art and allusion

Seven Ways of Thinking About Art (Tate Modern course)

Seven Ways of Thinking About Art - a course at Tate Modern Feb-March 2012 led by Nigel Warburton. Booking details for the course.

The Museum of Everything - James Brett and Nigel Warburton in conversation

James Brett, curator of the Museum of Everything, talks to Nigel Warburton about art made outside of the mainstream. The Museum of Everything has opened its exhibition #4 taking up the whole of Selfridge's Oxford Street window (read more about this in the NYT). The display (pictured here) will run until 25th October 2011. 

James Brett:  Nigel I want us to talk about a big idea, about art and how we classify it. Take the example of Harald Stoffers, one of the artists in our show. Many people see and the text within it and talk about Cy Twombly. I feel this is too easy and patronising: Cy Twombly is a contemporary art reference. Let’s take the example of Harald Stoffers. A viewer might compare it to Cy Twombly.If Cy Twombly did it, it would certainly be art. 

Harald Stoffers, Untitled, Galerie der Villa, Germany

JB:  Which is my point. It’s a formalist appreciation and also a comparative one. Cy Twombly comes with all kinds of references, contexts, Twombly baggage. It’s really a different thing.

NW:  The problem is that we can’t naïvely see the work we’re talking about unaware of Cy Twombly. We look at Stoffers and see a history of mad scrawlings across big canvases throughout art history. We read it and think: yes, I can see it, that’s beautiful, that’s got some kind of profundity about it. In part, that’s because we have already seen this sort of art (we think) before.

People are obsessed with language in the 20^th Century and language that doesn’t make sense becomes interesting in and by itself. It represents something, it becomes a symbol. If you think about all the ways in which we can see writing and reflect on the nature of writing, the links that the work doesn’t make with the world become interesting. As sophisticated viewers of art, we read all that into it. There’s an immediacy about it, the use of colour and inscription, the physicality of the obsessive line, drawing almost like a stave, on which the writing’s overwritten. It turns into a physical thing which we appreciate, the same way we appreciate the gestures of a painting, we see the brush strokes and we get a sense of the physical way in which that’s all there. The obsessive qualities become attractive because they are so relentless.

JB:  It becomes art through us, not through the artist.

NW:  It’s art because it’s a visual creation that’s been exhibited for the appreciation of others. It’s self-expressive, which is characteristic of a lot of artists. Yet you want to communicate that this is a primary sense of art, not just a peripheral sense.

There is a simplistic view of artistic intention as the mental events that precede the application of paint to a canvas: the idea that I’m going to make a mark here and now I’m going to do it. That’s not how most artists work.

It’s also not how sports people do what they do. They don’t typically think about what they are going to do and then do it, they just do it. People might call them intuitive, immediate or visceral, but it’s no different from the artists you’re talking about, who just make the thing they want to make and engage with the medium in a particular way - possibly not in a highly self-reflective way, but so what? For most artists in their studios, there’s a moment where they stand back and think about things because there’s that moment when they’re close to it.

JB:  They post-rationalise.

 NW:  The post-rationalisation is part of the process. You read Francis Bacon on this and there’s a lot on doing stuff, thinking about it, looking at the marks he’s made, reacting to what he’s done. He was a very articulate examiner of his own methodology, which is not the case with every artist. There are no doubt artists who think things through and then do it; but there are many who just do it. And in the world of sport, if you were to think about every shot you played just before you played it, to insist you have those intentions would be absurd.

 We still say, he meant to side-step, or she meant to get the ball in the net, but in terms of reaction times, a cricketer can’t actually analyse the potential shots in that split-second. They react to the ball from where it comes in. Presumably there’s a similar sort of immediacy with these artists.

JB:  What you’re saying is that the fact of making is itself evidence of the intention to make. They didn’t just fall over and this was the result. It was deliberate, but that deliberateness was not about concepts, it was about the doing of the thing.

 NW:  They didn’t intend to make this to sell it in Cork Street or get it into Tate Modern. That was not the intention. It may be a secondary intention for some artists, but not the artists you are exhibiting.

 JB:  So that thing we call art, is an instinctive idea rather than an intellectualised or rationalised idea. If we look historically at the first discovery of this work, which seemed to happen around the same time as Duchamp, whilst Duchamp was busy saying you can place your art tag on anything, the work coming out of the psychiatric clinics and hospitals didn’t get formally called art until Dubuffet. He was the first to say that it was art. He came in and gave it the seal of art approval.

NW:  Isn’t that to do with the history of aesthetic appreciation? If you read Collingwood on this, art as craft was the dominant model of what art is. Once we relinquished that idea, that skill prerequisites have to be met before you can be considered an artist, it became a lot easier to say anyone doing anything, potentially, could be considered an artist.

 The next question - which is a more interesting one – is are they any good? That’s what The Museum of Everything is saying: we’ve discovered a number of people who have made things which are really good, stimulating not just as relics of a definition of some kind of psychiatric disturbance, but as art.

 JB:  Indeed. Interestingly enough, historically this work was always found in anthropological museums.

NW:  The Sainsbury Wing at the National Gallery is full of dismembered altars which weren’t made primarily as gallery paintings. There are plenty of examples where art galleries exhibit things which haven’t been created specifically as artworks.

JB:  What I see is that whenever museums do exhibit this work, they do so within its own context.

 NW:  That’s an institutional issue. There’s not the same kind of money in exhibiting the work you are showing. It’s not linked to collectors who have a multi-million pound investment in a particular work or artist, Jeff Koons for example. There are also very few galleries that sell these works - and the artists are rarely in a position to market their own work themselves.

JB:  It’s true - and the best workshops include the marketing and selling as part of their structure. They know if you don’t sell, you don’t exist.

 NW:  Art contains room for interpretation. If you knew everything that was going through an artists’ mind, the physical work would become redundant - if it was simply meant to be rooted in intentions and nothing else. If you’ve got access to the intentions by some other means, you’ve got access to the bit that’s interesting. That’s certainly true with a lot of conceptual art.

Surely the point though is that the work you are showing is visually arresting and open to multiple interpretations, some more plausible than others. This is intriguing because of the ideas it sets off in you, as much as the ideas from which it originated. It’s not just about what the psychology is of the person who created the work, but what the object has in its potential to stimulate an artistic view of it as an object.

JB:  The question is: how do we present this work in such a way that it is not simply categorised as its own thing, separate from art itself?

NW:  You might say there is a different aesthetic needed for work by these people who aren’t consciously in the art world: an aesthetic that requires greater attention to the object, that demands we get back to looking and interpreting so that we understand by projecting our own interpretations.

In the conventional art world the easy way to understand art is to see it as being produced by an individual with a particular intention, in a particular art-history-aware context, because otherwise it’s too bizarre, we can’t understand it.

The works you’re showing have a degree of legibility, immediately there’s something interesting and appealing, in contrast to much contemporary art where aesthetic aspects have been deliberately sidelined.

JB:  I’m looking to differentiate this from craft or objects - or simply from what is termed outsider art.

[ends]

New Book: A Little History of Philosophy

A Little History of Philosophy, Nigel Warburton's latest book, is now available in the UK.

Read Julian Baggini's review of A Little History of Philosophy

Notes on Session 4 of Art, Politics, War - Tate Modern course

We began by discussing the basic question What is a Political Artist? A difficult question that underlies most debate about Art and Politics, but which is rarely addressed head on.

'Philosophers have so far only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it'

            Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach

'Art is not a mirror to hold up to society, but a hammer with which to shape it'

Vladimir Mayakovsky

My suggestion was that a political artist is one who 

• Is to some extent unhappy with the status quo
• Wants to change some aspects of the world
• Attempts to do this through their art
• Intends that his or her intentions are legible in the work
• Controls, wherever possible, the context of presentation
•  So that these intentions are apparent

Others pointed out that political work may simply depict reality. This might be done in such a way that it implies that change is needed when the work is presented in a particular context. Or it may simply be that the artist is content with aspects of the social world that he or she portrays, celebrates, or alludes to.

Here's an example of an overtly political work of art - the artist, Mark Wallinger's, intentions are expressed towards the end of the video:

 

We also discussed the case of Giorgio Morandi as an example of an artist who, although he had strong political opinions (he was a fascist), seemed to have no political aspect to his art - he obsessively painted objects such as bottles on a shelf while Europe was in turmoil around him. For more about Morandi follow this link to information about a Tate exhibition. John Berger (in The Shape of a Pocket) has writen of Morandi:

'Today it is hard to imagine an art less political and more intrinsically opposed to fascism (because totally opposed to any form of demagogy) than Morandi's'

This is somewhat contradictory, as was pointed out in our discussion: to be opposed to fascism is in an important sense to be political. But Berger's point is that the man's politics and art seem in opposition. Yet,  the choice of objects that Morandi depicted may not have been as arbitrary as they appear and that in context they had political significance: for more on this suggestion that Morandi's art had a political dimension read this article about Morandi from the Washington Times

In the Tate Modern collection we visited 'Architecture and Power' and discussed some of the ways in which a variety of artists used modernist architecture (sometimes unfairly) as a metaphor for political oppression.

Notes on Session 3 of Tate Modern course Art, Politics, War

This week we looked at an apparently apolitical artist Mark Rothko, and, specifically his Seagram Murals in Tate Modern. These large paintings, nine of which are illustrated here (7 others are in the Kawamura collection in Japan), are generally thought of as meditative and objects fit for solemn contemplation rather than political. The level of abstraction reduces the possibility of direct reference to time and place - many people will recognise a deliberately timeless quality about them. They are consistent with Rothko's expressed aim of dealing with large scale tragic themes, and can plausibly seen (in the light of his writing about Nietzsche) as his attempt to bring the Dionysian into painting:

Listen to a lecture about Rothko and Nietzsche (1 hour, 12 minutes and 5 secs into this long podcast)

These were originally commissioned to adorn the walls of the glamorous Four Seasons Restaurant in the newly-completed Seagram Building in New York City. Rothko later declared that with these paintings he hoped 'to ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room' - he wanted to emphasize a sense of claustrophobia, of being in a windowless room - and had been influenced in this respect by Michaelangelo's Laurentian Library with its blocked out windows. By a decision to break his commission and to ensure that 9 of these works were shown in an art gallery context in the Tate he did, however, make a political gesture of a kind using his paintings as the means. For more about the history of these remarkable paintings:

Read Jonathan Jones' fascinating article on Rothko (do read beyond the sensationalist opening lines about Rothko's suicide)

Watch Christian Rothko talking briefly on YouTube about 'The Artist's Reality' Mark Rothko's theoretical book about art.

Watch Simon Schama's  TV programme 'The Power of Art' on Rothko's Seagram Murals (broken into seven parts on YouTube, first part here 

The Seagram murals will provide an interesting contrast with Joan Miró's 'Hope of a Condemned Man' series, which we'll be looking at in the final session of this course. You can watch a video about this triptych here:

Art, Politics, War - Notes from Session 2 - Tate Modern

In this session we discussed what I dubbed the Paradox of Propaganda:

• To make propaganda you need to communicate your message in an unambiguous way
• Art is essentially ambiguous
• So if it's propaganda it isn't art
• And if it's art it can't work straightforwardly as propaganda

The point of this discussion was to introduce thinking about questions about art with a message or closed interpretation. Propaganda aims to persuade people of a position whether overtly or subliminally (see some examples of Nazi  propaganda posters ). 'Propaganda' need not be reserved for works that instill a position you detest: anti-Nazi posters are as much propaganda as pro-Nazi ones.

If there's a lack of clarity of message, it is to that extent less effective as propaganda. The second statement in the list above assumes that art is essentially open to more than one interpretation - this is something that can be challenged (though some people argue that it is a quality of great art that its meaning is not fixed, but leaves scope for interpretation by the viewer) - some felt that religious art is essentially unambiguous in its messages, yet no less great as art for that. Others pointed out that you could produce works with an unambiguous main message that still had elements that were open to interpretation - Picasso's Guernica is a case in point.

We also discussed the nature of documentary photography. My view is that with a documentary photograph the combination of causal (indexical) and pictorial (iconic) elements give it a distinctive relation to the world. Documentary photographs are in some sense traces of what they depict, even if reading off precise information about their causes requires extensive contextual information. Some philosophers, notably Kendall Walton, have even claimed that the directness of causal connection between object and image allows us to quite literarally 'see through' photographs. Without going that far, we can still recognize that the tradition of documentary photography (within which both Simon Norfolk and Taryn Simon's work largely falls) relies on a relationship of trust between photographer and viewer - we believe that the photographer is not misleading us about how the image was made. Contextual information aids the reading of the actual causes - in the case of Simon Norfolk's group portraits, seeing a video in which he instructed individuals on how to stand and where to look makes us realise the degree to which his portraits are constructed rather than found; contrast this with the family group photographs of Thomas Struth (soon to be shown at the Whitechapel Gallery) in which he deliberately lets the families select their own group pose. The information about how the group pose was arrived at is important to a reading in both cases. In the case of Taryn Simon, information about albinoism helps us to read the images in one 'chapter' of her work. In other words, to understand what a photograph is of typically requires additional information beyond what it containst visually.

But understanding what it is of does not exhaust its meaning. Photographers use photographs in complex communicative acts. Building from their referential aspect, photographers intend meanings through the way they use photographs in relation to other materials (and viewers often go beyond these intended meanings in their interpretations).  Whereas in Simon Norfolk's exhibition (which we visited last week) juxtaposition (of his own work with Burke's) and  information presented via a video (together with the use of an oriental rug in the exhibition space) were his principal means of amplifying the implicit anti-imperialist message, Taryn Simon, whose exhibition we visited this week, in 'A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters' builds most of the information for interpretation into the works themselves. Dead-pan portraits of genetic descendants of people (and, in one case, rabbits) caught up in momentous and often horrific circumstances (photographed against a neutral background) combine with framed text and associated imagery (and also with absences) to produce a context of interpretation, one that is still sufficiently open-ended to require substantial engagement from the viewer. [listen to how another contemporary photographer Thomas Demand uses absence in his work here]

[If you are interested in the topic of intentions and meaning, there is a podcast on the Philoosphy Bites series that deals with this in relation to language: Stephen Neale on Meaning and Interpretation - there are also notes on artists' intentions from a previous Tate Modern course here]

Read reviews of Taryn Simon's exhibition here, here, and here.

Watch Taryn Simon discussing this piece. 

Art, Politics, War: Tate Modern Course - Notes from Session 1

Notes from Tate Modern course Art, Politics, War (Monday evenings, Tate Modern 6th June - 11th June 2011, ticket holders only). 

Download handout

For the first session we explored some of the ways in which photographers communicate a moral or political stance, starting from Susan Sontag's famous claim in On Photography that 'strictly speaking, one never understands anything from a photograph' - her claim that understanding involves appreciation of events unfolding over time, a sense of a narrative, and that individual still photographs characteristically reveal or portray moments and so cannot in themselves communicate or express a moral position [if you have access to an institutional online library you should be able to download my article 'Photographic Communication' that responds to Sontag].

[The 18th Century thinker Gotthold Lessing's discussion of the classical sculpture Laocoön could provide a way of answering Sontag to some degree on this point: Lessing argued that the visual arts are particularly good at implying narrative through the careful selection of the moment depicted - in his example, the expression on the dying man's face suggests the howl of anguish that is to follow. For more on this, see my (illustrated) brief note on Lessing from a previous Tate Modern course.]

Stuart Franklin's iconic image of the man standing in front of a row of tanks on the edge of Tiananmen Square in 1989 [illustrated and discussed here] served as an example of how much we owe to contextualisation. Much of the symbolic value of an individual standing up against a powerful force is, nevertheless, almost immediately legible.

If you want to understand more about the context of this iconic image, Franklin talks about his experience of Tiananmen Square and shows more images here, and a further video interview providing more context here. Seeing the iconic image in the context of a range of images of the surrounding events significantly affects our interpretation of the famous image. (I also  interviewed Franklin for my weblog Virtual Philosopher here.) Charlie Cole, another of the photographers who took a similar image of the tank man describes his experiences of the events here. It is interesting that Cole's image excluded the large visual context of a burnt out bus and the full line of tanks.

The kind of contextualization provided by the links above explains far more about the photograph than is legible from the image alone. Without this background information the moral significance of the events that this image crystallizes is far harder to read. The scope and brutality of the suppression is easy to forget. Knowledge of the readiness of tank drivers to crush protestors makes the tank man's actions even braver than it first appears. Most viewers of the still image will have seen the BBC footage of the young man's actions too. 

Documentary photographs correspond to some degree to the scene that was before the lens when the shutter fell (even if they interpret, distort, enhance or obscure). Paintings are more obviously interpretations, often incorporate symbolic elements, and, frequently are deliberately open to multiple, possibly conflicting interpretations (indeed, some would argue that a work of art that doesn't invite different readings would be a failure as art).

Picasso's Guernica (1937) probably the most famous and successful overtly political artwork ever. Emotionally there is no doubt that anguish, anger and outrage combine in Picasso's reaction to the brutal bombing and strafing of the inhabitants of Guernica by Italian and German planes. As a fund-raiser for the Spanish republican cause the image achieved a political aim through lack of ambiguity of stance. Yet at the same time, the complex image replete with symbols retains the kind of ambiguity that is characteristic of most art. There are some speculative thoughts about the meaning of various elements of the image - the bull, the horse, the woman with a child, etc., and the art historical allusions  -  ( in a tapestry version that hangs in the UN building) here - yet there is no simple key to its meaning that allows viewers to read off the 'true' interpretation of the narrative.

In the gallery we visited the exhibition of Simon Norfolk's 2010 photographs of Afghanistan shown alongside those of the 19th Century photographer John Burke. There is a review of this exhibition here and more about this 'collaboration' with a long-dead photographer here. The juxtaposition of an Irish photographer's take on the imperialist forces in Afghanistan 130 years ago with images of present day U.S. forces there carries a clear message of repetition of attitude and even means (many of the encampments visually echo their 19th century pre-cursors).

The video contextualizing the exhibition and revealing how some of the photographs were taken and providing a clear narrative structure within which to understand the images proved critical to most people's interpretation - view it here:

The key part of the audio of this video is from 14'10" where the photographer describes his attitude to the beauty of some of his photographs as just 'tactical' to seduce the viewer into considering his argument. He expresses his  real anger and disappointment at the war in Afghanistan, the desstruction of the country, the loss of life, and 'Billions wasted, and nothing achieved. Nothing, nothing achieved.' Once you have heard the photographer's passionate statement of his position it is difficult if not impossible to read any ambiguity of moral stance in the images. It also creates an uneasiness in viewers who focus on the aesthetic aspects of some of the photographs, the beauty of the dusk light, the low horizon with two thirds sky with the recruits marching through sand towards a truck in the distance - these elements once revealed as merely 'tactical' aren't the point of the images at all, just a way of making us stop and think. Some in the group felt that there was a risk of caricaturing the events that led to American presence in Afghanistan - that visual similarity doesn't indicate similarity of cause and effect - the similarities in some visual respects between what Burke documented and Norfolk may mask important differences that may be worth exploring too (which reminds me of David Hume's point in his Enquiries: 'Nothing so like as eggs; yet no one on account of this appearing similarity, expects the same taste and relish in all of them.)

Next week. Taryn Simon's exhibition...Read a review of this here. Watch a short interview with her discussing this show:

 

Picturing Philosophers

Portraits of philosophers in the National Portrait Gallery (London) an illustrated pamphlet with text by Nigel Warburton:

Download Picturing Philosophers

 

 

Notes from Session 3 of Tate Modern Course: Sensing Art

This week in the Tate Modern course Sensing Art we examined questions of taste. There are two basic senses of taste: the taste of something (e.g. does it taste of strawberries), and the discrimination bewtween better and worse examples of something (as when we make a judgement of taste, that e.g. Picasso is a superior painter to Braque).

Discrimination of flavours isn't merely subjective. Some people are better at recognising objective qualities in the things they taste. Analogously, there are better and worse discriminators of the subtleties of what is in a work of art.

Are judgements of taste completely different from such judgements? Are they completely subjective, or are some art critics better at making judgements than others? In the 18th Century David Hume used the anecdote from Don Quixote of two wine tasters one detecting a metallic taste, the other a leathery taste, being vindicated when a key on a leather thong was found at the bottom of the barrel. We would like to have such an objective confirmation of our apparently subjective value judgements about art... See David Hume's  'Of The Standard of Taste' (the link here is to the full text with useful annotations and commentaries).

First, a good critic needs what Hume called 'delicacy of taste'. This is what the wine tasters in the example above demonstrated.

Secondly, a good critic needs practice. The skill of making judgment about works of art is one that benefits from repeated use.

Thirdly, a good critic needs to be free from bias. Not easy to achieve, but that's the ideal goal.

And lastly, a good critic needs to have a sound understanding of whatever he or she is assessing. So if looking at a landscape painting, the good critic will be aware of other great landscape paintings, of work by the artist's contemporaries, and so on. This would allow a critic to judge that a work was derivative or heavily influenced by someone else. It would also, incidentally, allow the critic to recognise qualities such as originality or allusion.

In contrast with Hume, Clive Bell, writing just before the First World War, in his book Art (good title!) argued that to judge the aesthetic quality of a work of art requires no special background knowledge. What is needed is sensitivity to what he called Significant Form (patterns of lines, shapes and colours capable of evoking the aesthetic emotion in the viewer). For Bell art history is interesting, but not a pre-requisite of engaging with artworks seriously...(more on Bell's theory of art in chapter one of my book The Art Question).

There is also the possibility that much (or all) of what we call taste in art is a self-fulfilling prophecy of the rich and  powerful who determine which works are 'in' and which 'out.' They come to a consensus about which artists merit attention, but this consensus may not be based on any objective quality of the work (it might simply be a matter of 'investment potential'): if they'd focussed their hype on a different artist, the same effect might have been achieved in terms of reputation...This is the cynical view...but if you read the interviews in the recent Collecting Contemporary ed. Adam Lindeman you will find some support for this.

If you are interested in doing some further reading on philosophical questions about  'Taste and 'Taste'', Carolyn Korsmeyer's essay on Taste in the Routledge Companion to Aesthetics is a very  good place to start.

 

 

Sensing Art - Tate Modern - Session 2 - How What We Know Affects What We See

How Theory-Laden is Our Seeing?

Notes from Session Two of  Sensing Art a Tate Modern course led by Nigel Warburton (by ticket only).

For the second session we focused on seeing and the degree to which our knowledge affects what we see. Here is the philosophical background.

Some philosophers of art in a tradition stemming from Immanuel Kant have argued that we should strive to remove all pre-conceptions and expectations when coming to a work of art. With visual art, our seeing should be pure and unpolluted by what Ernst Gombrich calls our 'mental set' and others our 'cognitive stock', that is the beliefs that influence how (and perhaps what) we see. For Arthur Schopenhauer, this amounted to losing one's sense of individuality and becoming a 'clear mirror' to the work.  A similar idea resurfaced in the Twentieth Century with Clive Bell's theory of art as significant form.  He stressed that when viewing a painting as art we need bring nothing with us from life, no art historical knowledge, and needn't even concern ourselves with what is represented in the picture, but should experience its patterns of line, shape and colour as stimuli to an aesthetic emotion (for more on Clive Bell's theory of art, see these notes from a previous Tate Modern course, or Chapter 1 of my book The Art Question ). 

Nelson Goodman (in his book Languages of Art) mocked the assumption that we can achieve such a purity of vision and the idea that the resulting frissons are particularly valuable as indicators of aesthetic worth by labelling it a 'Tingle-Immersion' theory (even including a mock footnote referring to Immanuel Immersion and Joseph Tingle ca 1800).

So there are two issues here. First can we practically achieve a purity of response, a kind of retinal seeing unaffected by beliefs? Secondly, even if we could, should it be given a higher value than are everyday seeing which is so obviously coloured by mental set?

In the philosophy of science the idea of neutral observation is frequently called into question. N.R. Hanson famously declared 'There's more to seeing than meets the eyeball' and 'seeing is a theory-laden activity.' For a summary of some of the key debates, see 'Theory and Observation in Science' in the Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy (a very useful and generally reliable free online resource). We may be almost blind to unexpected phenomena - such as a four of hearts in black or a 6 of spades in red. Our conceptual expectations affect what we see and remember.

Yet there are some pheonomena which are completely resistant to being affected by expectations. The Müller-Lyer ilusion, for example is one of these. We know the lines are the same length, but that doesn't allow us to see them as the same length. The Checker Board Illusion is an even more powerful example: it y seems impossible that squares A and B are the same shade, yet they are. Knowing that they are doesn't allow us to perceive them as the same. This is a different case from the Duck-Rabbit which seems to some degree under our conscious control: we can see the figure as a duck or a rabbit (but not both), and make the according Gestalt shift consciously (we can even choose to see it as a sea-gull or a hare). For my views on the Duck-Rabbit and a purported Stone Age precedent, see 'World's Oldest Optical Illusion Found?'

In the Tate Modern collection we visited two rooms in the 'Poetry and Dream' section (Level 3 West): the one dedicated to Mona Hatoum's work (read or listen to a fascinating long interview with Mona Hatoum); and the one containing the recently loaned Picasso painting 'Nude, Green Leaves, and Bust' (famous for having fetched the highest price of any painting at auction, c£66 million).

In the case of Mona Hatoum, we considered how knowledge that she is a Palestinian woman who has lived in a number of countries affects how we perceive her work. Captions and discussions of her work frequently emphasize her nationality and the fact that she spent her childhood in Beirut. Once you know this fact, it is difficult (perhaps impossible) to see her work without this colouring the interpretation. Yet in the interview linked above she is very concerned (at least in relation to her early work) that people should have a sensual, bodily experience of her work as well as an intellectual one:

'the work that I wanted to make I wanted it to appeal to your senses first maybe or to somehow affect you in a bodily way and then the sort of connotations and concepts that are behind that work can come out of that original physical experience. This is what I was aiming at in the work. I wanted it to be experienced through the body. In other words I want work to be both experienced sensually and intellectually rather than just one dimensionally if you like.' (from an interview with John Tusa) 

 With the Picasso painting, knowledge both that it is an extremely valuable object, but also that it depicts a woman with whom Picasso was sexually obsessed (and who was seventeen when he met her) are hard to set aside...

In discussion several people raised questions about the curator's role in shaping what we see (notes and links from a previous course discussion of this topic are relevant), and more generally about the relevance of an artist's intentions in determining what we see (more notes and links relevant to this topic). In the interview with Mona Hatoum above, it is interesting in this context that she expressly discusses multiple interpretations of the work that transfigures domestic utensils: 

'...it becomes a sort of threat as opposed to comfort and then makes you think about all the possible unpleasant things to do with home whether it's like the housewife or the woman feeling entrapped by domesticity, or whether it's to do with a condemned environment where the inhabitants have to flee, or an environment that is to do with incarceration as in being under house arrest, or the notion of the home denied. I mean there could be so many different readings, but basically what I like to do with these works is to like introduce a kind of disruptive element, physical or psychological element, that makes you question the whole environment.' (from the interview with John Tusa)

Listen or read the entire interview for the interesting comments she makes about multiple meanings and the richness of artworks:  'the language of art is slippery' 'the meanings are never fixed',  and the analogy she makes between a work of art and a mirror. (You might also look at a discussion from a previous course of questions about projective interpretation and alleged objective meanings of works of art).