Arty Bollocks

My earlier remarks might give the impression that I am among the "the emperor has no clothes!" crowd, decrying arty bollocks as inherently gibberish, as a terrible blight on the world.

This is not the case. Lewis Bush thinks I am an awful person, and most likely takes comfort in the idea that I don't know what I am talking about. And, of course, to an extent, he's right. I am not as they say "skilled in the art". Still, I do have a rough grasp of International Art English (I once again commend to you the excellent and hilarious piece on triple canopy). I can, in fact, muddle my way through a lot of this stuff.

Let me give an example, of sorts. My PhD thesis in mathematics was about "continuous functions between topological spaces which are both compact and zero-dimensional" which, if you are a normal human being, makes your eyes glaze over precisely as much as Lewis and Ben's dribbling does. The difference is that if you got on wikipedia and started poking around, searching for things, in a few minutes you would likely be convinced that all that jargon actually does go together, and that it most likely means something. What it means, even roughly, would be several hours of tough sledding for anyone who hasn't taken a course in point-set topology.

But the point is that you'd get the idea, pretty quickly, that it probably means something.

I have come around to quite liking the Artist's Statement. Arty Bollocks can be quite poetic, and if all you really need is a sort of word-cloud around an idea or two, it works quite well. It's just quite difficult to have a conversation in. Arty Bollocks is in fact a language, in which you can actually say things. It has less of a compressing effect than most technical terminologies, and seems to often actually expand the word count over what common English might use, but you can in fact say things. This expanding effect is really what makes it so hard to converse in, you have to spend so much time trying to dig out what the other fellow is saying that you can't simultaneously form a response, so in the end you just blat some canned Bollocks back.

It's like trying to converse in sonnets. You can either marshal up your own allegories and rhymes, count out your own meter, or you can puzzle the other fellow's out, but you cannot practically do both in real time.

A proper technical jargon compresses meaning into precise, detailed, nuggets, and makes conversation much much easier.

But, you can say things in Arty Bollocks, even fairly precise things:

My work centers on interrogating the politics of representation by minutely examining the specific mechanisms and processes by which meaning is constructed. The central thesis I propose is that this meaning essentially arises through the dynamic interaction of shared cultural semiotics with the deeply personal mechanic of individual memory.

Now, I just wrote that piece of crap, but it actually does mean something. First we can clear away the clutter of extra words that the talented speaker of Arty Bollocks jams in all over the place. Adverbs, for instance, can almost always be dropped without loss of meaning. I will leave in the words that actually carry meaning, but otherwise leave it alone:

My work is about the politics of representation, it examines the mechanisms by which meaning is constructed. I propose that this meaning arises through the interaction of shared cultural semiotics and individual memory.

Which is still pretty much gibberish, but shorter. If you poked around a little, you'd find that the "politics of representation" is a term of art which covers, roughly, the ways meaning is constructed, in society, from visual material, from media in general. This is a whole area of study, and it's probably kind of interesting. I assume one could do real work in it, although I have no idea if anyone bothers.

Anyways, having discovered that, you'd notice that the next bits are in fact about how meaning is constructed, and you might reasonably guess perhaps this mess actually means something.

Then, wonder of wonders, I actually propose a sort of mechanism, having suggested that these things are what I am interested in. Something about the interaction of widely understood symbols ("shared cultural semiotics") and personal memories, which isn't any more bullshit than any other random made-up mechanism I could pull out of ... the darkness.

So, in the end, it means this:

My work is about the ways in which we construct the meaning of media to which we are exposed. I propose that this meaning arises through the interaction of individual memories with symbols and ideas we share widely across our culture.

Which, natch, is quite a bit shorter than the original, and it sounds a lot less intellectually weighty. One might reasonably ask "what the hell else would meaning arise from, anyways?"

Then, of course, if I were a real boy, I'd go on to expand what kinds of widely understood symbols I mean, and what kinds of memories I mean, and probably provide some examples, maybe some interviews with real people, some worked examples of how, let's say, the meaning of a poster, an advertisement, a news report, might be constructed. Actual research, you know?

The difference between this and the Bush/Burbridge interview is that searching around and unpacking the terms of art in the interview renders the whole mess more confusing, more opaque. This is because these guys aren't actually having coherent thoughts, they're volleying canned phrases in a language they don't really understand. Phrases that, to be sure, sort of orbit around the ideas they're interested in (social media sucks, photography is awesome, I want tenure), but which don't cohere into any actual meaning and don't actually go anywhere.

I think probably Arty Bollocks isn't a good language for conducting interviews in. Perhaps Lewis should look in to English, or German. Those seem to work.