How Does Art Speak?

A little like proverbial trees falling in forests, does art speak if no-one is around to hear it?

I think it is quite rare to think about how art speaks. Perhaps we think we are doing it all the time when we look at, talk about, write about art. Over the years, however, I found I was doing something entirely different. Rather than thinking about how art speaks, I was thinking about how to speak about art. Of course, the two overlap. Slipping and sliding over each other until I find it impossible to think about one without the other. But they are not the same. After sitting with these questions for a few months, I realised that thinking about how art speaks is actually incredibly freeing. There is no reason to be self-conscious when thinking about how art speaks, no particular need to have done the reading or read the reviews. Doing these things may alter how art speaks to you, in positive and negative ways. But, even without them, the conversations you can have with art can be deep, personal, frivolous, intimate. And they will be influenced by who you are and who you’re with, where the art is displayed and how long it’s been since lunch.

In the past, I focused too much on how to speak about art. I tried to convey through my writing what I thought art was saying ‘generally’. Tried to imagine what other people might want me to say about it. I was scared to honestly recount the conversations I was having with art in case the way art spoke to me was ‘wrong’ or perhaps revealed too much. This text offers some ways that art might speak to you and some ways it has spoken to me, but, as ever, the best way to hear what art has to say is by listening, looking, participating and imagining.

Speaking Through Photography

I’m standing in Tate Modern in front of Constructs #10 - #13 (1989), Lyle Ashton Harris’s series of four black and white self-portraits. I look up and unexpectedly catch his eye in the photograph on the far left. He looks straight back at me, assertive in his netted tutu and ballet pose. Even when facing away from me in the second photograph, I feel like he is in control of the conversation. He appears to communicate his attitude through the sway of his hip, his tousled wig, and the netted material that barely covers his behind. He seems at ease, confident in front of the camera. But the last in the series is different. This time, instead of him choosing to turn away, it feels as though I’m the one who has decided to watch him from behind. The power has shifted to me, as his body shows none of the attitude marked by clothes or pose so evident in the other photographs. He doesn’t speak to me and instead I am left to project onto him, almost a blank canvas.

Across the four photographs, Harris plays with the language of classical sculpture and ballet: art forms with high cultural value. But, as a gay Black man making this work at the height of the AIDS pandemic, he subverts this language of established power. Harris has described the photographs as “almost an aggressive assertion of sex positiveness” and “a tool for embodiment to reimagine the self [...] and rethink our understanding of identity.” Made while he was still a student in California, the series has become some of his most celebrated work, included in exhibitions such as Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art curated by Thelma Golden in 1994 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In a conversation with artist and writer Morgan Quaintance, Harris described how his work and the Whitney exhibition made a lasting impact on many who saw it at a time when Black and queer identities were not very visible in mainstream art spaces.

Harris’s art is both the product and creator of many conversations between artists and artworkers and this is integral to how he speaks about his art and career. His work forms part of a dialogue between a network of Black creatives and thinkers, including filmmakers, artists, poets and theorists, many of whom he first met when they were visiting lecturers at the California Institute of Arts (CalArts). He took a one-week seminar led by writer bell hooks on the theme of “talking back”. For Harris, “being exposed to that book, what it meant to be able to speak in my own language, in my own voice, became a way in which I began to somehow seek out other forms of community, etc.”

Speaking Through Love

Sharon Hayes’s work speaks to us in a more literal sense – aloud, and with words. Everything Else Has Failed! Don’t You Think It’s Time for Love? (2007) is an installation by Hayes that replays "love addresses". Hayes explains that a “love address” captures how she memorised and delivered these passages in the form of letters, as if they were composed on the spot. The installation comprises five PA speakers placed directly opposite five posters advertising the performance, one for each day of the week. From each speaker in turn, we hear Hayes’s amplified voice above the noise of a busy New York street, speaking to unnamed lover. In the original performance, Hayes stood on a busy corner outside an investment bank in Manhattan, speaking each "love address" aloud to the passing public, repeating each three times. In conversation with writer So Mayer, Hayes described how she wanted to “butch up” her appearance for the performance as she hoped the anonymised letters would be interpreted as expressions of queer love. But the “you” she addresses in the work remains an open invitation to whoever is listening.

The title of the work Everything Else Has Failed! Don’t You Think it’s Time for Love? is taken from a placard that was held up during a protest in Berkeley, California in 1967. Over the years, Hayes has amassed a large collection of photographs of protest signs containing the word “love”. For Hayes, the love expressed by these signs “is a commitment, a collective tactic, a vital component of [...] non-violent resistance.” In her work, Hayes uses the intimate language of a personal letter to a lover, but, like with the placards, the implications are different when they are shared publicly. “The letters are not being read to their [original] addressees but to imagined future audiences,” she explained.

Everything Else Has Failed… is the first in a series Hayes calls Love Addresses, a series that speaks of Hayes’s despair and helplessness – and the failure of mass protest – in the face of the US war in Iraq and Afghanistan. She is interested in the idea that speech can do more than communicate, it can also perform “speech acts” (a theory developed by philosopher J.L. Austin in his 1962 book “How to do things with words”). Examples of speech acts include apologies, congratulations, invitations or promises, like the words “I do” during a marriage ceremony. I like to think Hayes’s work is a speech act of solidarity, of love. As with protest signs, art is an open invitation that can speak – and offer this act of love – to anyone who sees it. Hayes explained how to understand the address from a protest placard, you need to look at the words on the sign, the person holding it and the place and time they are in. Although referencing specific political events of 2007, as part of Tate’s collection, the work will now exist across time, preserved by the museum to perform speech acts at potentially infinite future moments.

Speaking Through Movement

I often think of dance as an ephemeral performance, but its life is also prolonged when it enters a museum’s collection. Trisha Brown’s Set and Reset is a work of post-modern dance first performed in 1983. Brown originally choreographed the piece using a process of memorised improvisation. The improvisation was done to a set of five instructions from Brown: “keep it simple, act of instinct, stay on the edge, work with visibility and invisibility, and get in line”. Carolyn Lucas (Associate Artistic Director of Trisha Brown Dance Company) explained how dancers must learn a new vocabulary of dance in order to master the choreography, putting together memorised phrases of movement to create longer passages.

Watching the performance, I feel like I am experiencing improvisation, full of the happy coincidences that occur when a group of people know each other so well that they are in tune with each other’s movements, like when you adopt a tilt of the head from your mother or an eyebrow raise from your best friend. In discussion with Carolyn Lucas, dancer Joel Brown and Director of Programme Catherine Wood, Benoit-Swan Pouffer (Artistic Director of Rambert) spoke about bodies being collectors of experiences. There is the physical memory of the dance choreography but also the memories of how the body has moved before, both through dance and in the world in general. The end performance expresses all of these experiences, this knowledge. In the original performance of the piece, we can compare the movement of Eva Karczag, a dancer who brought her traditional ballet training to her movement, to Trisha Brown, whose movements were deliberate refusals of ballet’s strict language.

The choreography speaks across generations to other communities of dancers. Dancer Joel Brown, who performs a version of Trisha Brown’s choreography called Set and Reset/Reset with Candoco Dance Company, spoke of his excitement that Set and Reset would be kept alive through new dancers who will need to learn the choreography every time the piece is brought out for “display”.

Speaking Through Community

In Gee’s Bend, Alabama, the skill of quiltmaking has been passed down through generations of African-American women since the 19th century. Seeing these quilts in a gallery, I am very aware that many were made to be used, not to be seen in the white cube of a contemporary art space. The quilts were traditionally taken outside after the winter months to be aired out and were laid over washing lines and fences to be examined and enjoyed by neighbours. They contain the material evidence of the mundane and everyday, of special memories and loved ones passed away. They make me think of the cloth that has held important places in my life – a blanket given to me by my nana, a t-shirt I kept for years after I outgrew it. A different kind of beauty is found in wear and in age, in something that has meant many different things to different people over its life and theirs.

Most quilts from Gee’s Bend can be considered “my way” quilts. Speaking with art historian Alayo Akinkugbe, curator Raina Lampkins-Fielder explained how “the quilter starts with basic forms and then heads off “their way”, allowing the material to really direct their hand with unexpected patterns, unusual colours, and surprising rhythms, really seeing where the quilt takes you”. There are also many popular quilt styles including “house top”, a pattern of concentric squares that begins with a medallion of solid cloth to which rectangular strips of cloth are added. Aolar Mosely’s quilt “Log Cabin” – single block “Courthouse Steps” variation (local name: “Bricklayer”) (c.1950) is a particular adaptation of the house top style, which in Gee’s Bend is called “bricklayer”. The quilt is hung like a painting in the gallery, but I imagine what it would be like to look down on it from above, like the aerial view of the housetop it depicts. I see the stains faded by time and imagine a time long ago, a clumsy child spilling a drink and scolded by their mother who had spent so long crafting together the scraps of material.

The quilts do not just reveal individual and family histories preserved in the materials but they also record the history of the community. The Freedom Quilting Bee was a sewing co-operative to which many of the Gee’s Bend quilters belonged. In 1972, Sears Roebuck, a nationwide retailer in the US, commissioned the co-operative to create corduroy pillow covers. You can now see this commercial enterprise reflected in the gold, avocado leaf, tangerine and cherry red corduroy used in many quilts around that time – offcuts and scraps from the commission that the women saved from the floor and shared with other quilters in the community.

The way that art has been and continues to be categorised can change the way it is received. Artists from Gee’s Bend have often been described as “self-taught”, a label Raina Lampkins-Fielder believes “doesn’t have a bearing on the work that these artists are producing.” The term self-taught not only affects the way that people perceive the art but also affects people’s ability to talk about it, giving the impression that this artform has sprung up from nowhere and has no relationship to the rest of art history.

Writing this piece has allowed me to spend time with these works and reflect on how they speak to me personally and how that conversation relies on so much more than the artwork itself. There are many power structures at play that shape our perception of art, and influence where it is shown, how it is described, and even who is open to listening to it. The works by Lyle Ashton Harris, Sharon Hayes, Trisha Brown and the Gee’s Bend quiltmakers have sparked conversations between artists, historians, curators and dancers about how art can speak in today’s world. It’s exciting to think about how these artworks might generate new conversations with future generations, to speak in ways we can’t yet imagine.

Debbie Meniru is a London-based writer and curator who explores art and museums through emotion, anecdote and humour. Her writing has been published internationally and you can read more on her website.

The How Does Art Speak? Series is part of the Terra Foundation for American Art Series: New Perspectives