Art Descriptions

Artists Describe Their Art

Art Descriptions explores the descriptions artists give to their art. Caught in a liminal space between a dichotomy of fate and a tautology of choice, the art creator exists apart from but still confined to the constructs of language. What linguistic means does an author of art employ to bring the indelible ether of ink to a page? Where does vision end and an assemblage of words begin?

By excoriating the text that describes a piece of art from the very art itself, we have created a new juxtaposition wherein the “artwork” exists solely in the manifolds of the mind. The viewer is left anxious, almost empty, as the art descriptions themselves take shape without adherence to any real, or haptically palpable thing. It is a pastiche of the mind, turbulent yet warm.

The end result is the incontrovertible confrontation between meaning, artist, viewer, and, ultimately, the as-old-as-the-cosmos koan what is art?. Drawing upon an artistic lineage pulled taught like gossamer across the epochs smelling of the splash of the paintbrush, the scratch of the pen, and the drum of the typewriter, Art Descriptions disturbs the sacred and the profane and leaves us open, like a book without margins, seeking context within boundaries but finding that boundaries are more of the ether than of the flesh.

Created by Chris Baker and Mike Lacher