On the power of descriptions

Stop telling me what something means.

Image Description: Your turn. Write only what you see (or don’t see).

Dear Studio for Tomorrow subscribers: hi, hello.

In the seminar I teach, we’ve been thinking about description and interpretation. Or, rather, I’ve been thinking about description and interpretation and they’ve been generously suffering alongside my insistence that description is powerful, followed by hours of examples, soap-box-standing, and hand-waving. It’s possible that they are just wishing I would tell them how best to find gallery representation, but they are being very patient with my description fascination, perhaps in the hopes that we’ll get to the professionalization stuff one day if they stay awake long enough (bahahaha! bless them). In any case, I’ve spent a few weeks in description head-space, always a place I enjoy being.

It’s hard to write description. The human brain, saturated as it is with images, prefers to skip the step of describing what it sees and jump immediately to understanding what it sees, even if that understanding is built on shoddy ground (or no ground at all). (Ask me how I think bad description and lazy looking is at the root of so much interpersonal chaos and political impasse). Interpretation is satisfying; description is tedious. Art historians learn formal description in their earliest classes in the discipline, and there are both good and bad historical reasons for this. At its best, description insists that the object carries information, and that close looking is a pre-requisite to understanding something. At its worst, description is used as an exercise in masturbatory connoisseurship, arbitrary valuation, and social gate-keeping. With its seeming objectivity (spoiler alert: description is anything but objective), description, unfortunately, can be used to suggest the inherent worth of certain ways of thinking and seeing the world and to dismiss others. But at its best, description can give an artist/curator/writer/etc. wings. Bear with me.

In the exhibition catalog she published on the occasion of her solo exhibition Serious and Slighly Funny Things at the Art Museum of South East Texas (AMSET), painter Francesca Fuchs wrote extensive descriptions of individual works of art. The exercise was an extension of Francesca’s paintings and objects themselves, which are also visual (replica) descriptions of other paintings and objects. “Stack shows a painted vertical sculpture on a very light neutral yellow-gray ground. The sculpture is made of seven to eight different shaped lumps that are stacked on top of each other,” begins one description of a painting of an object from her home.

The book begins with a description of the exhibition itself—a lovely way of making visible a moment in a place. She writes, “Serious and Slightly Funny Things is an exhibition of sixteen paintings and twenty-two objects at the Art Museum of Southeast Texas, on view from December 18, 2021 until March 13, 2022. The gallery space is 27 x 48-feet with an 8 x 16-foot entrance. The floor has 12 x 12-inch brown ceramic tiles with gray grout. The main space is divided into six sets of alcoves with protruding columns. The paintings on view were made during a period of two years from 2019 to 2021. The sculptures were made between 2016 and 2021. Each work tries to describe what a thing is and why it is important.”

In the second paragraph of her description, Francesca allows herself a bit of space to describe intent. The exhibition, she writes,

“tries to connect all these things into one big thing:

to put things together in mushes that may not want to connect.

to make an earnest attempt to unground us.

to make magic and give away the reveal at the same time.

to walk the line between being nothing or being something.”

And then, the reason such specific, faithful description is so significant:

“In my paintings, in my objects, and in my words, I try to use the bluntest language to reveal what is felt, not seen, after all.”

There are moments of such affective subtlety in Francesca’s descriptions that the power of this descriptive impulse can be startling. She grew up between languages—living in German and English—and some of the layers of word work speak to an ongoing search for the right language (as if there is such a thing; language is too wily to be ever quite right, to its credit). But what she clearly grasps is that the seeming objectivity of description can give space for the exploration of immense feeling. To know what an emotion is, why it is here, what to do with it, she painstakingly details the material qualities, formal decisions, and contextual information behind the thing and how it looks. We make a thing—her descriptions lead us to understand—because we care about it. We look carefully at a thing for the same reason. And that care, in this inversion of the standard economies of value, is important, even if the object we are caring about might be deemed worthless by the galleries my students are dreaming of working with while I rattle on about description.

Can you describe a thing you make without telling us what it means? Or maybe: can you describe a thing so precisely that the description finds its meaning? Can you describe a thing so fully that I can sense your attentive love for it?

I remember an exercise from an early drawing class when I was in college: we were asked to focus our eyes on a thing and, without looking at pencil or paper, to draw the lines of it. A blind contour drawing, the exercise bridged eyeball and hand, but also forced a very close looking at the object, its every ridge, dip, curve, contour, swoop, and cranny. The eye became a kind of finger, gliding gently across the surface of the thing and learning it.

Words can also be a way of tracing the surface of a thing in order to fully see it. Use your language to walk your eyes across every bit of the thing you are working on. What is there? What, exactly, have you made? There’s a weird-ening that happens when you slow down enough to describe the thing in all its thinginess. This weird-ening can make the thing new to you again, even if you’ve been working on it for 72-hundred-gazillion hours. And once you see it with precision, you have also opened up a space to finally tell us something about how you understand it. That is to say: the description comes right before the words “and because of that, I understand/feel/know/argue/believe this to be true…” (or you can write something more lovely, but you see what I’m doing here?)

If you write a description that is true to the object, and if your understanding of the object and what it does springs from that description, your idea will feel absolutely incontrovertible to the person listening to (or reading) your words. Description is the foundation you can stand on, the method with which you can help your viewer learn how to see through your eyes. (Ask me why I think teaching people to slow down and look carefully and describe what they see is important not only in the art world, but to the processes that maintain democracy and nourish a more just social discourse, broadly speaking). Or, what I mean is: when your viewer can better see, they will also begin to better understand.

Thanks for being here, for reading me, for supporting this work. I am so grateful to you.

Laura

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You can find Francesca Fuch’s book Serious and Slightly Funny Things in Houston at the Menil Bookstore and also, here. Her exhibition Francesca Fuchs at the Suburban at the OJAC currently on view at the Old Jail Art Center in Albany, TX can be seen through January 28th. In it, she re-makes an exhibition from early in her career: i.e. she does the thing she does with paintings, but with a whole exhibition! Worth a drive, imo.

If you find yourself in West Texas in the coming weeks, the Rubin Center is hosting a durational dance performance, #documance with Melissa Melpignano in the exhibition Sam Reveles: Solastalgia. Through movement, Melissa considers ways we can document (or describe) abstract paintings, without turning to written language. The performance is from 2-7 pm on Friday, December 9th, and you can read about it, here.

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Laura August, PhD makes essays and exhibitions, lumpy pots, and wild gardens. She has curated more than 20 exhibitions as an independent curator working between the U.S. and Central America. In 2021, she was named an inaugural Mellon Arts + Practitioner Fellow at the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration, and her writing about contemporary art in Guatemala City has been recognized with an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. Alongside her consulting practice for artists and writers, she teaches a process, practice, and professional strategies class for artists at the Glassell School of Art, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She currently makes her home on the edge of the Chihuahua Desert, and she is the first full-time Curator at the Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for the Visual Arts at The University of Texas at El Paso.