Writing artist bionotes is hard work
In a recent project I was involved in, I was requested to provide a longer and more detailed artist bio. This is not the first time that I got such a request: the bios I provide are usually rather sparse, since they only describe what I do and nothing else. This made me curious about this contemporary exhibit staple. Usually manifesting as a short biography and description of a person accompanying their work, sometimes written by the person themselves, the artist bio and its structural entanglements have been largely overlooked.
Surely, self-descriptions have existed since time immemorial, but the modern bio likely emerged along with the rise of commercial marketing. Around the start of the 20th century, books began featuring words of praise (blurbs) and well-written descriptions of the authors on the back cover. The bio-as-marketing-copy further developed through the financialization of art and through modern media, both of which began treating art as merchandise and the artist as brand.
Bios have the practical function of allowing artists to navigate their fields through constant self-recalibration. Today, some even tend to their artist bios as grounds to cultivate, for instance, queer identities. The artist bio is part of the scaffolding that allows “the artist”—itself a social-commercial form—to construct the myth of their practice.
In fact, it is the bio, not the work, that indexes the artist in the art ecosystem. People can secure gigs, win grants and—this is no secret—build a reputation with a well-written bio. Of course, this has some drawbacks. Recall back in 2019, when the literary world was shook as Lina Sagaral Reyes exposed a particular writer’s laurels—prizes, books, etc. (all advertised in the bio), as false. “Reputable writers” were quick to mock the writer for his audacious auto-fiction, but the incident simply spelled out a well-known fact: skills and passion are secondary to marketing in any creative career.
Since the advent of communicative capitalism, the bio has functioned as more than product copy. It aids the mythifying of the artist/producer by asserting a cohesion to the self as a project. The bio is the plastic that glues disparate objects together into a single constellation.
At the same time, this plasticity allows it to disturb the thermodynamics of the larger system. The bio enacts a certain syntax, a personalized hierarchy of concepts and infrastructures, which can either affirm or negate their claims of power or authority. In the context of the neural network, the thermodynamic disturbance is quite literal. As artist bio dissolves into ad copy, into SEO slop, into training data, it also affects how “hot” or “cold” certain ideas and institutions are at a given moment.
The bio, thus, paradoxically “transduces” (following Gilbert Simondon) the artist into an individual while crystallizing the structures that enable it to emerge. These structures may be as rigid as commercial galleries or as pliable as art barkadas. Judy Sibayan, in a talk organized with Lena Cobangbang and Gary Ross Pastrana called “Artist-Run Space from the Mid-70s to 2006,” echoed this when she said in jest, non-verbatim, that the most practical way to have a career in art is going to events like this. The renowned artist who, according to her bio, “has produced self-instituted parodic (auto-critical) works as her modality of Institutional Critique,” surely recognizes, perhaps even enjoys the irony, in saying this inside Calle Wright, a space owned by some of the richest people in the local art scene.
Of course, not all artists choose to get into the messy business of artist bios. Graffiti artists, for instance, get street cred in anonymity. This is why I was delighted by the inclusion of graffiti in the recently opened QC Biennial. Kalawakan SpaceTime opened The Hardway Collective’s “Balagbag,” featuring graffiti in an exposed, recently demolished building. The show’s title shows their intent of “deliberate disruption of the linear”: balagbag means “deviations from the straight, the crosswise, and askew.” Fittingly, the group doesn’t have a bio on their Instagram profile
Of course, anonymity doesn’t necessarily mean autonomy from the mainstream. While some are fortunate to have communities that can support their work at their chosen scale, most other artists and cultural workers are compelled to work within the existing ecosystem. A valuable skill, then, is the flair to know where to draw the line. In a gathering organized by the Kalaw-Ledesma Foundation in the Philippine Women’s University, several art writers and I talked about the issues that artists and art writers face today.
Common themes include the lack of venues and fair compensation for art writing, ethics, and the question of complicity when it comes to broader issues that involve the most established institutions. Can an active producer really stay clean and uninvolved? One of the participants said, “If you dig deep enough, you’ll find dirt in all of them.” But crude moralism is lazy; criticism, as poet Angelo Suarez notes, is hard work. And so is writing an artist bio.
The difficulty lies here: writing oneself into artisthood/writerhood/whatever means rewriting the shared space we occupy, making allegiances, and burning bridges. If the bio is truly constitutive of “the artist-form,” then the myth of one’s practice is indeed the meat of one’s practice. Thus, the fact that the bio pins the artist into the fabric of the art world should not be a cause for lament, but should be taken as part and parcel of the serious labor of art. If to create is to constantly reorient oneself in relation to others, the world, and its many conflicting objects, then the heavy lifting happens not in bringing the inside out, but in letting the outside in.
