INTERVIEW WITH JESSICA LACK

ZM: What led to your career as an art writer? 

JL: I studied art and I’ve always enjoyed the stories behind a work of art - what motivated an artist to paint what they painted, the social and the political circumstances of the times. Take the Impressionists – all those interior scenes, there is a reason for that, 1870 was the Paris Siege and they couldn’t go outside. I like making those connections. It’s an obvious statement, but artists reflect society, it is another way of telling you what it was like to live in that time and place. You can’t get everything from a history book, artists give you a very personal psychological experience. 

ZM: What do you find most challenging/rewarding when writing about art? 

JL: There are loads of challenges. When you interview an artist, they often find it hard to articulate verbally what they’re doing, which is understandable because they’re doing it visually! Have you ever read anything by Mondrian? Trust me, it’s totally incomprehensible. This makes it difficult for a writer to articulate an artist’s idea in words. You often end up with these slightly half baked explanations which are not very coherent or helpful. As journalists we are working to a word count too. At the Guardian Guide I was limited to 150 words. Good training, but what artist, who has been agonising for over a year on a concept wants their work distilled into a couple of sentences? It is important to find the pertinent points quickly and succinctly without oversimplifying the message. Not easy.

ZM: On reading your work ‘Why are we Artists’, what first led to the project and inspired you to collate 100 world art manifestos? 

JL: I just felt the way we discussed art needed to change. I’d been working as an arts writer for the Guardian for several years and had become increasingly frustrated by the lack of diversity I was seeing. I chose the artist manifestos as a vehicle to articulate those frustrations and because there’s a tacit agreement in the art world that the Futurist manifesto of 1909 was the first artist manifesto. I grew up in Bangladesh and was aware of Ananda Coomaraswamy’s Art and Swadeshi manifesto which had also been published in 1909, I just wanted to show there were other vibrant art movements out there across the world doing politically radical things at the same time as the Futurists. I had also read a lot of Stuart Hall who argued in favour of multiple centres of interconnectivity rather than the traditional centre-periphery relationship. Now, of course, there are lots of books promoting the history of art from a feminist perspective or a black perspective and that’s great. For years the only book publishers were interested in was the one that explained modern art in an easy digestible way. There were shelves of them. So, although writers were proposing all these other books the appetite just wasn’t there from the publishers. Thankfully that has changed. I was fortunate Penguin were prepared to take a risk with me. 

ZM: Who did you expect your readership to be? 

JL: I hoped it would be a useful reference book for people eager to discover art movements they’d perhaps never heard of before. My earliest readers were curators, then I was delighted to discover the book on reading lists for degrees in Politics. The first manifesto that I was properly aware of, aside from the Communist Manifesto, was the Labour Party manifesto of 1945 written by Michael Young. I studied at Dartington College of Arts, which was a radical social and artistic experiment set up in the 1920s. It took its inspiration from Rabindranath Tagore’s Santiniketan School with its focus on the arts and ecology. It so happened that Michael Young was a pupil at Dartington school where he was exposed to these ideas which subsequently influenced the Labour Party manifesto, which he wrote at Dartington. That manifesto transformed Britain, bringing in the welfare state, so there was a very clear indication to me that art had the power to change society and influence policy.