In taking the time to digest Adrian Searle’s thoughts at Art Toronto (along with the rest of that overblown weekend), I’ve come away with remarkably very little, at least insofar as the advice given at his keynote address was sensible beyond contention. The value of building a conversation that extends beyond the press release and actually allows for an ambivalent response should practically speak for itself - this is, indeed, a good thing. But what did make me sit up and take notice early on in his lecture was the revelation that Searle was, himself, a practicing painter up until 1996, when he finally stopped juggling the two paths in favour of writing full time.

My personal interest in his experience is obvious, given my own dual occupation as artist and writer. While I happily identify as both, there remains an ongoing pressure to choose one over the other, typically expressed by the whims of a world that makes one path seem more lucrative than the other at any given time. Despite the somewhat schizophrenic lifestyle that can come of balancing the two, however, I always maintain that there isn’t a choice to be had - the combination of creative mediums mutually support and inform each other in such a way that I’m mentally incapable of separating the two.

Given that stubbornness, I was pleased to hear Adrian Searle share a similar perspective on the matter during the question period at the end of his lecture. His ability to write about art is directly informed by his tangible experience in the studio as a painter, and contributes directly to his sense of how things are made when he comes to see them in the gallery. With this awareness comes a sort of respect, what Searle referred to as ‘the creative emptiness of being in a studio’ - the knowledge of the difficulty posed by the studio, such that ease of production is not taken for granted as it might be by a critic who has never so much as drawn a stick figure.

Another point in which Searle’s artistic background asserts itself over his outlook as a critic came through in his considerations of writing as a craft - not a point he made in those precise terms as such, but one that became apparent in Searle’s conversation was the weight of process in his work and his refusal to know what piece of text might reveal until the thing is done. That his criticism can function in such open and fluid conditions is, in my opinion, the clear mark of a writer who knows the studio. Searle’s belief in turning to fiction, music and other creative works to break one’s familiar habits of language is also strongly evocative of that experience.

Searle explained that his move away from the studio to a single career as a writer was brought about by the excitement he felt at viewing works that were not of his medium: sculpture, new media, and other things that he was not capable of producing with his own hands. Writing became his means of developing a creative relationship with those modes of production. It’s a perspective that I can agree with wholeheartedly.

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