Defying Categorisation

As part of an art writers meet up I was tasked with writing a piece based on the book ‘200 words to help you talk about art’ by Ben Street. Here’s a short essay I wrote based on the words in the book, specifically the art styles and movements.

I’ve spent many conversations and several articles railing against artspeak. And while I do find its use excessive, every industry still needs its own jargon. After all I work in the energy industry where they even have nested acronyms - that’s where one letter in an acronym stands for another acronym, i.e. in EDCM the E stands for EHV*.

It makes sense for art to have specific vocabulary around techniques and mediums used within the creative process but it’s the naming of movements and style within art that has always seemed strange to me.

It’s odd that visual art, which ultimately admires freedom and whose creation has very few barriers, should be home to dozens of words designed to categorise that which seeks to defy categorisation - I mean this in the truest sense, not in the way that ‘defies categorisation’ is now a shamefully overused expression by lazy writers of press releases.

So it’s unsurprising that many of art’s movements draw their name not from the artists at the heart of the movement but from those outside it - both Impressionism and Fauvism are derogatory in origin, derived from critics mocking the artists whose works are now classified with those words.

Where artists do give names to movements it’s normally driven by ideas that don’t always make rational sense. Was Suprematism really a movement or more of an ego boost to Malevich so he could claim to have founded something? The Pre-Raphaeites were talented artists but it seems clear to me that their ideas of taking art to a time before the High Renaissance were clearly incorrect, as the history of art has since shown.

Of all art styles the one that’s strangest to me is outsider art. It’s used to refer to those who exist outside of the art mainstream, but then surely hasn’t art itself failed if there is a mainstream that we can be outside of? And if art is truly about freedom of expression then surely those who have no (or very little) reference to the outside world are the freest among us? Anyone who is an ‘insider artist’ must in some way have their practice impacted by the realities of needing money and connections with the wider world of patrons, gallerists and collectors - and therefore can never be as free as an outsider artist.

‘Outsider artist’ is a neat box we place certain artists within, but are we looking through the glass at them or are they looking in at us, constrained by all the factors that feel trivial to them? After all, as far as the goldfish is concerned we’re the ones on the wrong side of the glass.

* In case you are wondering, EDCM stands for Extra High Voltage Distribution Charging Methodology.