My question concerns the issue of a “signature style” and the importance of projecting an image of consistency (particularly on one’s personal website). I’ve done a lot of different things, and tend to work in the medium that I feel best expresses what I am trying to communicate. As a result, I’ve got a real mix of things (photos, text-based pieces, assemblages/sculptures, some video work) and categorizing on my site is done by 2D, 3D, and “other” (to include video, installation, proposals).

While I can personally see the threads of consistency running through the work, I’ve been cautioned that I need to “grow up, pick one thing, and get known for it.” I realize that curators and judges look at my site, as do galleries and employers I might be courting. While I feel the need to be true to my vision, should I maybe rethink what I’m publicly presenting? Is it just too much for people? Does it present me as scattered and lacking seriousness? Maybe as a compromise, should I not limit what I make, but be more focused by what I share and exhibit? I understand that there are many shades of gray here, and it is difficult for you to comment without actually seeing the work.

Let me start by saying that I don’t believe you should put an arbitrary limit on the kinds of things that you make, and certainly never for the humdrum purpose of marketing your work. While it may be an idealistic, unpragmatic thing to say, I do believe that artmaking is the last bastion of real freedom. If you artificially restrain what you make in order to curry speculative favor with a narrow set of people who may or may not assist your career, you’ll only hurt yourself in the long run.

Paul Chan, Sade for Sade’s Sake, 2009. Digital video projection, 5 hrs 45 mins looped

That said, the other option is to continue making whatever you want, but be selective about what you show to the world. There’s no reason to put every last thing you’ve ever made on your website, as viewers might find it overwhelming or confusing, so slim it down to a manageable group of works. The first step is to take a really hard look at your oeuvre and select your strongest pieces or projects. Pretend you are starting from scratch with the new site and concentrate on quality over quantity. Be unsentimental! Make a list of these works as you go, and once you’ve gone through your images the next step is to figure out how you’re going to arrange or order them.

Surely there is a thread of conceptual continuity that runs through all of your projects, even if it’s sometimes hard to discern. Your job now is to find a way to emphasize that thread in the layout of your website. You might want to try using a standard outline for this kind of organizing because it mimics the architecture of most websites. For example:

1.) Oil on canvas, chiaroscuro

_____A.) work from 2012

__________i.) Sunset on Dragon Lake

__________ii.) The Coachman’s Dress

__________iii.) Grapes & Wicker

_____B.) work from 2011

etc.

Paul Chan, Volumes – inncompleteset (detail), 2012. Each: oil on fabric, paper, and cardboard, dimensions variable

You could arrange your projects by medium as you’ve done before, but you could also make an outline for a chronological organization, or by project or solo exhibition, or for particular concepts that you’ve explored. If you try different ways of sorting, they might lead you to a new way of expressing the commonalities between your works. And if you really have a hard time doing all this with words on paper, you could try printing tiny images of your work and rearranging them on a wall or table until you find a combination that makes sense. Remember to keep an eye on cohesion and try to look at your distributions as a stranger would. As you go, just keep asking yourself, “Does this make sense?” If your final preferred grouping is nontraditional, make sure you have a solid justification for it.

You can also unify the work with good site design, keeping the layout consistent from page to page. If you’re not creating a website using one of the popular template-based site builders, be sure that your font styles and sizes are the same throughout and that all your images are one standard width. Having a regular structure or format for each section will help, too. For example, if you arrange the site by project or exhibition, then in each section you could show an installation shot, then the individual works, and then a detail shot or two if the work warrants it; if you’re grouping your work by a medium like drawing, then you can establish a rhythm by consistently showing a sequence of overall shot, detail, overall shot, detail, etc. The goal here is to unite all the different works by establishing a background uniformity in the site’s structure.

Paul Chan, Constellation Series, Right to peaceably assemble (formerly Cassiopeia), 2005. Inkjet print, 30 x 40 inches

The other part of your site that can really help bring everything together is your statement. This is perhaps the hardest part, but when you are going through all your images and organizing them, think about the progression of your ideas and the way that one project has moved you to the next. What are the similarities between your works? What notions or concepts have you been following? The statement is the place where you can wrap it all up and put a bow on it, so don’t neglect this portion of your site.

When you’ve spent some time on this and feel like you have a workable solution or two, run your ideas by a few friends (or people who are familiar with your work). They may have further suggestions for you, and it’s always a good idea to get feedback on a new site from people who know your goals. Have them look for inconsistencies, site-wide flaws, and typos before you release the site to the world. Good luck!

Your counselor, hard at work.

I’ve noticed a trend of not putting any information about the artist, including labels, on the wall. I get that the idea is to make the viewer just look at the artwork. However, I find it rather alienating, as often, particularly in contemporary art galleries, it is hard to be engaged without some kind of information about the work or the artist’s motive. I suppose that the idea is to get the information from the gallery worker, but I have found them to be unavailable, either on the phone or engaged with another customer. Do you think it is a mistake to do this or is there a higher purpose of which I am not aware? 

Standing before an unfamiliar thing set atop a plinth and with no cues on how to proceed can be unnerving. You might feel overwhelmed by questions: What is it? Who made it? When? And why does the artist want to show this to me?

The way out of this terrifying situation is to approach the desk and pick up one of those nice information sheets in the stack right next to the guest book, near the vase of wilting flowers. If there isn’t one, ask for it. If the gallerist is on the phone, just look perplexedly up and down the length of the counter, then up again at the gallerist, and mouth the word “information” while air-drawing an 8.5 x 11 inch rectangle in front of your face with your index fingers. This is the international sign for I am interested in learning more about the artwork.

Check out this review of labels on Art Fag City, one of my favorite art sites.

In the past, I too have been mildly annoyed at the lack of easy-to-access wall information. Yet I must say that given the choice between remembering to grab the info sheet from the counter and having to read an exhaustive catalog of information on the wall, I’ll take the gallery’s walk-though paper any day, even when it means I have to backtrack once I’ve figured out that I don’t have what I need to get the full picture (if you’ll excuse the pun).

It is not a mistake to reserve the walls of a gallery for the artwork. Many artworks cannot easily coexist with wall tags. And there is a higher purpose: with an information sheet, you are more likely to be engaged with the work before becoming distracted by its price. Indeed, it can be very pleasant to look at artwork in the gallery setting and pretend for a moment that it exists outside of the crass vagaries of capitalism.

Photo courtesy of the artist. Surely someone somewhere has thought of this before?

Is consistency important for an artist? I am interested in all sorts of media and different styles, but when I go through my portfolio, there’s no telling that every piece I have made is done by me. Is it important to stick to a medium rather than dabble? And is it important to have a recognizable look like all of the prominent artists?

Your query has a few layers to it, and I’m going to try to tease them apart. First is the question of whether consistency or visual recognizability is important for an artist. Next is the idea of “dabbling” vs. sticking to a medium. Finally, there’s the notion that prominent artists are all working undeviatingly within a particular set of constraints.

Visual “consistency” or recognizability can be important for an art career—note the emphasis, please—but that’s a separate issue from being important to an artist. One can recognize a John Currin painting because of his repeated combination of medium, subject matter and style. The same applies equally to a Giacometti sculpture or a John Hughes film or a Louis Vuitton logo purse. One reason that this kind of consistency is popular is that it is highly marketable. The perceived value of a status object can often be correlated to the ease of the identification of its maker or origin. That’s why everyone concerned with status wants a LV handbag and a Lexus. These objects transmit their value on sight, and so does a John Currin painting.

Sigmar Polke, Kölner Bettler III, 1972. Offset lithograph, 16 7/8 x 23 3/4 inches (image: www.rfc.museum)

The second part of your question is easily answered. Dabbling is often necessary if you want to suit your medium to your subject, and every master began as an amateur. Just be sure that you’re not just tinkering with something new every other week in order to avoid the real work of digging into a technique or material. Avoid being superficial, and don’t be afraid to work (and think) all the way through what you’re doing.

Let’s tackle the last question: do all the famous artists really conform to some kind of stylistic homogeneity? Yes and no. Sigmar Polke, for example, produced paintings, photographs, and sculptures over the course of his life. Though Polke’s style is visually recognizable within bodies of work, overall he used a wide range of styles, media and techniques. The consistency in his work comes from his preoccupation with alchemy and transformation. Likewise, John Baldessari is another artist who creates an incredible amount of work, but any two of his works selected at random and placed side by side might not be easily perceived as having the same maker. However, nearly all his works have the same ironic attitude.

Sigmar Polke, Untitled, 1973. Gouache on paper, 69.5 x 99.5 cm (image: www.likeyou.com) Note that this work and the one above were made within a year of each other.

But these are examples of work by über-famous artists. Why not consider the oeuvres of somewhat lesser-known lights like Paul Chan and Michael Huey? These artists are following paths that have few obvious markers for the casual viewer, but their work is strong and intriguing. I recommend that you spend more time studying artist monographs and catalogs of retrospectives. I think you’ll find that visual uniformity is sometimes tightly controlled through medium or style, and sometimes ignored altogether.

The real question is not whether it is important to be consistent, but what kind of artist you want to be. Is your goal to be good? To be free? To be a household name? I feel that we can’t talk about consistency—visual or otherwise–without shivering under the looming shadow of capitalism and branding, nor can we really divorce it from the myth of the mad-genius artist, obsessed and compulsive, driven to repetition. Are these narratives important to you? In the end, my advice is to make what you want to make. If it’s good, and if there’s enough of it, it will be easy for dealers, critics, and your future biographers to follow the threads of your concerns throughout the work.