Letters to the Red Crayola VI, 1997-2012
| Letters to the Red Crayola VI, 1997-2012 | |
|---|---|
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| Art & Language | |
| Project |  Letters to the Red Krayola
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| Year | 2012 |
| Dimensions | 42.5 × 62.7 cm[1] |
| Materials | Ink, acrylic, collage and mixed media on paper |
Text
Dear M, There's a 'Secret Painting' here, remade somehow as a memory — or rather as a kind of fiction. However, we need to distinguish this kind of fiction from another that occasionally besets us. This latter is the fiction of the disappointed. It is often cast in words of principle and integrity, the louder these are spoken, the more certainty there is that the speakers simply lie. We have done our best to assume disguises, to be ventriloquists and to shift identities. This makes it possible for us to construct some of our putative history as indeed a kind of fiction — to make sure that, like the work itself, it remains unstable. Such disguises and shifting identities are made in a dark place hidden from the light of instrumental principle. Of course, this is in fact a principle that has been made in a very dark place, one whose existence is necessarily hidden. We've been misguided enough to harbour a sense of civil disobedience which might attend making the whole of our history up. We have not been content to remain within, let alone to claim or recover the historical boundaries that might be set by a methodologically rigorous (fictional and instrumental) historicising, preferring a discontinuity that wastes time and disrupts identity. At the same time we want to argue that such discontinuity does not decisively rule out all questions of autonomy, either personal or artistic. You mention the audience member who intervened with the observation that they didn't understand why anyone should need to be concerned with such useless games. They felt sure that artists needed to remain within the proper protessional boundaries (however expanded), because without them there would be no guarantee of critical objectivity. We replied soothingly that, 'of course it's true that any artist who knows what's good for them seeks to preserve — or rather to submit — to a professional decorum'. Indeed, we were anxious to reassure them that this is a decorum that often distinguishes the autobiographical and mythic gnomery of the artist from the methodologically rigorous discourse of the academic. We were trying to invoke — to introduce — the figure of the curator. And this was a trap. But who for?
Interpretations
- The background image references Sighs Trapped by Liars (1997)
- The text references Mel Ramsden's Secret Painting (1967-68)