OK, this is a hoary topic vulnerable to nit-picking definitions and over-intellectualizing (not that those serve no purpose). But it was brought to mind today because of a comment from an artist (Molly Stevens) on an Ed Winkleman post: “Meaning is seen as romantic, outdated, idealist, basically corny.” This reminded me of Sunil’s and my own recent remarks of looking for meaning in abstraction, in counterbalance — not opposition — to June’s reveling while meaning is “beside the point.”
So my question is: what do you feel is the role of “meaning” in your own creative work? Do you have a goal or message or effect in mind while working that could be called meaningful? If so, is it perhaps a different kind of meaning from that which might be present in a more “traditional” work of art?
Steve,
Good question. It forced me to clarify some thoughts I had in mind.
I think I identify with two kinds of artistic manifestations and I guess they are on opposite sides of the spectrum…
The first belongs to art that carries the import of a message and forces you to think along the lines the artist wanted to steer your mind/thoughts. I believe in this kind of art. Art with meaning is important.
Most of our undertakings have a sense/reason/motive behind our actions that result in a specified output – to do something without a ‘why’ seems a bit illogical to me. I try and paint faces of individuals that tell a story or highlight a condition of our culture. However hackneyed it may sound to the current crop of art purveyors, it makes sense to me and it serves the purpose for which I had set out – to convey an idea in my head. I believe in this.
The second deals with artistic displays that have 0.0% meaning… in the purest sense – in the sense of enjoying a Jackson Pollock.
Sometimes, I just go ahead and playfully throw paint on canvas just for the fun of it, just to watch it drip. Some examples of this are http://i187.photobucket.com/albums/x56/sunilgangadharan/Untitled_29_04_07_1.jpg and http://i187.photobucket.com/albums/x56/sunilgangadharan/Untitled_22_04_07.jpg – it only helps me enjoy the texture, color patterns and juxtapositions. It only gives heightened visual consciousness and sensory pleasure – no meanings or messages or thoughts.
I may be criticized as being old fashioned by some for looking for meaning in art, and that is OK.
Steve,
I certainly appreciate works that I find meaningful.
Sunil,
“I try and paint faces of individuals that tell a story or highlight a condition of our culture.”
I appreciate the ambition but can a face really do this without being unbearably reductive?
“…artistic displays that have 0.0% meaning…a Jackson Pollock…playfully throw paint on canvas just for the fun of it, just to watch it drip.”
I would up JP’s % to 100.
D,
“can a face really do this without being unbearably reductive”
I guess you are right. I am still exploring… and have only begun
Sunil,
Thanks for the images of the “play” paintings, they really induce a sense of joy in me, too. I’m not at all sure that should be called meaningless, even though it’s not an explicit message. I think the best art touches us that way in addition to anything else it conveys.
Regarding the paintings, they make me think of the ocean and a skyful of fireworks (both joyful associations), and then of a chaotic universe of nebulae and stars being formed. That’s fun for me to contemplate, whether or not you had any such idea painting them.
Steve,
Thanks for your interpretations. No, I had not meant them to be resolved way though… but it does go with the sense of ‘Laissez-Faire Aesthetics’ as documented here ( http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20070129/002039.html )
Very interesting read – I did not agree with everything that Jed says, but he makes sense in some places… on the state and meaning of art in todays world.
“Pop Art and “Bad” Painting were self-consciously ironic; they depended on the existence of a standard that was being mocked or from which one was registering a dissent. Irony, even in the whatever-the-market- will-bear forms that it often assumed in the 1980s and 1990s, was generally accompanied by at least the afterglow of a moral viewpoint. The artists were mocking something. They had a target. This is what has now changed. Laissez-faire aesthetics makes a mockery of nothing. Even irony is too much of an idea. It treats everything equally.
David Zwirner, the dealer who in recent months has sent Yuskavage’s reputation into the stratosphere, has observed in an open letter to the artist that “frankly, I am not sure what your work is about.” He
makes this declaration without any embarrassment. And while Zwirner does hasten to add that the paintings are “utterly sincere,” I am left with the gathering suspicion that the meaning of the work is designed to be unresolved, that the work is meant to register as noncommittal, at least from the audience’s point of view. This promiscuity can be regarded, I suppose, as a sort of “democracy of access.” Transcendence and stupidity, formal perfection and kitsch: it’s all just part of the same big expensive banquet.”
The problem with “meaning” is that its own meaning is too vague. This is particularly so in the arts. If you mean by the word recognizable images and symbolism, than the Pollock is at 0%. If you mean some kind of emotional or cognitive impact than the Pollock is loaded, but so is everything else.
Dear Mr. Sunil Gangadharan
Spent some time looking at your playful throwings and find them elegant.
I can barely hack out an artist’s statement, in part because I tend to lock up over what it’s all about – if you get my meaning. Stuff passes through various centers in my mind on its way to the wall, and few if any of those centers is particularly cognitive. There the object might hang, getting as dumb a stare from me as from any random passerby.
But that’s alright as I like art to be a little remote and resistant to easy interpretation. I want the meaning to be somewhat ascribed by the viewer’s eye and by that person’s situational awareness. For me a good work of art has me reaching more than halfway across the table to shake hands with it.
Without knowing thing one about you, I can surmise that you are not miserly in your employment of paint, that your painting movements tend to be with your hands, that dancing with brushes is a source of great pleasure,that you may prefer to set a dominant color etc. I may be dead wrong, but my point is that your paintings can be seen as infused with your presence and can be interpreted as very meaningful by a viewer who knows something about painting as such. And that person need not read the label to come away with at least a little shift in his or her perceptions – which in part is what art is meant to create.
Thanks for the article link, Sunil, that’s a good rant that I like because it pretty much agrees with my own opinions. Stepping back a bit, it’s amusing that for all Perl’s disappointment in the current art world, he seems to be totally caught up in a narrow part of it. From the article one gets the impression there’s no art being made or shown outside of New York. And I find Perl’s term “laissez-faire aesthetics” not quite apt. I think he is complaining not that any aesthetics is OK as long as it finds favor, but that work with no personal aesthetics behind it is produced simply because enough buyers find something in it that they’ll pay for (to the extent the buying is more than mere speculation).
Jay, I really like your point about resistance to too-easy interpretation. A favorite quote from the photographer William Corey is: “Don’t understand me too quickly.” Although I was fairly glib in my previous post discussing some meanings related to abstract aspects of the images, I hope that viewers do not absorb them immediately. At the same time, I want them compelling enough that viewers keep looking (and thinking).
For sure meaning is vague, Arthur, I was only hoping to find out whether creators themselves considered their work meaningful (whatever that was for them) or rejected the idea that it had meaning. The artist has a special role, though far from the only one, in the whole knotty question.
The ante is raised (happily) for work without an easy interpretation but there better be some depth.
I have had students (too many!) try to convince me that there typos or sloppy brush-cleaning were intentional and even, meaningful, though when asked to elaborate only one admitted that she was lazy and probably suffering from a condition.
D…I would submit that the laziness and conditional suffering are part of a possible complex of meanings to be attached to those studential outcomes.
A lot of the dialog that came out in the 60’s and 70’s in the pages of Artforum and elsewhere had to do with the basic thingness of art. A premise was that the sticks and stones that comprise a work of art are themselves a basic part of the context in which the artist/viewer exchange is enacted. A Rothenberg (sp?) horse is of another hue entirely when galloping over a color field than it is corralled into a print.To an extent, one might say that the medium is meaning-laden and one person’s brush cleaning is another’s Christ in a dishcloth and the student’s manifested condition is for some infectious.
Steve,
Well, this is one of those conundrums that I can drone on and on about. I’ll try not to…
I think there’s a big difference between the artist and viewer in terms of meaning — the ab exs being a case in point. Art Forum and Greenberg decided that the painting of the late 40’s and 50’s was about the “thingness of the thing” as Jay puts it. But the artists whom I know a bit about, Pollock and Rothko, for example, thought they were expressing universal truths about the nature of the universe. So it is that “meaning” becomes meaningless because very vague.
Having said that, however, for myself, I can’t continue with a visual thought unless it has some meaning. That is, once I’ve solved an artistic problem or two, I’m done with the motif unless I have something more that I need to say through the visual.
It’s not that what I start out thinking I mean is necessarily what I will finish with — in fact, it’s the further thoughts that are often more intelligible and public. But I have to have something or I lose interest.
In the JOhn Day materials, for example, I began by thinking about the various power that the varied landscapes of the region exhibit — an animal like power, a power of an aloof remote formation, the power of the looming formation.But, six months later, I’m thinking about the nature of that landscape vis-a-vis the metaphor of Mother Nature and have extracted a different meaning. It dawned on me that whatever power I see there isn’t “motherly.” Nature, or the earth, or evolution, or whatever, doesn’t care a twit about us (hence not “motherly.”) This means that she is indifferent to the trash that we’ve littered the planet with and the trash we’ve dumped into the atmosphere. She (“Mother Earth”) will go on, willy-nilly, as she has for all these millions of years, mostly without people. She won’t miss us.
And the moral of that, for me, is that I’m a Cenozoic patriot and therefore, even if the earth is indifferent to me, I’m rather fond of the conditions which have allowed humans to arise. So I’d better not count on Mom to save me. It’s up to me — or us — if humans are to survive their human-made messes.
Oops, gotta go. I’ll read this later and if it hasn’t made sense, I’ll try to explain.
June:
To those who haven’t seen your progression of late from somewhat tentative landscapist to earthmover, you might lead us through a selection of your before and afters. I believe that your evolution goes hand-in-hand with one of my earlier statements that a less accessible art can be more provocative. It would appear that you are pulling in the fossil beds as a photo op and breathing them back out as a personal metamorphosis. Those strange looking landscape elements that you have posted on Southeastmain say a lot about tectonics, the local weather and your and Jer’s skill with a camera, but the paintings have something to say about the John Day Parallel Universe and that is far more provocative.
There is a saying in Eastern thought (that I’ll paraphrase badly): the Tao that can be written (or is it spoken?) is not the Tao.
I think it’s the same thing with art. There are the meanings that we can put into words about the artwork and the art experience, and then there’s the other stuff, the stuff we try to articulate but can’t quite. Not that we shouldn’t try. There’s a lot to be gained by talking and writing about art. But I think it’s a mistake to believe that the meaning you can write or talk about is the whole meaning.
Thanks, Jay. I did beleaguer this group with some of the first group of landscapes I did. Perhaps I’ll have to do more. And I like your phrase “parallel universe” — maybe I’ll steal it for my next artist’s statement <snort>
Steve, I think I lost my point when I got wound up about my Idea in that last comment. What I meentersay is that without some “meaning” however vague and foolish, I can’t keep working at the same subject over and over. Somehow the working out of the artistic problems doesn’t lead me to new artistic problems in the way “meaning” leads me to new artistic problems.
I was wondering if that might be what David (?) or D (?) and I were questing after in looking at your photos.
Not that you have to stick with the meaning you start with, nor that it has to be the “real” meaning, nor that you have to hand it over intact to your adoring public — but that as an artist, it is meaning that propels me through 19 versions of Sheep Rock (thus far.)
June, I’m like you in that a sense of meaning, or perhaps an exploration for and of meaning, is what keeps me going with a particular art work, a photograph in my case. Sometimes I do just play with an image, changing it in various ways to see what happens, but I tire of that very quickly if it doesn’t awaken some thought that seems worth pursuing.
One thing different about photography is that I think it’s possible to shift most of the aesthetic decisions (if any) to the time of clicking the shutter, with further work being motivated by the simple goal of trying to accurately represent the original scene. Since one can take a picture for all kinds of reasons that don’t necessarily seem “artistic,” plenty of photographers — perhaps the great majority — would say there’s no art and no meaning beyond what’s inherent in the subject, the scene depicted.
David, important point! I believe it absolutely. I also find, as you imply, that attempting to articulate, and especially the ideas form others gained in conversation, help in approaching an understanding of the Tao, or maybe I should say of my little, personal tao.
What is art without meaning? Isn’t it like anonymous sex? Fun at best, but ultimately empty?
But Richard, you speak from the viewer’s point of view — and she will either place meaning or eschew it (or sometimes steal it from the artist statement or the guy standing next to her).
That’s different from the artist’s approach. What I’m wondering is whether, for any of us, if working without any meaning except exploration and problem solving with the materials of our art is sufficient? Just a query.
I have a discussion on my blog of Suzi Gablik’s book, The Reenchantment of Art, that talks about the lack of meaning in art and how to recapture meaning in modern art (http://artblogbybob.blogspot.com/2007/05/reenchanting.html).
–Bob (ArtBlogByBob.blogspot.com)
June, I’m not clear on what you’re asking. I wasn’t at all speaking from the viewer’s point of view but rather from the artist’s point of view. For me, I see no reason and no merit in producing art that lacks meaning or an at least an attempt at meaning. Otherwise, it’s purely technique or decoration.
Bob,
I have been browsing following your links. It is all so new to me.
I am struck by all that realism I am encountering today – your paintings, the photos on Richard’s post, and an article about a realist painter in one of Columbia magazines that I read this morning (cannot find the link here at work).
From bo’s site:
Is realism rearing its head?
Richard, you are right. Something about your wording made me jump to envisioning the viewer, the specator, looking at art-in-general (“What is art without meaning?).
But that is a very peculiar point of view given that you specifically metamorphize the thinker as being intimately involved in the action (“anonymous sex? Fun at best, but ultimately empty?”).
Whatever was in my head was clearly akilter. Thanks for the correction.
Hi Jay,
Thanks for the eloquent thoughts as regards the illustrations that I had highlighted earlier. Though I did not mean them to be anything other than play with color, your description lends it some meaning. All I can say is beauty is in the eyes of the viewer…
Thank you,
Sunil
Steve,
Yes, you are right – that seems like a very NY centric article. I think it is still indicative of the boarder issues surrounding the art world in general using specific episodes gleaned out of this individual’s account of NY galleries… I am glad you find resonance in that article.
Richard,
You do have a penchant for statements. I rephrased your thoughts above for my clarity here…
“Art without meaning is artwork that either serves as a demonstration of technique or as a decoration piece.”
Comments from the rest…