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| Pablo Picasso in his Cannes studio, 1956. Photograph: Arnold Newman/Getty Images. |
You have a studio visit. You don’t know the person too well and he doesn’t know you. He comes in, looks at the paintings without saying much and after about 35 seconds sits down and looks at you. What do you say? Maybe he will refer you to someone important. Maybe he will get you a show. You talk. And you usually talk more than you should. You use these words and expressions you don’t know the meaning of too well, but you’ve got to impress:
“I am interested in questioning, … investigating,
…exploring, …lexicons, … that deals
with, …Postmodernism (always said in a positive context), …identity,
…perception, …abstraction, …conceptualization, …in-between, …formal, …tension
between, …reminiscent, …process, …appropriation, …assemblage, …symbol for, …complexity,
… dichotomy, …archiving, … the idea of nothing and the unknown, …Modernism
(always in a bad connotation), deconstruction, …in relation to the body, …gravitate
towards, …reconstruct, …contemporary issues, …dislocation, …modes of
representation, …Feminism (I shouldn’t have said this word), …ambiguity, …juxtapositions,
…criticality, …problematic, …contradictory, …Is AbEx back?...”
He
says your work is challenging, shakes your hand, gets his coat and walks away. You
see his back leaving the building and you don’t realize you still have a simper
on your face.
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