INTRODUCTION to ‘Reviews and Profiles’ (Journalism)
- May 2007
Here, you can find a lot of reviews and some ‘Profiles’.
I wrote reviews, unpublished for a number of years before a short NCTJ journalism course shaped up my writing for editors and gave me a couple of contacts.
Then I published quite a few, in Contemporary, Zing (New York), Third Text, AN (Artists Newsletter) Untitled, Circa, and a few others.
I was very meticulous in my writing of these small pieces, but, as yet I haven’t edited what’s here or compared them with published versions which may be better versions.
You can find well-written pieces on artists who have fallen away and others who are now well-established but at that time were just budding.
There are also rough notes and rejected paragraphs hanging over the ends of the pieces, which could be edited from this site, or may be of interest to keep.
One of my aims in writing reviews was to just publish SOMETHING, and every artist is crying out to be described, if not praised for their work, at least acknowledged in words, so it was easier to publish these than anything else.
When I got frustrated with the limitations of reviews I started thinking about writing features, but instead went back to college to do serious MA writing there and shape up my act for teaching and larger forms of writing.
One of my ambitions while writing between 1994 and about 2000 (when I mostly stopped to study), was to try and locate and specialise in Black and Asian Artists working in Britain, who were then terribly obscure and invisible and un-supported, in a little separate art world of their own.
I hoped that by cultivating a profile in mainstream (almost entirely ‘white’) journals, I would be able to start bringing Black and Asian artists over into their pages.
It didn’t work, I didn’t attend to this plan for long enough, in retrospect it would have taken years but by now would have born fruit.
At that time, editors just weren’t interested in taking risks reviewing artists that no-one else was reviewing and they didn’t understand my agenda – which admittedly was a bit of a Trojan Horse. So if I asked to review a Black or Asian artist I was always refused and asked to write for someone that they had in mind.
Here there are none of the catalogue essays I wrote –mostly for Black and Asian artists- and I will include them somewhere else.
There are also many reviews missing.
Finally, there are a small group of profiles, that I wrote for ‘Pride’ a Black Woman’s Magazine, as a way of encouraging young black women, particularly working class, to consider art as a career and to see other young black women as role models. As a photographer, I also often used my camera and skills to get a record of portraits of these artists and you can see some published in back issues of Pride.
You can also find a piece called ‘Confessions of an ex-reviews writer that I wrote for a new journal starting up a bit later on, but was refused. And a couple of odd pieces I’ve written more recently when asked.
© 2007 Paul O'Kane