Art and interpretation.

[danuv]

Scenario:

I'm an artist. I pour myself, my life, my experiences, my emotions, my logic, my skill into a great work. 200 years later people see this. 200 years later one person sees my work. They view through the filter of all of the same things, their own emotions, logic, background, experiences. This creates their interpretation of my art. Another person with a great depth of knowledge about my life and history views it, sets it into the context of all of that and allows all these things to shape their perception of my work. Yet another person is in possession of a previously lost or secret letter explaining my original intent and this is how they chose to understand the piece.

Which person is interpreting my art in the 'right' way? Why?

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/idlewild_/]

Hmmph. Well I guess I'm the ultimate pragmatist when it comes to understanding art. There isn't a right way to interpret the work, there's a collage of ways to understand things based on everything the viewer brings to the work. It doesn't matter what the piece of work is, or even if the artist wrote a 50,000 word long dissertation on exactly how to interpret each dot- the viewer brings their own world to the art. It's unavoidable, and as a creator I like to build in hooks for people to fill in the blanks with their own mental/emotional stuff.

I saw a toddler standing in front of a piece of abstract art once, (a Miro, I think), and explaining to his mother what was "happening" in the painting. He couched his narrative in terms of cartoon characters. His mother insisted sternly that he was seeing it wrongly, and proceeded to impose her own narrative, also using cartoon characters, over his. Art critics or historians who feel they have the correct key to understanding a particular piece of art remind me of that kid's mom.

[danuv.livejournal.com]

So then why should the artist bother with intent? Do you think randomization is as valid an art form as pieces that are emotionally expressive?

[http://users.livejournal.com/idlewild_/]

It's like a potluck: The artist brings intent and whatever skill they have to express it, the audience brings experience, bias, emotion, and all kinds of other loads of baggage.

As for validity and art, I'm not very fussy- if you tell me it's art, then it's art. Whether I think it has as much aesthetic weight or emotional impact is a different question, and again gets into the primal soup of what the artist brings and what the audience brings. But humans seem to arrange visually even random or-pseudo random images to find patterns. So I do think that a randomly formed piece of visual art has the possibility of have an aesthetic parity with a piece formed from strong intentions. Not so much with verbal work, since random strings of letters don't tend to elicit the same pattern making response, though random clusters of words may.

But I am aware that my position is definitely not the only valid one among artists or people who view art. It's just my position - I put intent into my work, but I also expect that it will be read with the biases of the audience, and take delight when that synthesizes to make different art. A woman at the back of the audience of a poetry reading I was reading at heard one of the lines of one of my poems incorrectly but what SHE took away was of emotional importance to her. Was it what I intended? No. Was I pleased? Yes, because even though it was by chance, she had found an emotional response to what she heard.

And at the end of the day, the viewer/reader/listener/watcher is alone with the art. Commentary, and again this is my very own personal opinion, doesn't count higher than what happens when a person sees the work. If the artist wrote a letter saying that their work was intended to be about humanity's fall from grace, but their brush strokes on the canvas convey something else, then I've got to listen to what the viewer has to say about what the canvas says to them. Because the artist's commentary is not the work. They can say "this is what I put in to the work", but that doesn't mean I find it any more valid than the audience saying "this is what I get out of the work."

The only interpretation I don't find to hold merit is the "But it's just not art" interpretation, mostly because that's not useful. The artist's commentary on why they dumped a busted armchair in the corner of a gallery, information about the movement they were a part of that valued that kind of installation, or a genuine response from someone seeing the art and evaluating it for themselves as art all work for me. "That's just a busted armchair, not art." doesn't.