The Less Said the Better

John Hilliard 1999/2000

The most uncompromising, the most apposite written exposition on this theme should, by strict definition, be a succession of perfectly blank pages. Equally, its most complete counterpart from within the realm of the art object should be replete with omission to the point of virtual disappearance. Clearly, though, a page is beginning to be filled, just as that ideally invisible work of art persists in being made. The shortfall, then, between imagined ideal and actual realisation, the need after all to speak of or present the very subject of notspeaking or not-presenting, provides a space for production and an excuse for utterance.

Setting aside for the moment the specific, perverse and possibly scopophobic phenomenon of image-erasure as a subject for the artist, ‘saying less’ as a beneficial condition may emerge as a consideration at two stages: the primary process of creation and the secondary process of dissemination. In the first instance, saying less may mean saying less to oneself. This by no means suggests the abandonment of conscious, nameable, considered prescriptions that guide the mechanics of conception and production (in favour of a wholly unconscious spontaneity). Rather, it means making an admission – that however analytical and rational one’s inclination, the unheralded influence of the subjective or the accidental may in fact add a certain je ne sais quoi that turns out to be crucial in the finished work, and there are times when it may be wise to curb an inquisitorial bent, and allow such intrusions some licence. In the second instance, saying less may mean saying less to the percipient of that work.

Marshall McLuhan, in Understanding Media (1964), refers to the ‘act of completion’ – the spectator’s struggle to grasp a work of art, the profound understanding that devolves from a necessary participation in making that struggle, and the ensuing satisfaction which is the result of that participatory act. In order to allow the spectator this experience, to permit them to contribute, the artist needs to leave some space, giving them room to enter and room to manoeuvre without being over-instructed.

Nevertheless, there is a subsidiary voice that the artist may be tempted to deploy as a persuasive tactic to secure influence. It is the voice of explanation: the articulation of a theory or argument that surrounds and contextualises the work itself, legitimising it and making it comprehensible. One source for such commentary might be the wealth of contemporary theoretical writing on the subject of representation (from a linguistic, sociological, philosophical and psychoanalytical position), which has been particularly relevant for the visual arts, not least because visual material (painting, photography, film, architecture) is often the subject of analysis and the source of examples. The temptation, though, is not in the actual resort to such theory or indeed to any complementary text, but in the attempt to shore up one’s work with it in order to stave off a collapse.