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Artist Statement

When I arrived in Canada in the early 80s, the war in El Salvador was all over the news, and I became aware that painting should be a technical process dancing around the tacit, formalist belief that visible phenomena are a structure of the brain. But they are about the past, smeared with a patina of the present, trying to overturn our position as a response to Western society’s seemingly unquestionable belief in a rational universe. As well to say we understand everything as that skeletons battle soldiers in murky swamps; towers of eyeballs goggle cartoonishly; flesh peels wetly off bare bones. The list is endless. Where Ziółkowski’s measured and often peckishly painterly style features a white van traveling, forwardly mobile structuring inherent in the process, it points to stereotypes of different histories of fragments which are interwoven and embossed into the paper, etc.--so that errors are not repeated. Errors are frighteningly more expensive than gold. Platinum prints are not only transfers, but embodiments of their technical and scientific diagrams and designs. The body politic as a sentient character. The removal of dictators has only peeled back then, without the possibility of in fact being able to paint even with unconventional truth which resides on the surfaces, to reveal colour--will this enable us to depict the scene in the fullness of pure representational capability? Or will they merely bunniesring to us fragments of art art collections, art history?

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Wait what? What did you just read?

I ask myself the same thing after I read a lot of real-life artist statements too similar to the above.

You Can Draw These From a Hat Because It's All Farce

It's okay. It's supposed to be farce. Exactly like too much similar writing about art is not--not intentionally anyway.

Folks have studied and named the fugly beast which is such writing. It is International Art English, or IAE.

Good and Bad Artist Statements

A good artist statement may be:

• Optional: if it is better that there is no statement, please make none
• Clear and accessible
• Usefully informative or descriptive of the art in away that may not be obvious to the observer, but which improves their experience or appreciation of the work upon learning.

A bad artist statement probably:

• Lacks any of those qualities
• Is conceived for any of countless bad reasons which all artists should say no to
• Perhaps at worst profanely anoints and separates The Opaqueonaut: in reality the artist turned fool, but too few people see the emperor's clothes

How This Works

This page randomly selects and serves pre-generated farcical artist statements, many of which were created with computer assistance; for example by statistical sentence recombobulation: training an AI on actual IAE, then having it gurgitate similar stuff.

The statements, being AI-generated, are by nature (and if human-created, by dedication) in the Public Domain.

To get another statement, reload the page.

This "statement" is from this source file:

aMxXsv9W6MJVVqqM3C4a_generated_IAE_gibberish__2016-01-09__01_16_12_AM.txt

This page doubles as an API. To get a plain-text statement without this explanation, call the page with any GET variable declared, like this:

http://earthbound.io/data/gibberish-artist-statements/index.php?gib=florf

How to Contribute

To contribute to these entertainments, clone the git repository, do your stuff and submit a pull request.

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