Art: Part 3 (Day 30)

Viewing art:

How I feel sometimes [Note the eyes]

Fish (I think?) In the Ethnologisches Museum

As I alluded to a few posts ago, I've been having some trouble with viewing art (particularly that of the modern persuasion) in museums. I wanted to share some of your troubles in the hopes of getting your feedback on them.

First, I've grown unsure of the manner in which I ought to observe it. Am I meant to be a passive watcher who simply notes, ah yes indeed this does indeed depict Fredrick the Great leading his armies against so and such, how very interesting indeed! Or am I supposed to look deeper within a work to find some sort of secondary (or even tertiary meaning). This has been one of the deeper conflicts I've had with my art education as a whole. That is to say, ought I, as my instructors do, constantly search for a deeper meaning within a piece? Or can, as Freud so famously said in response to one of his students asking about the symbolism of the long pipe he was smoking, "a pipe be just a pipe"?

The constant attempt to find some sort of meaning within an artistic work can be a tiring process, or sometimes a frivolous one at best. There are of course obvious cases for which a political interpretation is necessary, Goya's Third of May comes to mind, but there are also other instances (like a still-life) for which it would be equally hard for the casual observer to make a decent argument about the deeper meaning of an artist's beliefs.

Kind of hard to ignore the political message here....

The academic response of course is that we allow the researcher the ability to be able to well reasoned interpretations of a particular work. Still this brings up its own host of problems. First, which material is considered acceptable to base an argument upon, for instance, ought a contemporary event matter much if we can't guarantee the artist cared about it? Ought we consider the biography of the artist at all when viewing the work?

Similarly to history's eternal debate between Thomas Carlyle's belief that "The history of the world is but the biography of great men," and the combined forces of Herbert Spencer and just about everyone else, all of whom come out on the side of historical context and social pressures shaping events, art history is constantly engaging in a debate about how much to use social and biographical context to better understand a work of art. Obviously if context matters than the biography of the artist becomes integral to any deeper reading of the work. Still its not very clear that it ought to matter, as a fair number of people feel that as soon as a work is created we are free to interpret it as we choose (presumably independent of context). However even this kind of seductive psuedo-relativism is, it poses a a problem because it begs the question asked by every high school english student, if the work is what it means to me, why bother with all this interpretation? Why is interpretation meaningful? Why don't I just say that every dead pigeon I see in a 17th century Dutch still-life is a metaphor for Christ and be done with all of this?

The fact of the matter is that this relativism is dissatisfying (at least for me) much in the same way that merely accepting another persons interpretation of a work is, when reduced fully to its logical extreme it fails to produce a (personally) satisfying result.

To take this back to more mundane level, I find myself always asking whether I ought to read the little placards that accompany paintings or not because I know full well that they will affect my understanding of the work in front of me. Moreover, they provide one with the incredible ability to be able to categorize particular works of art (I.e. that painting was some stereotypical French post-impressionist mumbo-jumbo) without giving any sense of the work itself. Guys, remember, labels like that are arbitrary, if art is supposed to have any capacity to move the viewer it won't be able to do so by being called "mannerist" it will do so by showing you the emotional state of a particular individual, by documenting a particular event, or in short by evoking some sort of intellectual/emotiv response from the viewer. The important thing is the painting not the placard.

So far the way of thinking about art that has resonated most with me was one we discussed recently in a class I took last semester. That is that art is a process with the capacity to move and actively change the individual. That if one takes a step back from a truly inspiring work of art and allows that piece to become itself (to in the words of philosophers wiser than myself "allow the thing to thing itself" or to come into its own) without forcing it into a system of categorization or of one's personal understanding of the world, one allows himself to be changed by art. The piece views can then crash through his understanding of the world (in a way that may be as scary as it can be profound) and fundamentally alter the individual. Or to put it in more philosophical terms, art can allow earth (the real world) to crash through world (our conception of reality and the way we order our lives) in a way unimaginable moments before. Not every piece will do this, but the possibilty exists for all of them. That so far is what I look for at art Museums, the opportunity for art to change me.

As a result, it was all the more shocking to find myself confronted with a diagram of this theory when I walked into an exhibit on Paul Klee at the Neue National Galerie. Still regardless of this, I'd love to hear about how you, Dear Reader, think about art yourself. Send me an e-mail, comment or the like if the spirit moves you, but please let me know if you have thoughts on the matter regardless of when you stumble across this post.

One Example of Moving Art For Me

Peace [Burial at Sea] / J.M.W. Turner