The Dominic Samsworth’s case: can artists be the most compelling writers about their own work?

 

In this article we would like to address the fairly recent practice of exhibition press releases: texts written for the audience of what today we call an art show, often given in the form of paper handouts in the physical space, which somehow should communicate and enhance the experience of the art for which they exist and therefore promoting it.

 

Particularly, our focus here is on how some of them have managed to break a few rules of this mentioned practice within a system consisting of commercial galleries and for-profit enterprises, which mostly regard these texts as part of marketing strategies and consequentially design them by following conventions that come from conservative and functional use of language.

 

Our case study for this exploration is a recent exhibition of works by Dominic Samsworth (an artist we have already laid our attention on elsewhere in our blog). Held in the Brussels gallery Monchéri between September and November 2014, the show consisted of an installation that appeared as the artist’s personal interpretation of a swimming pool whose elements were spatially de-constructed onto painted canvases (the basin) and an undefined shape of objects wrapped up in plastic (umbrellas and bathing chairs). The title of the show – Floridian Gut – likely referred to the landscape of the American state hotels and resorts from which Samsworth might have taken his inspiration.

 

The reason why we use the conditional tense is that, assuming no other source of information would be taken into account, facts about the show were not prosaically described in its press release. And neither was an interpretation about the artworks given by the seemingly objective voice typical of this type of texts. Instead the artist, along with his gallerist, imagined the experience of the show would be better communicated to the art viewer/consumer by replacing the standard with nothing but a poem composed by the artist himself.

 

Without going too much into a poetical analysis, this text consisted of 21 lines of free verses that, thanks to the autonomy that connotes poetry, seemed to plunge the reader into the light-minded artist/writer’s observation of the glossy and consumerist elements of swimming pools in Florida, a standpoint that could poetically head somewhere else (IE an ‘aimless atoll’) though had to eventually come back to where the fascination aroused (‘whatever, I’ll see you by the swimming pool’). And connecting what this poem inspired with what we saw at the show, we can come to the conclusion that the voice said exactly what the hands made: deconstructed and concealed elements of the artist’s fascinating though ambiguous experience with a swimming pool.

 

This strong example of how a poetical text and visual art can serve each other prompts some questions about the nature of this ‘press release’ and press releases in general. For example, can an artist be the most compelling speaker about his or her own work? Is commercial prosaic language of most exhibition press releases lacking the creativity that should be expected in a field – the arts – that often bases itself on novelty and invention? Is poetry in this context an improved commercial communication tool used to build a stronger aura around the artist? Or is a poem written by an artist nothing but part of his or her art-making process and therefore should be inseparable from the artwork? Perhaps, like it often happens in the arts, there is no direct answer to these topics and what matters should once again be the research and experimentation that led to them.

November 25, 2014