This describes the differrence between "illustration" and "art" about as
well as anything I've seen. To the rebutal that the great religious
pictures are illustrations of specific things and were meant to assist in
meditation,therefore they cannot be art, I would say that they are a very
good example fo what Conger means by by ambiguity and meaninglessness.
it also takes care of the demand for "what did the artist mean in this
picture", artist statemnts, and the rest of the parapharnalia of the would
be art lover,critic,curator,artist etc. However, it does lay open the
question of what one paints in a new and possibly frightening way. If the
painter
has never painted anything but what caught the eye or the emotions and has
then had to hastily make up a sensible reason for having spent so much time
on a set of windows it is a relief. If the painter has carefully
determined his or her intent,has situated it in the world as they know it, and
is now
told that the visual representation of this intent is a cognitive
machine and as such is limited and that they must stop dwelling on their
worked
out philosophical possibilities of meaning in the work in favor of the
ambiguity of paint-then does this not destroy the idea of the painter as an
intellectual determining the deeper meaning of his work from his education?
If you habitually paint cups as cups-literally,cups on canvas-then it is
quite true that indulging a wish to guide what the viewer feels or thinks
will falsify the cup,you will no longer have a cup qua cup, but something
else which rings false,or in asimpler phrase"looks funny", an element of
cariacature enters in, cultural symbols gambol in the margins, and you no
longer
have a cup, but an intent disguised as a painting of a cup. Leave off the
intent,concentrate on the cup, and nothing in the painting is excused by the
propriety of the intent. The painter is left defenseless against the
intent seekers who want to know what the meaning is, and on being told that
it is the existnce of this cup,will then say that the work is an act of
craft, not art, since the painter seems to have had no intent and no
intellectual
basis for the painting.
Kate Sullivan
message dated 11/26/09 12:18:11 PM, [email protected] writes:
> To approach art as if it was a machine, something to be examined and used
> according to the implicit directions for its use and goal, is, to me.
> alarmingly naive and superficial. Yes, a real machine may not work as
intended
> if I try to impose another use and goal for it, but perhaps it will do
> another job better. Artworks, if they symbolize proscriptive intentions,
are
> merely illustrations, like ordinary signs or maps. But if they somehow
> symbolize ambiguity too, by which I mean additional symbols of subjectivity,
> (only a few of which the artist can symbolize due to the fact that
> subjectivity cannot be fully exemplified), then there is at least an open
ended
> potential for enlivened subjective experience for both the artist and
his/her
> audience. The point is that the best intentions are those which symbolize
> far more than are intended. None are excluded and thus all are relevant and
> all are "truthful" and all are causal without defined or limited
> effects.
>
> My trouble with Dutton's notion of intentionality is that he requires the
> artist to have foreseen the broadest and most profound symbolization of
> subject matter, style, etc. That's impossible due to the cage of
subjectivity
> and the inability of anyone to have full experience or acquaintance with
> "cultural habits and customs" that invisibly shape our symbols and
> associations, most of which normally evolve over generations or even
millennia, far
> beyond the life experience of any individual. I would respond to him that
> the best approach regarding intentionality, which is the container word
> for meaning, is to avoid intentionality, to try to contradict meaning at
> every turn, because in this sense, "none" is equal to all, or "one" is equal
to
> "any".
