Speculative Writing as Art Interpretation

Below is a transcript of a presentation I gave at the University of Bristol for the Association for Art History's annual conference.

Imagine you are visiting an art gallery with a friend. You’re standing in front of an artwork, discussing what you think it might depict, why it was made, maybe how you feel about it. Then, you take a step forward, look to the side and skim read the little caption placed next to it. You realise you were wrong. ‘It’s not about that at all,’ you say to your friend. In this way, the experience of walking around a gallery and looking at art can become a sort of test: how much do you know, how on the money are you? And this seems like the best-case scenario. Far more common, I would argue, is for the visitor to read the caption without having considered their own response at all. In my experience writing and editing gallery texts at Tate and the Hayward Gallery, and reading them in many other places, art institutions’ use of interpretation unintentionally limits the possible readings of an artwork, suggesting a correct reading, or providing what is perceived to be the real information. But this should not be the only art interpretation on offer.

This mode of thinking – that there are better or more correct ways of reading art – mirrors my experience of the British education system. Studying poetry for my GCSE in English Literature was a lesson in how to correctly analyse a subjective experience. We had to learn a specific, and limited, methodology for engaging with poetry, allowing us to uncover the meaning of a poem, which we would then learn rather than experience. At university, while studying French literature, I found once again that my own readings were not important unless I was quoting theories already laid out by people whose words were published in books and journals. What I really thought and why didn’t seem to matter and certainly didn’t have a place in serious academia.

Museums and the people who work in them seem to be obsessed with taking themselves seriously, terrified of accusations of ‘dumbing things down’. But maybe, instead of taking an uncritical lead from academia, museums can challenge what is seen as worthy information. I lead with this, not because I think that these ‘traditional’ methods aren’t useful or interesting but because I think they limit the ways in which people experience art. Audience research at Tate suggests that visitors – especially regular visitors – want the facts.[1] But do facts help people have uninhibited personal interactions with art? Or do they teach them that how they really respond to an artwork could be wrong?

Interpretation, at its core, should be about offering the viewer different ways to engage with an artwork and encouraging them to spend longer than the average eight seconds looking at it.[2] Interpretation should let the artwork speak to the viewer, show the viewer how to open their eyes and emotions and form some kind of connection with it. If, like with my experience of GCSE poetry, you are only given very limited ways to engage with art – in this case, a list of facts – then these are the only ways you will be able to read it. I want to argue for the legitimacy of other forms of knowledge and other ways of reading artwork. I want people to know they have permission to feel however they want to about art, that their understanding of what they are seeing and experiencing is interesting and worth interrogating. I also want them to know that the way they are experiencing that artwork can change, and, if they don’t automatically respond to an artwork, by learning how it speaks to other people they might be able to form their own connection. To me, all of this seems infinitely more interesting than being able to parrot back a few facts.

Let’s imagine that traditional interpretation, or my GCSE English education, is a box from the supermarket which contains dried pasta. The packaging contains a simple message that we can be taught to decode: the meanings of different colours, words, images, celebrity endorsement. The clearest packaging is transparent or has a little cellophane window to show you a sample of what you can find inside. You feel like you understand what this object is, yes, but have you experienced it? Have you run your thumb over the little hard ridges of the pasta shapes, heard their satisfying rattle, put your whole hand in the package and wiggled it around? Better yet, have you imagined doing these things? Imagined what would be like to touch, eat and smell it, to make and package it yourself, or to swirl around in the emptiness of a giant pasta shell? The standard packaging – or interpretation – might lead us to assume we know for sure what’s inside the box – or what the artwork is communicating. Remove it, and a kind of absence is created. This isn’t an absence to be filled, but one to play around in: a kind of abstraction. I think this playful space is where speculative interpretation operates.

Martinican poet and politician Aimé Césaire argued for the ability of poetry and literature to fill the void that has been created by privileging Western or imperial scientific knowledge.[3] In this vein, speculative interpretation can be understood as a form of poetry that is both imaginative and uncertain. It embraces plurality. It is a mode of writing and thinking that accepts and uses the idea that everything we receive, everything we understand, is constructed by people who have come before us and those who have held power. Awareness of that construction problematises the information we might consider to be fact.

My concept of speculative interpretation draws upon ideas from people who are telling histories that have not yet been recorded in writing or have been deliberately suppressed. Maryse Condé’s novel I Tituba, Black Witch of Salem recounts, in first person, the story of a woman called Tituba who was imprisoned for witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts, in the 17th century.[4] In Condé’s story, Tituba is the daughter of an enslaved African woman and has arrived in Salem from Barbados. But the official records, of which there are few, say she could have been of either African or Indigenous American descent and little is known of her life before, after or during the witch trials. In her foreword to the English translation, US political activist and philosopher Angela Davis describes Condé’s novel as ‘Tituba’s revenge’.[5] By telling her story, Tituba’s revenge is complete, Davis notes, even if the story doesn’t match up to the real Tituba’s life. She writes, ‘Tituba's revenge consists in reminding us all that the doors to our suppressed cultural histories are still ajar. If we are courageous enough to peer through the narrow openings, we will discover our fears, our rage, our hopes, and our roots. And sometimes there is magic behind those doors, sparkling clues about the possibilities ahead.’ Tituba’s revenge, therefore, exists in the fact that she is plural, she is multiple, and her story can exist and be told in different ways.

In her essay ‘Venus in Two Acts’, US writer and academic Saidiya Hartman coined the term ‘critical fabulation’ to describe her method of inventing narratives and operating in the void created by the lack of recorded information, especially in relation to histories of enslavement. These stories acknowledge the absences rather than fill them. Hartman notes, ‘I intended both to tell an impossible story and to amplify the impossibility of its telling’.[6] The absence becomes a space for imagination and embracing other ways of looking at the world. Discussing critical fabulation in relation to her own work, artist Simone Leigh said, ‘In order to tell the truth, you need to invent what might be missing from the archive, [...] to formally move things around in a way that reveals something more true than fact.’[7]

I want to engage with the literature around critical fabulation and speculative fiction to think about how we address the absences that exist in the ways we currently write art interpretation. The absences of emotion, imagination and plurality. Speculative interpretation can offer a way to acknowledge those absences and play within the spaces they create.

A lot of interpretation is already somewhat speculative; it is just not always presented as such. Readings of artworks change over time; new information is unearthed and new perspectives come to the fore. Let’s take for example a painting by the 17th-century Dutch artist Albert Eckhout, Portrait of an African male. This work was included in the Hayward Gallery exhibition In the Black Fantastic in 2022, which I worked on. During our research, we found drawings and prints of the work in various collections across Europe. It changed in composition and content across its different forms, departing from Eckhout’s work, mutating and becoming more of a fiction.[8] Just before the exhibition closed, I stumbled across a reproduction of Eckhout’s painting in the Africa Galleries at the British Museum. It was being used to illustrate African weaponry. Here, the work had a different title (A Man from Ghana) and the following caption: ‘Painted by the Dutch artist Albert Eckhout in Brazil, presumably with a slave as a model.’[9] However, the man’s status and origins are unclear; it seems unlikely that the British Museum can be sure that the man is specifically from Ghana, when they can only ‘presume’ he is enslaved. There is also debate about whether the work was painted in Brazil or back in the Netherlands.[10] To me, the text and title are speculative, and the work equally so, yet both are presented as fact in the British Museum setting.

In other instances, interpretation already embraces doubt, and thus speculation. Questions can be a useful way to demonstrate that there are multiple readings and that the viewer’s point of view is welcomed. For example, the following text for a work by Gravelot at Tate Britain:

The maid gazes at the cardplayers, to the apparent amusement of the enslaved boy. Is she simply worried about where to place the tea, is she intrigued by the game, or does she wish to be part of the group? [11]

Something as simple as using words like ‘perhaps’ or ‘maybe’ can also suggest speculation. For example, the caption for Awake I Wait for You by Sandra Vásquez de la Horra, currently on display at Tate Modern, reads:

A naked woman reclines, her hands shielding her lower abdomen. This vulnerable position suggests she is an expectant mother or perhaps a lover awaiting her partner.[12]

Speculative interpretation can also be personal, emotional, anecdotal and fictional. Interpretation that obviously does these things is currently always authored by an individual, often an artist or someone outside the institution. At Tate, this form of interpretation is sometimes used in exhibitions, particularly those which feature works by artists who are no longer alive. It is seen as a way of making exhibitions relevant to a 21st-century audience.

Take the Hogarth exhibition at Tate Britain in 2022 which featured authored responses from a variety of contributors. Artist Lubaina Himid wrote a speculative caption about The Toilette, one of the plates from Hogarth’s Marriage A-la-mode. Here’s an extract:

My name is Oumar and I am a butler-cum-manservant from Mali. However, my main function is to make this unimportant aristocratic household look exceptionally wealthy. The Countess treats me with disdain almost all of the time, but she loves the way I can be a delightful African Gentleman when she needs me to take that role.[13]

A visitor commented:

‘It was like she was in the picture and describing it from the characters’ [point of view] - there should be more of that if curators could [be] more imaginative. Artists can do that automatically, but a curator might think that is not really their job.’[14]

So, what if it was the job of the curator (or interpretation curator) to be imaginative? I went into Tate Britain’s collection displays and wandered around, stopping to write short interpretative texts about a range of artworks. Some I knew well; others I had only previously walked past. My intention was to write something deliberately different from Tate’s standard interpretation: something speculative and imaginative.

In order to engage my more creative and less inhibited side, I felt that fiction was probably the most fruitful route. When discussing her auto-fiction novella Monaco, Juliet Jacques noted: ‘I lean towards journalism when I broadly know what I want to say about a subject, and my main view is to convey it to an audience; I prefer fiction when I want to work out what I feel about something, or why I feel as I do about it, and want to share that journey with others.’[15] This is exactly what I wanted to achieve. I wanted to explore an artwork, find out how I felt about it and what was going on. But, most importantly, I didn’t want the text to only work as personal introspection. The text had to be about sharing this exploration, this playfulness, with the public.

I found several ways to engage my mind in speculative thinking:
- Imagine you are in the work
- Imagine you are the artist creating the work
- Imagine a conversation or interaction with a person, object or material in the work
- Imagine a conversation about the work
- Imagine seeing the work in a different place or context
- Imagine seeing the work in a different time (past or future)
- Imagine touching the work

I wrote the following text in response to David Bomberg’s painting In the Hold, imagining what would it be like to be within the painting or to be the artist examining his source material.

He’s lying on his back looking up at the sky. The busy city rushes past his ears and crowds his peripheral vision. The buildings are so tall that they bend and warp. Is he looking up their flat sides or are they are descending under him? His eyes can’t catch up with what he's seeing. There’s no time to pause, no time to settle, too much to ascertain. He loosens his focus and tries to absorb it all.

Now I’ll read the actual interpretative text:

David Bomberg’s triangular blocks of colour ripple across the painting’s canvas in an interpretation of dock workers loading cargo onto a ship. The fragments of colour move across the work’s surface, mimicking the constant movement and bustle Bomberg saw at East London’s Docklands. When painting this work, Bomberg divided his blank canvas into 64 rectangles. When considered individually, each rectangle is a meditation about line, form and abstraction in painting. When they are considered together, the painting ripples with the tense energy of modern industrial labour.[16]

The next text I want to share suggests a fantastical relationship with Henry Moore’s Draped Seated Woman.

I feel calm and I would happily be wrapped in your arms. You are silent. You don’t say much; I don’t know if you can speak at all. But I need to be held and you are soft and strong and I know you’ll protect me. Your awkward pose will melt away once he, the sculptor, leaves. It will be just us and you can hold me.

Now let’s hear the current interpretative text:

This sculpture shows the influence of ancient Greek art on Henry Moore’s work. He had visited Athens for the first time in 1951. The sculpted representation of carved fabric he saw on many of the historic sculptures there inspired him. Here, Moore explores the potential artistic and formal use of classical clothing: ‘Drapery can emphasise the tension in a figure... [and] can serve to stress the sculptural idea of the figure.’[17]

I think speculative texts offer a different form of engagement with the artwork. They contain elements of storytelling which allow the texts to flow in way that isn’t possible when they are used as heavily laden vehicles to communicate a lot of disparate information. These speculative texts lean into personal experience. They draw on emotion and imagination. I feel like the Henry Moore text is quite revealing, almost confessional. Writing it made me wonder what would it mean for the museum to speak in a completely unexpected tone? What relationship would this establish with the viewer?

In her essay, ‘Noodling around with exhibition opportunities’, museum worker Elaine Heumann Gurian wrote, ‘If the label writer believes [...] the information he or she wants to pass on is genuinely good for [the audience], then the label writer will assume the role of a teacher in transmitting information [... to a] passive but obedient recipient.’ But, she continues, ‘The role of teacher is not the label writer's only possible stance. He or she can choose instead to be coconspirator, colleague, preacher, or even gossip columnist.’[18]

I would love to see speculative interpretation unauthored, presented in the voice of the museum, but this would necessitate a change in the audience’s relationship to the institution so that its role is to open up experiences of art to audiences, to empower them to have their own relationship with art, rather than behave as a didactic teacher.

A new methodology would need to be developed to support this kind of interpretation. There will be some kinds of artworks that might respond better to certain types of speculative interpretation. Some that might require speculation based on further research more in the style of Saidiya Hartman’s critical fabulation. If a work draws from the experiences of oppression or relates to histories that have been suppressed, what would it mean for speculative interpretation to be used? How could it be handled with care and ensure that these histories are not further submerged?

In art critic Jennifer Higgie’s book on art and spirituality, she says: ‘I wanted to return to a place of speculation, to open myself up to new ways of inhabiting the world. I wanted to embrace doubt, nurture curiosity, write with no conclusion. [...] What I longed for was a kind of re-enchantment – something that art is very good at.’[19] I wonder whether traditional interpretation lets visitors know that enchantment with art is even an option. I think speculative interpretation can do that. Being speculative means making space – the space for viewers to find themselves but also to imagine things outside of their experience; making space to play in and to explore; not offering answers but a way of experiencing.

Footnotes:

[1] X Marks the Spot, Hogarth and Europe Interpretation Research Debrief, 2021.

[2] 'A Guide to Slow Looking', Tate (undated), https://www.tate.org.uk/art/guide-slow-looking, accessed 11 June 2024.

[3] Chiedza Mhondoro, ‘Sensitivity and Possibility: Reading Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The Beloved Through Fiction’, in The Rossettis (exh cat) (Tate, 2023).

[4] Maryse Condé, Moi, Tituba, Sorciere... Noire de Salem (Mercure de France, 1986).

[5] Angela Davis, ‘Foreword’, in I Tituba Black Witch of Salem (University of Virginia Press, 2009), p.xiii.

[6] Saidiya Hartman, ‘Venus in Two Acts’, small axe (June 2008), p.11.

[7] Simone Leigh, ‘Critical Fabulation: Simone Leigh in Conversation with Susan Thompson’, Hauser & Wirth (15 Oct 2020), https://www.hauserwirth.com/ursula/29691-simone-leigh-conversation-susan-thompson/, accessed 2 April 2024.

[8] Mariana de Campos Françozo, ‘'Inhabitants of rustic parts of the world': John Locke’s collection of drawings and the Dutch Empire in ethnographic types’, History and Anthropology, 28:3 (2017).

[9] British Museum Africa Galleries caption, accessed 2022.

[10] Rebecca Parker Brienen, Visions of Savage Paradise: Albert Eckhout, Court Painter in Colonial Dutch Brazil (Amsterdam University Press, 2006), p. 48.

[11] Tate Britain Hogarth and Europe exhibition caption, 2021.

[12] Tate Modern collection display caption, 2024.

[13] Tate Britain Hogarth and Europe exhibition caption, 2021.

[14] X Marks the Spot, Hogarth and Europe Interpretation Research Debrief, 2021.

[15] Juliet Jacques, ‘On writing ”Monaco”’, London Review Bookshop (1 June 2023) https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/blog/2023/june/on-writing-monaco, accessed 2 April 2024.

[16] Tate Britain collection display caption, 2023.

[17] Tate Britain collection display caption, 2023.

[18] Elaine Heumann Gurian, ‘Noodling Around with Exhibition Opportunities’, in Exhibiting Cultures, ed. by Steven D. Lavine & Ivan Karp (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), p.185.

[19] Jennifer Higgie, The Other Side: A Journey into Women, Art and the Spirit World (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2023), p.2.