Artspeak #1

I mentioned previously that I saw the Newspeak exhibition at the Saatchi.

On the way in I saw that they had a cheap guide to every work in the gallery and I bought a copy even though I normally prefer to form my own opinions about both the meanings and quality of art uninfluenced by the thoughts of others.

I was so glad that I had bought the book though, as it kept us howling with laughter as we walked around, occasionally drawing odd stares from other gallery-goers who may well have assumed from our hilarity that we didn't like the exhibition. Nothing could have been further from the truth. We loved it. It was just the book that we found so amusing because it is filled from start to finish with the kind of typical jargon that the give the general public (me included) the impression that art critics are pompous elitists who couldn't form a comprehensible sentence if their lives depended on it.

In the rest of the posts in the series I will be attempting to translate some of the better examples into English, a language that is apparently known to the authors only in its most arcane and esoteric forms. I of course will have the advantage that I have seen the actual art in question and have a few visual clues.

For this post though I shall simply whet your appetites with a little quiz. Your task is simple. Work out what kind of artwork each of this selection of five phrases refers to. They were chosen in a pseudo random fashion by taking something from the first entry on every eighth page,

Through this literal hybrid, Claydon incites the current revivals of genetic engineering and post-modern eclecticism as plausible validation of [J.G.] Frazer's theories.

From this consumerised reproduction. MacKinven crafts a twisted and contorted portrait that conceptually merges the forefathers of communism and today's hyper-capitalism, addressing selective appropriation of ideology and history's romanticised cycles and ill-fitting precedent

Her knitted jumper appears to be a structure both containing her body and stiffly holding it together.

Any true sense of time or place is discarded as one iconic image crashes into another to leave a chaos of chronology and open-ended associations.

All the weight is in one knuckle as if the foetal figure is a chyrsalis in transformation.

Anyone want to have a go at deciding what the actual works look like?