subscribers.

Be sure to watch next week to see how this mosaic is developing.

Thank you for being here as I keep digging for optimism.

Some days with a hammer, some days with a shovel. And some days with a pen.

Click HAMMER to ENTER