Ann Klefstad steps up to the mic and says: >You know, the writer you quote wasn't saying that art is the only thing that has >meaning; she was essentially saying that the meaning of art-intended gestures is >inflected by their relationship to the art-meaning realm. My question was worded poorly. She wrote: �it is a truism that in order to be meaningful it must, by definition, ultimately be classifiable as "art" by an audience� But surely art can have meaning for someone if it is not seen as art. It just won�t be written about in Artforum or Time magazines. It seems to me that she was placing certain kinds of art at a privileged position to other kinds of art, maybe kinds of art that she wouldn�t even consider to be art. Maybe this was just a slip of the tongue on her part, as the book as a whole deals with publicly subsidized avant-garde art (particularly the French IRCAM music center). There is something fishy about the idea that an artist puts meaning into a work which is then extracted by a viewer. I would say that in most cases meaning is put in, and then in most cases meaning is taken out, but then there doesn�t have to be any correlation between the two. Maybe the �anti-art� I am interested in is whatever cannot be viewed as art. >Meaning is always >dependent on the mutually agreed upon context in which a communication is made. >If one person intends the communication to be made and understood in one >context, and the other person doesn't know this or disagrees, then confusion >results. But there are many cases where there is no mutually dependent context, and many more where that context is generated by someone other than the artist. Consider prehistorical rock art or cave paintings. We can speculate what they were trying to do, but we don�t know. We can surely appreciate what they did without knowing what meaning they had put into it. I like thinking about situations where the intended will or meaning of the artist is completely unknown. Like getting a strange package in the mail full of painted leaves with no return address or note. Or, someone just told me about this (but I forget the exact details), walking in the forest off trail and finding a huge pile of children�s dolls and used ammo clips, or something equally strange. Or maybe finding some strangely smooth rock in the wilderness: is it just a rock, or was it at sometime a created piece of art with profound mystical meaning for its maker? Perhaps all of this is �confusion� as you say. I think that word has certain unwholesome connotations that maybe you don�t intend. Do I sound like a post-structuralist yet? >Release some act into the realm of communication, and it ceases to be only >yours, it becomes public property, and many others will have their way with it. Maybe we are saying the same thing. But I am interested in the idea of things intended to be �art� and not seen as such, and things that aren�t intended to be art but are seen as such. Please respond Ann! You write interesting things and I only disagree with you to make you write more! -Josh Ronsen http://www.nd.org/jronsen ------------------------------------------------------------ --== Sent via Deja.com ==-- http://www.deja.com/
