'Contemporary art resists language. It can be very difficult to fix the meaning of a contemporary artwork with words. You can describe what it looks like, how it behaves, how it is made and even how you feel about it, but these rarely explain why the artist has made the work or its singular meaning. Artworks are formed in fundamentally different ways to written texts and obey a different set of rules.’
Sabah Naim, City People , 2003 (detail). Mixed media. © Sabah Naim. Photo: Pat Binder and Gerhard Haupt. Courtesy of Universes in Universe.
Writings
A thousand and one
Sweating, fucking, sleeping, dreaming.
Blue and green butterflies hover above the archipelago of sweat and semen stains on the soiled mattress whose pale pink material has faded only slightly. The mattress is a dumb object, mute witness to the actions that once took place over it and the people who occupied it.
Chiselled from pastel: the work of Claudette Johnson
Claudette Johnson’s statuesque female figures occupy space. They do so confidently and without embarrassment. They fill the paper from which they meet our gaze. Frequently, they push out beyond the boundaries of the frame, uncontained and uncontainable.
Dissonant Divas: Sonia Boyce, Sound and Collaboration
A breathless, halting male voice breaks the silence with his stuttering sounds and deep grunts, perhaps he is clearing his voice before he begins to speak and then, almost as suddenly, he pauses.
Art and Language (For Jimmie Durham)
The problem with writing about art is that artworks resist words like climate protesters resist policemen who want to remove them by force. Even if, as Jean Genet observed, those policemen have very desirable hairy legs.
Sunken Stories: Recent Works by Zineb Sedira
A wooden boat, mangled and broken, has been upturned onto its side and hangs suspended in a frozen sea of clear resin. Pieces of wood from the wreckage have fallen away and lie scattered on the bottom.
Sweet Oblivion
One day he was looking for the small anvil that he used for laminating metals and he could not remember its name. His father told him: ‘Stake’. Aureliano wrote the name on a piece of paper that he pasted to the base of the small anvil: stake. In that way he was sure of not forgetting it in the future.
The Stuart Brisley Interviews: Performance and its Afterlives
A significant theme which runs through these conversations is the impossibility of containing, completing or reconstructing a performance work which by its very nature is destined to remain unfinished and elusive.