10/100 Do you have to mean it to say it?

(caveating this with I am exceptionally tired. I’m working on a tight deadline on a project that’s pushing me in all sorts of directions and right now I’m convinced I can’t do. But maybe that’s how it’s meant to feel at the beginning. I have spent the day inside, rain beating the window, hair dirty and pulled back into a bun, I’ve read about 200 pages and trawled archives and really have very little brain left for thinking anything half way think-y but this is what’s floating around my small, slow brain.)

I read an interview recently, I can’t remember where, with Rob Doyle and it made me laugh because some parts of it were so wildly over the top that there was no way he meant what he said. Or so I think. Maybe he’s just a fan of big statements. But for the sake of my argument here I’m going to say he was being deliberately provocative. In short, he was being funny, in public, which seems in these earnest times, at least one of the deadliest sins.

One of my favourite artworks is Jenny Holzer’s Inflammatory Essays. On the surface these propositions arranged on a series of coloured posters appear deadly serious but look a little closer and are they, are they really? Does she really mean it when she writes starve the flesh, destroy superabundance, shave the hair, leave the family, destroy the church, etc. The hint’s in the title, the intent is to inflame. Inflame here possessing multiple meanings. Taken as a whole, this set of declarations reflects social concerns, becoming both distinctive and detached as she raises questions around the nature of text itself - who’s speaking, under whose influence, and in doing so destabilises and calls into question meaning. In the same way Rob Doyle’s declarative interviews do similar but go further, he’s not presenting this as a series of impersonal statements but rather these statement are him, he plays with the idea of source and persona and how ridiculous it is that we’re ever allowed to be in an interview setting at all. It’s no accident perhaps that Lias Saoudi does similar in interviews and essays, both friends understanding it’s much more fun to say what you don’t mean than to be there in all your boring splendour on the page or in the interview sections.

The same extends to work. In Ava Anna Ada, both Ava and Anna come out with some wild things, they were fun to write. At times they say taboo things. Do I mean them? Do I believe them? Does it matter if I do? It’s the I here that is the root of the problem, in this digital world artists are expected to stand in place of the artwork, to explain it or to back it up or to justify it or sometimes to excuse it. What this does is create a series of cookie-cutter online personas more concerned with growing their audience, more preoccupied with numbers over substance. What suffers is the thing itself. Spend that long with appearances and something has to give; when Barthes wrote that we’d moved from being to having, he didn’t envisage a world in which we’d have moved further from having to appearing to have, from being to appearing to be, and from being so busy appearing that there’s not time to create quality. Of course these are intractable problems. I’m not here to find answers.

Attach the artist too firmly to their work then we read the work in tandem with the artist, which is another unfortunate consequence of online life; and if the art is transgressive or deviant then does that then have implications as to how we treat the artist? Does it allow the full multiplicity of the work to be considered if it’s always and only considered in relation to its creator? Barthes again was onto something with Death of the Author, only now it feels more pressing to enact an online death, or perhaps the pantomime of social media is a type of real time death of the author, it certainly seems to prove his point at times, as the author collapses into their own work.

I don’t see Jenny Holzer making reels on Instagram, although now I come to think of it, she’d probably make it more fun. Or Patricia Lockwood sending earnest updates to her followers. Instead, they make their work, let the work speak. I like this. I think it’s really increasingly the only answer to make something that’s both meaningful and has longevity, or when called on to participate, to create a deliberate distance between the I of the interview and the I of me.